Today, Liberty Alliance will move to a new organization named Kantara. That is based on the analysis that security, privacy, and minimal disclosure of end users’ personal information are becoming more and more important. In this area, several initiatives are on their way. The idea of Kantara now is to build an umbrella organization for the entire identity industry and to streamline different initiatives. Liberty Alliance will become a part of that bigger effort.
The interesting question will be: Will Kantara become a big umbrella or a small one? There are several interesting initiatives within the Liberty Alliance today, but there are many initiatives outside of that. There are OASIS standardizations like SPML and SAML, there is the Information Card Foundation (ICF), there are many other activities on different levels up to industry specific standardizations.
Thus it might appear that Kantara becomes more sort of a Liberty Alliance relaunch – if they don’t succeed in integrating at least most of the other relevant initiatives. Let’s wait and see…
Interestingly enough, a Google search reveals a resolution by the InfoCard Foundation to join Kantara. Also, the overlap between SAML and Liberty's ID-FF specifications is sufficient to have resulted in the two having converged some time ago as SAML 2.0.
I can understand some of the reasons for your scepticism, but in many areas Kantara seems – to me, at least – to have taken many of the steps towards 'big umbrella' status already.
This appears to be the final result of the IDTBD movement from last fall's Internet Identity Workshop (see <a href"http://vquill.com/2008/09/yaug-yet-another-umbrella-group.html"> "YAUG – Yet Another Umbrella Group "). A subsequent meeting pretty much turned off the OpenID people and the Identity Commons folk (see also "more IDtbd"). I can't imagine why the InfoCard Foundation would want to join – but I do wonder if this played a part in the recent cnange in exec. mgmt. of that group…