In Context

At long last the Information Card Foundation launched on June 24th after spending about a year and a half in the works. Here’s the press release and some coverage of it. Also, Bob Blakley gave Charles and I a few minutes to talk about ICF on one of his panels at the Catalyst conference a couple of weeks ago.

A few words about how we got here. Pretty much the first year was all about discovering new, clever ways to not start the foundation. Probably the biggest mistake was to start by trying to get corporate sponsors. The problem is that when you do it this way, you’re always a supplicant.

About six months ago we decided that since our colleages are the the developers, architects and inventors in the information card space, and since we’ve been working together in one forum or another for years, why not take a page from the OpenID Foundation, and just start the foundation as ourselves–without sponsors! So we did. We incorporated in Febrary, and invited ourselves to the board! We called up Andy, Axel, Ben, Drummond, Kim, Mary, Pamela and Patrick and invited them to the party with Charles Andres as the executive director. Every one of these warm, fun, thoughtful people thought this was a great idea. We figured that now we’d have a forum to work out technical wrinkles and to promote adoption of this tech that we’re all so enthusiastic about. After this, it was much easier to recruit Google, Equifax, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle and PayPal to the board, to attract sponsors like BackgroundChecks.com, Gemalto, IDology, IP Commerce, Parity, Ping Identity, Privo and Wave as well as to create ties with the Liberty Alliance and the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS.

In closing, I want to thank Charles for his willingness to take a huge leap of faith that the ICF would ultimately get funded. We’re all indebted to him for that.