I took a look at the Sxip site, and it appears to be similar to the Identity Commons model in many ways. The key difference is that it appears to be in use already (Salesforce.com and drupal) and is free to use, at least at this early stage of development.

https://www.sxip.net/
https://www.sxip.net/how_sxip_works
https://www.sxip.net/faq

Overall, I still think that some approach to an open distributed online identity model will end up in widespread use within the next few years. That said, has CompuMentor / TechSoup considered investigating this for our own use? This might be the sort of open, socially responsible technology that CompuMentor can play a part in fostering. Early adoption of this technology by CompuMentor may help it's adoption by the npo-sector at large.

At Penguin day Victor Grey from 2idi.com and Kaliya Hamlin from Planetwork.net presented some information about the identity commons and XRI / XDI. This presentation fit in with some thoughts I've been having around online identities, relationships with organizations, and data privacy. The rest of this email is an overview of this technology, at least as I understand it, which in my opinion is pretty cool.

Online identities are slippery things. As the saying goes, on the Internet no one knows you are a dog. Most often our online identities are tied into our email addresses. Michael@compumentor.org is my online work identity, but it is a "dumb" piece of information. To people and organizations outside of the compumentor.org domain it signifies an email address, nothing else. It is, in essence, a one-way channel of communication. In my personal life I have a domain, shibboleth.org, which has a rather dull website, and some associated email addresses. A whois lookup returns my address and phone number. All this information is public and out of my control.