The government office that has been laying the groundwork for the establishment of an identity ecosystem aimed at dramatically advancing the trustworthiness and security of how individuals, organizations and businesses conduct business online earlier this month achieved a major milestone in the effort by handing off implementation to the private sector.
The implementation of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) will now be directed by the Identity Ecosystem Steering Group, which includes members from the private and public sectors. The chair of the group’s management council is Brett McDowell of PayPal, which is part of eBay [EBAY] while the vice chair is Jeremy Grant, who is the director of the NSTIC National Program Office within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Passing the “baton” off to the private sector has been part of the plan ever since President Obama signed the NSTIC strategy in April 2011.
In launching the Steering Group, over 330 different organizations and businesses registered to participate and the total number of names that participated was 960, Grant tells HSR. There were registrants from 43 states and the District of Columbia and 12 foreign countries, including Brazil, Britain and Japan, he says.
In the initial meetings not only has the Steering Group been stood up but so have various standing committees and working groups around privacy standards, policies, usability, sector specific issues and more, Grant says.
Already there has been a lot of “energy” and “engagement” with the new Steering Group and its various committees and groups, Grant says.
Grant hopes that within the next 18 to 24 months that the new management council will have created an initial version of the standards and policies that will underpin the identity ecosystem. These efforts will be aided by a number of forthcoming pilot projects that will be awarded by mid-September that would test concepts for advancing the identity ecosystem.
The work of the Steering Group and the various committees combined with the forthcoming pilots are an effort to “try and catalyze the marketplace with different identity providers and credential providers that the average citizen can use,” Grant says.
The pilots include business models and ways to test new technologies among other things.
“I think what you will see is a host of pilots that are embracing what would have been very interesting ‘what ifs’ and actually putting funding behind them and not only test them out but test them out in some cases with a number of major commercial relying parties,” Grant says.