Big News: there was an important election at the end of 2008. No, I'm not talking about the presidential election. I'm referring to the OpenID board election results.
The OpenID foundation is made up of five corporate board members (Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo!), and seven "community" board members (four of whom serve a two year term and three of whom serve a one year term). The OpenID Foundation ("OIDF") was not created to determine the technical direction of OpenID, but rather is concerned with intellectual property, brand promotion, etc.
There's some pretty significant debate going on about whether OpenID should pursue a strategy of heavily branding itself to the masses of internet users (think "intel inside"). And it will be interesting to watch this year as the board works to foster greater adoption.
OpenID certainly has a great deal of "alpha geek" support, but still seems to be struggling to get over the adoption hurdle. If and when it does, enterprises everywhere will need to take notice.
