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The Center Channel Project

The basic element of a community is the notion of identity. Technology exists today to create, manage, and authenticate online identities and broker services based on information related to that identity. The CenterChannel.Org Project is a business alliance formed to deliver and support an identity solution for the Internet that enables single sign-on for consumers as well as business users in an open, federated way.

Federated identity represents the natural evolution of the next generation of the Internet. The first waves of the Internet, namely communications, global access, commerce, and community identity, gave us a pervasive user medium that has largely been relegated to one-to-one, customer-to-business relationships and experiences. The inflection point starting the Internet's next wave will be marked by an era of open, federated identity with promises of bold new business taxonomies and opportunities, coupled with economies of scale that, until recently, were simply unimaginable.

Federated identity will enable the next generation of the Internet: federated commerce. In a federated view of the world, a person's online identity, their personal profile, personalized online configurations, buying habits and history, and shopping preferences are administered by users, yet securely shared with the organizations of their choosing. A federated identity model will enable every business or user to manage their own data, and ensure that the use of critical personal information is managed and distributed by the appropriate parties, rather than a central authority.

The role of the CenterChannel.Org Project in all of this is to support the development, deployment and evolution of an open, interoperable standard for network identity. It will require collaboration on standards so that privacy, security, and trust are maintained.

• To allow individual consumers and businesses to maintain personal information securely.
• To provide a universal open standard for single sign-on with decentralized authentication and open authorization from multiple providers.
• To provide an open standard for network identity spanning all network devices.

CenterChannel.Org Project charter members currently represent over a billion network identities. The charter members of the CenterChannel.Org Project intend to create an open, federated solution for network identity - enabling ubiquitous single sign-on, decentralized authentication, and open authorization from any device connected to the Internet, from traditional desktop computers and cellular phones through to TVs, automobiles, credit cards and point-of-sale terminals.

Each of the companies invited to participate as a charter member of this Alliance, either owns and operates large communities of interest or is the developer of core technology that can enable a federation of online communities. But membership is still open, and we encourage all interested parties to participate.