I spent last week in Sydney, Australia for the 5th annual Marcus Evans Identity Management conference. It’s always good to see the Oz ID guys, and this trip was as much fun as my visit two years ago. This year, the real surprise was how small the world is becoming.

While you were (hopefully) reading in this newsletter about the release of the Trustguide report, I was listening to Malcolm Crompton, the former federal privacy commissioner for Australia, tell the attendees about how important the Trustguide report was. So we had an Aussie privacy guru telling his countrymen – and me telling the rest of you – all about a British report on trust. Maybe we are all reading from the same page, finally!

My talk to the group was about user-centric identity and what seemed to interest the audience most was the concept of the Internet Identity Workshop (where I happen to be right now, as you read this). You can follow the proceedings online, in not-quite-real time.

When I mentioned to some folks associated with IIW that the Australian audience seemed interested in holding a similar session, I discovered that there was also some clamoring for a European session. If you’re interested in getting involved with either of these, go to the announcement page scroll down, and contact one of the organizers.

I also had the pleasure of attending a meeting of the New South Wales branch of the Australian Computer Society (thank you, Allan Milgate and Barry Wong!) where I got to hear and participate in a lively discussion of the latest advances in RFID technology led by Ray Huetter of Sydney’s University of Technology. It’s a technology we’ll need to include more about in this newsletter before too much more time has gone by. It’s an important technology in many areas, despite what I had to say about it last month (see “NCR takes RFID toward the creepy side”).

Among the other impressive presentations I saw was one by David Curtis, chairman of the Asia Pacific Smart Card Forum which gave me a new insight into the “cards with chips” that are becoming ubiquitous. And I was very impressed by what Eric Vullings, of Macquarie University, had to say about PKI: he (and I agree) can’t understand why this technology, which has been around for 30 years, still hasn’t penetrated our everyday online functions – maybe it’s time to seriously find a different way.

We’ll be exploring these topics in more depth in the coming weeks and months, so be prepared – there may be a test!

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.