Open Identity Exchange

The Open Identity Exchange (OIX) is a membership organisation that works to accelerate the adoption of digital identity services based on open standards. It is a non-profit organisation and is technology agnostic. It is collaborative, and works across the private and public sectors.

Members work together to jointly fund and participate in pilot projects (sometimes referred to as alpha projects). These pilots test business, legal and/or technical concepts or theory and their interoperability in real world use cases. A white paper is published for every project.

Shortly after coming into office, the Obama administration asked the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) how to leverage open identity technologies to allow the American public to more easily, efficiently, and safely interact with federal websites such as the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

At the 2009 RSA Conference, the GSA sought to build a public/private partnership with the Open ID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) in order to craft a workable identity information framework that would establish the legal and policy precedents needed to establish trust for Open ID transactions.

The partnership eventually developed a trust framework model, described below. Further meetings were held at the Internet Identity Workshop in November 2009, which resulted in OIDF and ICF forming a joint steering committee. The committee's task was to study the best implementation options for the newly created framework.

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