One of the highlights of the recent European Identity Conference was the conferring of the European Identity Awards, which recognize outstanding projects, innovations and additional developments in standards -- an area that should get even more recognition.

While some of the awards are purely parochial (such as the one to the city of Colgne, Germany, for "Best IAM/GRC project for eGovernment"), others have world-wide implications.

My favorites were the awards for "Best new or improved standard," of which there were three.

The first went to the Liberty Foundation's Aristotle Project for ArisID, an implementation of the Identity Governance Framework (IGF) and Client Attribute Requirements Markup Language (CARML). For more on the standards, see "Identity Governance Framework sprints to the finish line" here. 

The second standards award went to OAuth (Open Authentication, "An open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and Web applications," for its streamlined approach for authentication standardization.

Lastly, an award went to the Information Card Foundation (ICF) for "…standardizing the important approach of information cards for future identity management". We've looked at information cards extensively here in the identity management  newsletter, including "The two-pronged attack to push Information Cards" and I hosted a panel on the use of information cards in the enterprise at the EIC with a star-studded array of panelists (Microsoft's Kim Cameron and Vittorio Bertocci; The Bandit Project's Dale Olds; Sun's Eve Maler; FUN Communications' Johannes Feulner; and Paul Trevithick representing the ICF), which rocked the room and provoked discussions long after the session ended. With last week's release of Beta 2 of Microsoft's Geneva server, bringing the chance of easily implemented information card identity providers ("even the brain-dead can do it," was how Vittorio Bertocci put it), this promises to be an important focus over the next 12 months.

Vittorio, by the way, is the authority for Microsoft implementations in this space. Follow his postings here.

The Geneva Project itself, by the way, won an award in the category "Best innovation." Also winning in this category was Sun's OpenSSO initiative for their project, OpenSSO Fedlet, which provides a lean solution for Identity Federation.

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