I was happy to have had chance to meet James Walker of Bryght and attend a couple of his workshops including his workshop on OpenID. I was first exposed to the OpenID concept at the AdvocacyDev conference in San Francisco a couple years ago. I met with Identity Woman at a Web of Change conference in between that conference and this one, so I wasn't new to the concept or why it might be useful.

James' talk focused mostly on what the OpenID movement was and why this mattered to the community. It was filled with lots of stuff to help explain this concept to people using real world examples. This is one of many presentations on OpenID that James has done, as he's recently given them at DemoCamp and the OpenSource CMS conference at Yahoo. The most exciting thing is that it looks like there may be OpenID support built into the core of Drupal 6. It was quite a punchy presentation and the only downside I ran into was that there was just one sceenshot of what OpenID would look like in Drupal.

Any identification system relies on there being a third party authority who can vouch that you are who you say you are. James suggested MyOpenID as a reliable source for folks who are new to this, but there are also a few others that are available and you can also run your own OpenID server if you want to. OpenID allows you to secure control of your digital identity & provides a easy single signon which is already available for a number of large sites like Technorati and Magnolia.

I finally signed up for my own OpenID and am looking forward to seeing more sites support this single signon technology. There are two drupal modules for Drupal already, OpenID and OpenID URL the former should work with Drupal 5.x and will hopefully be brought into core soon.