Right after the BizDay #1, Nat rushed to this meeting to give his presentation this council.
This council is supposed to create a national guideline for e-Gov and possibly to the private sector for the usability and identity assurance. Prof. Sudo, an advisor to OIDF-J, is the chairman of this council. (Mr. Mitsushio, a member of OIDF-J, and the leader of the security working group of CIO aide of ministries, is another member of the council.)

For details, see http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/it2/guide/index.html (Sorry, it is in Japanese.)

The Agenda was as follows:

1. Opening Remarks
2. Status of E-Sigs usage
3. On the “Inference articles” of the e-sig and authentication law.
4. Technical Trends in the technologies that impacts user interface
 4.1 SmartCards and NFC phones
 4.2 Web SSO

I could only attend 4.2 (i.e., my speech) because of BizDay #1 obligation, so I cannot report on anything but my speech and discussion followed it. My presentation was on OpenID and SAML including PAPE and CX proposal, and gave several case studies as well. It was very well accepted. In the following discussion, the importance of the NIST SP800-63 style assurance framework and guidelines that can be used across government and private sectors were noted.

IMHO, this kind of activity is very important for OpenID adoption. There are many companies hesitant to become an RP because the assurance level and legal implication of being a RP is not clear. This kind of council will eventually come up with a national guideline and possibly a new law that covers these and thus make it much easier for something new like OpenID to be adopted.

On Dec. 12, OpenID Foundation Japan had a members only seminar titled “OpenID BizDay#1″, hosted by Yahoo! Japan.
BizDay is something OIDF-J is providing to the members as the benefit of being a paying member.
It is intended to be a forum for the members to share their business (non-technical) experience.

Dec. 12 was the first such occasion, and over 60 people across the industries attended it.

The agenda was as follows:

0. Opening Welcome Message: Koji Yagi, President, OpenID Foundation Japan
1. Keynote: “Next Generation e-government services and security - loosely coupled databases and Government-Industry collaboration.”
     Prof. Osamu Sudo, The University of Tokyo
2. “Yahoo! JAPAN and OpenID”, Tetsuya Nishimaiki, CTO, Yahoo! Japan.
3. “Developments in the U.S.”, Tatsuki Sakushima, NRI-A
4. “Interoperability considerations on ID management: A Concordia Project”, Hiroki Ito, NTT
5. Status report on the progress of OpenID Japan’s activity. Nat Sakimura, NRI
6. OIDF-J Activity Reports, Noboru Uchiyama, OpenID Japan/NRI
7. Member announcements and forthcoming OpenID Japan activities.
 - mixi OpenID Contest, Hiroyuki Oyama, mixi
 - OpenID BizDay #2, Noboru Uchiyama, OpenID Japan/NRI

To start the BizDay #1, Mr. Yagi gave a welcome message to the members for joining this forum.
He also announced that now OIDF-J has 3 additional members: Hitachi, HP Japan, Indigo, that now it has 40 corporate members.

Prof. Osamu Sudo is a renowned government advisor and is an advisor to the OpenID Foundation Japan.
He gave us the current e-gov situation and his insight on how OpenID etc. can help the situation.

Mr. Nishimaki gave an overview on the rationale for Yahoo! Japan to invest and support OpenID, and shared the roadmap with OIDF-J members. Also, he shared business ideas that Yahoo! Japan is considering right now.
It was also good to hear Yahoo! Japan’s basic privacy policy: “The customer owns the information he registered to Yahoo! Japan.”

Tatsuki gave us an update on the U.S. OpenID related development, such as the Board Election, New Working Groups being formed, XRD 1.0 at OASIS Open, etc. Then, he finished off his speach with the mention of OpenID PAPE - SAML Authn Context interoperability project which is supposed to be demoed at RSA 2009. This acted as a good introduction to HIroki’s announcement and introduction of the OpenID-SAML Interop Concordia project.

Nat gave a brief status report on the SIG formation etc. There has been bunch of SIG proposals and the option of starting them simultaneously were considered, but the direction now is to start one to debug the process, and then start others.

Then, Mr. Uchiyama reported on the activities of the past two weeks including Web 2008 Conference that OIDF-J sponsored.

The last portion was member announcement. There were two announcement.

The first one was the announcement of mixi OpenID Competition for students. Awards are going to be given to the teams with implementation that leverage on the social graph represented by mixi OpenID. Juries are composed of two people from mixi, one from OIDF-J, and two others.

The second announcement was the next OpenID BizDay hosted by Japan Airlines. It will be on January 16.
It will feature Japan Airlines’ OpenID strategies as keynote.

Nikkei ITPro Article: http://itpro.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/NEWS/20081212/321354/