Around 45 different organisations from the global identity and internet communities have launched the Kantara Initiative, aimed at solving harmonisation and interoperability challenges currently facing identity-enabled enterprise and web-based applications and services. The Kantara Initiative will aim to help foster the innovation required for broad adoption of interoperable identity-enabled services across industries, regions and fixed and mobile networks, and follows a year of strategic planning involving stakeholders representing the entire identity ecosystem. The initiative is based on a bicameral governance model where the board of trustees and leadership council work in steering the direction of the organisation, and will see the initiative collaborate on projects that make use of all identity frameworks, protocols and specifications currently available. Roger Sullivan, vice president Oracle Identity Management, has been elected president of the 2009 Kantara Initiative Board of Trustees, and J. Trent Adams, outreach specialist for trust and identity at the Internet Society, has been elected chair of the Leadership Council. Initial board of trustee members include AOL, BT, CA, Intel, Internet Society, Fidelity Investments, Novell, NRI, NTT, Oracle, PayPal and Sun Microsystems. Representatives from Intel and the New Zealand government have Leadership Council seats on the board of trustees.
