Identity Commons

Identity Commons (IC) is an American organization that was founded in 2001 to support the emergence of a user-centric layer of the web. In 2007 it was restructured and become a nonprofit organization incorporated in Florida to support a community of working groups focused on different aspects of making a user-centric identity layer real.

Its founders Owen Davis and Andrew Nelson thought that an innovative organizational structure would be best to support end users being in control and having autonomy on this layer of the web. They modeled the organization on aspects of how Visa International was structured and imagined membership belonging to the people. The organization presented at the first Internet Identity Workshop in 2005.

Identity Commons was originally conceived to be the first trust federation implementing Dataweb technology to build an open global network for persistent identity and trusted data sharing. Identity Commons worked with XDI.ORG to implement the first global i-name registry services based on the OASIS XRI and XDI specifications. Identity Commons was going to be an international non-stock membership organization similar to Visa, and was inspired by the concepts of chaordic organization developed by Dee Hock (founding CEO of Visa). Although open to any organization, its initial participants are largely civil society organizations (non-profits, NGOs, foundations, etc.) and their service providers who wish to promote cooperation through inter-community data sharing.

The current organization links together many different projects and technologies working on various legal, policy and social aspects of identity on the web. Member groups include the Internet Identity Workshop, OpenID Foundation, Information Card Foundation, Data Portability Project, OSIS interoperability efforts, ProjectVRM and Vendor Relationship Management.

The community and organization is focused on creating a commons where the challenges of user-centric identity can be solved rather than driving toward a particular solution. It is a purpose and principle-driven organization.

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