At the Gov 2.0 Summit this week in Washington, the nation's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, got down to some boring but important business: enabling user-friendly, open access to .gov websites.

As part of the Obama administration's Open Government Initiative, Kundra seeks to enable access to non-sensitive government websites without requiring users to create new usernames and passwords at each one. Going a step further, the administration is working with industry and nonprofit groups to enable users to log into government sites with credentials from a host of popular commercial websites like Yahoo and Google.

OhMyGov! interviewed Don Thibeau, executive director of the OpenID Foundation, and Drummond Reed, executive director of the Information Card Foundation, to dig a little deeper and better understand how the administration's initiative originated and how it might affect those in government.

Currently, each agency website has its own format and conventions requiring separate registrations and credentials. But both government and industry officials see value in applying open identification standards across the web.

"By creating open access, users will be able to leverage other common credentials such as Yahoo, Paypal or Google to access information without having to create new registered logins for each resource," said Thibeau of the OpenID Foundation.

According to Thibeau, Kundra recognized the need for some uniformity and integration between government agencies and resources early in his tenure. He sought out OpenID and ICF for the trust framework and to facilitate dialogue with key private-sector companies. This week, ten of them—Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems—announced that they will participate in a pilot program for the open identification logins on select government sites.

The administration's Open Government Initiative is meant to make government more accountable and more transparent, but we still need to solve the problems with identity and wrestle with challenges of privacy, Thibeau said.

"In many ways, privacy has become a commodity," Thibeau said. "Our working hypothesis is the U.S. government's pilot adoption of open access protocols is a forcing function and will yield benefits throughout the open identity community."

ICF's Reed told OhMyGov! that the new administration is taking advantage of innovation and standardizing. For example, ICF is planning workshops with the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute to refine interoperability and look at usability through the eyes of scientists collaborating worldwide.

Both OpenID and IFC are confident that the open identification pilot program will prove successful and that it will ultimately be expanded across government. If it does, both feds and the general public can benefit, as they will enjoy better access to websites and more effective use of social media tools in both internal and external agency dealings.

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