I just joined the OpenID foundation in order to take part in the current board elections.

I’m reading the mailing list traffic with interest trying to figure out which candidates I should support, which ones are going to provide the OpenID with the right mix of skills and experience to make it have even greater success in 2009.

For me there are a couple of obvious choices, Chris Messina is an incredibly smart guy.  As well as already taking several projects to widespread success (BarCamp, Firefox), he also has the right UX focus that I think OpenID desperately needs.

David Recordon is another obvious choice for me.  Having seen him speak at FOWA London, I found him smart and articulate, this is added to his obvious commitment to OpenID (and the rest of the open stack).

As for for my other 5 votes, well, I’ve got to the 24th of December to decide, so I’ll carry on lurking on the mailing lists.

If you too are interested in having a say in how one of the most important elements of the open web will be driven in the coming months, then et yourself over to openid.net and pay just $25 to beome a foundation member.  Worth every cent

After attempting to import my Firefox password list only to told that I had exceeded my allocated number of of entries by -97 (yes, minus 97).  Hmmm!  a few emails back and forth to the (very helpful) Passpack support team, plus the dicovery that I have third party cookies turned off on Firefox (forgot that) and I got it up and running.

So do I like it?  Well it’s exactly what I wanted, but not actually what I need.  You see it forces me to be a bit too secure.  In order to login to a website without remembering the password, I have to:

1. login to Passpack – no problem it supports openID (and I can have ‘remember me’ turned on my computers)
2. perform the humanity test (a nice one actually – just click the black square)
3. provide my packing key – which must be a fairly long and safe key.  This is slightly annoying as I am an incredibly bad typer and have trouble typing more than 2 keys in the right order at the best of times.  So trying to get a 20 character packing key right when I can’t see what I’ve typed takes numerous tries.
4. locate the appropriate entry for the site I wish to visit.
5. click the link to be forwarded to the site
6. click the ‘Passpack it!’ bookmarklet (if I have the bookmark tool bat turned on – I don’t normally)
7. and there, Robert’s your mother’s live-in-lover.

Now I know that this would probably be a lot easier if the domains in my password file (not sure why the don’t), but it’s all such a bloody palaver.  Compare that to the Foxmarks experience:

1. I go to the site I want to use
2. Firefox prefills my details

Okay so there is a downside.

• I can’t store any data, just passwords
• I can’t use other browsers
• I can’t use a public access (or a friends) computer

Well, I’m thinking that I’ll stick a copy of Firefox passwords on my Truecrypt encrypted USB key to cover most of those issues.  Sorry Passpack – but you’re just too secure for me!

Now if only Foxmarks would support openID, I’d be have just one password to remember.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my accessing on my iPhone though!  Any ideas?

http://vimeo.com/1971430

I’ve been waiting for a good robust plugin implementation that would give me a chance to play with openID as a provider (I want to implement an OpenID/OpenLDAP gateway for a work project), so I downloaded and installed it.

It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to delegate my domain to an OpenID provider and allow me to log in to my WordPress instance with its own domain as the OpenID url. But it all worked out of the box, first time.

So well done Will – damn fine job sir!