OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

OPENID - Extending Institutional Identity

Into External Services and Communities

Sean MehanHead of Integrated Technologies

UHIsean@smo.uhi.ac.uk

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

OPENID - Extending Institutional Identity

Into External Services and Communities

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

The plan...

• Motivations

• Benefits

• Risks

• Alternative Scenarios

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Motivations

• There are many new and innovative services emerging on the Web.

• Multiple IDs are starting to effect larger proportions of the online community.

• Students and staff are often clamouring to utilize external services that are seen as being better than institutionally provided ones.

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Opportunities I

• We can serve our users better, and give them what they want by providing them with an externally useable ID that they can use to access external services without having yaa.

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Opportunities II

• Integration point via ID to merge best of breed (market led) services into institutional framework.

• Allows for rich functionality / integrations at the end of the ID pipe.

• Provides mechanism to mitigate risk of lsot data for important processes.

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Opportunities III

• Allow for life long learning associations - services for students.

• Manages in a structured way delegation and transfer through ID lifetime.

• SSO possibilities from infrastructural apps for web 2.0 type mashups.

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

http://sourceforge.net/projects/guanxi/

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Changes in mindset

• Institutions have to stop behaving in bunkered fashion.

• Understand web penetration into requirements for service provision.

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Risks I

• We get fooled and id theft occurs.

• That shaky external service goes bust and we loose all of that assessment data that we are legally responsible for.

• YAP emerges!

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Risks II

• Your ID changes over time and we lose you.

• You drop your ID and there is no pointer to your land based ID.

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Alternative Scenarios

• Why don’t we just let the students come in with their own, established identities?

• http://seanskye.myopenid.com/

• Many still are not net savvy.

• Data representation issues and (inter)national match for SIS.

• ....Institutional bias in terms of trust...

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Summary I

• Its out there, institutions should not be putting their heads in the sand.

• It won’t be the final protocol, so don’t be precious about adopting it or adopting the next one.

• It provides opportunities for integrations with external services / communities

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OPENID

FOR EDU 8/11/2007 - LONDON - EDUSERV

Summary II

• Fits a more user-centric, Web 2.0 world.

• Provides opportunities to allow people to retain IDs of choice post institutional association.

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