Tuesday, August 12th, 2008...2:40 pm
The OU and OpenID
For the last few months I’ve been working on a new OU student / alumni community site called, well, I’m not sure what it’s actually called yet, but let’s just say it is a companion / successor to the print-based Sesame magazine.
We’ve tried to do a few new and interesting things with the site (although much more cool socially and data-driven stuff will happen in the much-whispered-of `phase 2′) and hopefully the users will flock in their thousands (indeed hundreds of thousands).
One big win has been the use of Drupal to build the site. AFAIK Liam has been at the forefront of pushing Drupal within the OU - he’s provided a lot of help to this point (and hopefully going forward) so a big thanks to him :).
I’m excited about using Drupal for two main reasons.
1) It doesn’t tie us to one particular (or any) external agency should we require a few tweaks to this and that.
2) It allows us to contribute and benefit from the Drupal community. We’re having a few new modules created which we’ll be sharing back, and there will be quite a few community-created modules that we’ll be implementing. The scope for tinkering with new modules is massive and i can’t wait!
The second `new’ aspect to the site will be the incorporation of login via OpenID. Alex has done some great work in putting together an OU OpenID server. Alex has also been really helpful in our discussions around this, so a big thanks to him too!
There is a lot of work to be done around OpenID sign-in however, and a coherent story needs to told around what it is and why it is useful. I’m pretty much convinced that there is a definite direction of travel towards single sign-in for the web however, and the OU as an educational institution should play its part.
There have been a few developments over the recent months that begun to build this momentum. These include the BBC’s decision to join the OpenID foundation, MySpace deciding to jump on the OpenID bandwagon, and Google FriendConnect’s support of OpenID.
Of course this isn’t all plain sailing. There are reports of problems with OpenID, such as those here (thanks to LauraD for the tip off!) and there’s a rival in form of Facebook Connect. There’s a great post on this over at bub.blicio.us which is definitely worth a read.
So, some good steps forward and lots of work still to be done. No change there then :).
2 Comments
August 15th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Hello,
Excellent post, I am glad to see OpenID being used at educational institutions. I have always thought there was a natural fit there.
I wanted to say that there is progress being made regarding making OpenID easier and more intuitive to use. Sites like Clickpass and applications like OpenID browser plugins are doing alot to improve usability. Also there is a new site and spec out that will let you use emails addresses as an OpenID. More info on emailtoid and EAUT is here: http://blog.vidoop.com/archives/139
There has been a sizable investment in OpenID by many companies and it is only a matter of time till we get all the kinks worked out.
Cheers,
Kevin
August 18th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Hi Kevin,
Thanks. It’s really Alex Little who did all the hard work / good thinking on this - we’re just enjoying the fruits of his labour.
We’ve looked at IDSelector which seems to be a useful tool. I’ve tried to get hold of them quite a few times but no-one returns my email!
I read a while back on one of the OpenID project pages about email being used - the concern seemed to be about people signing up to use a site once (with their email as OpenID) and then getting spammed cos the site has their email address.
I like the look of emailotoid though and will take a closer look!
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