[humanities-dev] Federated ID for TEXTUS

Thu Feb 23 10:02:12 UTC 2012

On 23 February 2012 09:34, Jonathan Gray <j.gray at cantab.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 9:23 AM, Jonathan Gray <j.gray at cantab.net> wrote:
>> Could also be worth speaking to CKAN team about why they phased out
>> support for OpenID on TheDataHub.org?
>
> See also:
>
> http://allinthehead.com/retro/351/openid-has-failed-so-what-s-next

This article utterly misses the point. OpenID in the original form it
was envisaged is no longer used, but sign-in with Google, Y!aho!o!,
Facebook is everywhere and the first two of those *are* OpenID, they
just present the login UI differently. I agree that telling academics
they need an OpenID account would be a recipe for confusion, but how
about a google account, for example?

Personally I'd rather trust google with my login credentials than the
OKFN, they're bigger and have a much higher stake (due to being rich)
in keeping themselves away from privacy related lawsuits.

OpenID, at least with google, can also give us verified email
addresses (through OpenID attribute exchange) should we need them for
notification without requiring users to go through a confirm loop,
it's a lower friction system all round.

It'd be interesting to see what proportion of our target user base
already has an appropriate account (Google and Yahoo being the most
significant).

Tom