Repositories and OpenID

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Repositories and OpenID
Some buzz is beginning to build around OpenID, which is good, as it (or something like it) is the best (and only) hope against the morass of logins we've found ourselves in. here's the question: "Why don't we just use OpenIDs as author identifiers in institutional repositories?" Some indications of what the institutional response (which must own everything) will be: "I'm not sure that Traugott was very impressed... possibly for good reason! He was particularly concerned about legacy issues for example." Yeah, well, were I a student I would be worried about an institutional ID that isn't portable and that disappears when I graduate. See also Wesley Fryer on OpenID. Dave Tosh also mentions it in passing. Also worth a look is this short (4 page) summary of the Identity management Summit. More...