Point well taken regarding the requirement I had for an i-name - I have removed that and you can now contact me with a valid email address (which will be verified) if you don’t have an i-name.

I had thought that it would be more “viral” to require i-names, but until free, community i-names are available (by next year - only a few more weeks to wait) I agree that it is anti-social to force people to pay in order to contact me. And I try to be social.

Thanks for the tip!

Interesting project you have going here. I have a mix of anticipation and skepticism, and i definitely want to understand it better. I’m sorry now that i didn’t have the chance to discuss this with you at Hackers. I’m in Berkeley and have some free time over the next week; would you be willing to meet and talk?

(Note: I’d like to send this message to you directly, but i don’t have your e-mail address on hand. So, i click your name to contact you, thinking “Aha! Now i get to try out this system for real.” I get a nice form for explaining why i’m contacting you so you can vet me. But the system is closed! I’m not allowed to contact you by your i-name unless i get my own i-name first. Thus, it appears that i have to give $25 to your project just to contact you. Not that your project isn’t worth supporting — it looks pretty good, in fact — but i submit that this may not be the kind of first impression you want to present.)

Beyond this, we plan to provide lightweight i-broker client and data hosting services that anyone with a machine connected to the Internet could run, increasing the opportunity for people to become their own data “banks”, Our still-in-committee standard for data access negotiation, XDI, may also prove to be an area that Shib follows our lead.

But bottom line, you are correct in noticing the close similarity between 2idi/Identity Commons and Shibboleth. My statement was perhaps a little overly broad.

Shibboleth?
http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/