Polder Consortium

For the past few months I've been involved in the Technical Steering group of the Polder Consortium.

The Polder Consortium helps organizations establish environments of trust for sharing critical information across organizational boundaries. 

It involves Wycliffe and a couple of other mission organisations at the moment. Deciding what sort of organisations it should involve has been one of the things we've discussed on our teleconferences. My particular interest is authenticating a local application that I've written against one of our corporate systems. When it comes to the technical stuff and the discussions that accompany the beginnings of such a co-operative venture I'm a bystander, but it's interesting to watch the formation of this group. If you want a bit of technical detail then let me throw out a few words: SAML, federated identity, Shibboleth.

If you want to dive in a bit more I suggest you look at slides from an ICCM 2011 Presentation of Federated Identity. If you're wondering "Why the word polder?" then follow that link.

Update: I didn't realise until now the Polder Consortium is on twitter too.

Photo of the Petronas Towers Skybridge courtesy of Shubert Ciencia.