(Sent on the behalf of Matthew Gardiner (CA), Kantara Initiative President)

Welcome to 2011. We hope you are now well rested and ready to push forward in our joint quest to make a more secure and trusted Internet easier for everyone. Going into 2011 the Kantara Initiative, now almost two years old, has some good things going that we need to expand upon as well as some challenges that we as a group all need to do our part to mitigate.

On the plus side, the market continues to be our friend. More and more people are recognizing the central role of identity online, in particular with the rise of public clouds. The continued rise of the federated identity model in such programs as NSTIC in the U.S. Government and the Cyber Authentication Program in the Canadian government shows clearly the value of the federated model. Where the Internet is heading comes right through the issues that we at Kantara are leading on and have been for some time – trust, privacy, interoperability – to name a few areas.

A bit more practically, we also enter 2011 with a small but committed staff led by Joni that continues to catalyze the organization’s work products. We are very unique as an organization to not rely on volunteers for everything we do. We however need to continue to be mindful of the balance as ultimately the core work needs to continue to materialize mostly through volunteer efforts. But it is very nice to have a reliable, expert, and readily-enabled staff to push us along and make the work progress more efficiently.

Also we have great global participation in Kantara, covering North America, Europe, and Asia (in particular Japan). This is incredibly important for the type of work we do and an important advantage that Kantara has. The Paris meeting in October 2010 was the most recent example of our global perspective and participation in action. I should note that we already have confirmed a meeting in Germany May 16-18 hosted by our colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute. For those based in North America we are also tentatively planning for a Fall meeting in the Washington D.C. area later in the year. We also have a continually expanding Discussion & Work Group roster, with the most recent additions of the Business Cases for Trusted Federations DG and the European Use Case and Market DG.

And finally, in an effort to continue to expand the value of membership and the footprint of Kantara within our members’ own organizations, the Board of Trustees are currently working on a bylaw update that will create 2 new annually elected spots on the board open to all organizational members. You will hear more about this once the bylaw change has been approved and the election process has been kicked off. Start giving some thought as to whether your organization would like to run for one of the two “at-large” Board of Trustees seats.

Now to the challenges. Three key ones that I see are financial, people resources, and awareness. Your first response probably is, “doesn’t every organization have these problems”? Of course this is true, but we still need to move the needle on them. Regarding finances, you should know that the Board of Trustees just passed our 2011 budget and it was a tough one. We have cut what we think it is reasonable to cut while staying vibrant, we aren’t funding projects as much as we would like, and we are still spending in deficit (no we aren’t borrowing money, we are spending down our surplus). Obviously, unless you are government, deficit spending can’t go on for long (and it can’t for them either actually) so we need to find more revenue so that we can fund even more projects in 2011 and beyond. We have partly addressed this funding challenge by approving a 10% across the board increase in membership fees for 2011. Obviously for the long term health of the organization we need more paying members (not existing members paying more), more externally funded projects, and more revenue from programs such as the assurance and interoperability certification programs.

One action for you to take for 2011 is if you aren’t currently a paying member, please become one. If you are already a paying member, please consider upgrading to the Trustee level. Another action would be to locate finances within your organization that you can bring forward to fund a project though Kantara. FYI, as part of the 2011 budget we did set aside some funds against which the Leadership Council approved projects can seek to get matching funds.

On the people resources issue, we need more identity experts of all types participating actively in more Kantara groups. An action you can take right now is to ask one person that isn’t already active in Kantara in your organization to take an active role in one of the existing or new Discussion/Work Groups.

On the awareness front, it seems clear that not enough people that should be aware of Kantara are fully aware. In my experience the best way to do this is through speaking and writing with direct tie-backs to the appropriate Kantara activities. An action you can take is to submit a speaking session to your favorite identity-oriented conference on a topic directly related to what you are doing with Kantara. Some people are already doing this today, but all of you should consider yourselves to be Kantara evangelists. I firmly believe that if more people knew about our activities at Kantara, the other two issues of people and financial resources would solve themselves.

I look forward to collaborating with you more in 2011!

Matthew Gardiner

President Kantara Initiative

Director, CA Technologies