"The purpose of Identity Commons is to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet -- one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities."

Identity Commons as an organization helping to facilitate and coordinate the work of distributed, self-organizing working groups who share this common purpose.

The history of identity commons has spanned a number of years and work continues, to create an interoperable, universally-adopted user-centric identity layer for the Internet. Currently this effort, dubbed "Identity Commons 2.0", has resulted in the community consensus at the end of July 2006 to adopt the new Purpose And Principles and incorporate Identity Commons as an international non-profit legal organization.

We are an open, inclusive, and bottoms-up, community of groups working to address the social, legal and technical issues that arise with the emerging, identity, data and social layer of the internet. The organization of Identity Commons include "community or working groups" which agree to abide by a set of principles providing a common purpose. Membership resides in the "Community or Working Groups" and a "Stewards Council" - with a representative from each group provides a minimal structure for supporting community activities. The basic structure has been referred to as an "upside down umbrella" because the vast majority of the activities and decision-making occur within the community Groups, which have tremendous autonomy.

Work to create an interoperable, universally-adopted user-centric identity layer for the Internet is full of challenges and questions including:

• What are the open standards to make it work? (identity and semantic)
• What are technical implementations of those standards?
• How do different standards and technical implementations interoperate?
• What are the new social norms and legal constructs needed to make it work?
• What tools are needed to make it usably secure for end-users?
• What are the businesses cases / models that drive all this?

All this takes time, and yes, interest is growing and movement is happening, but there is not 'one answer' or 'one blueprint.' As Doc Searls, one of the 'grandfathers' of this movement is fond of saying, it is a "market conversation."

As such, We need a broad and diverse range of participants. This layer once implemented will be as world changing as the World Wide Web of documents was for the Internet.