Amid much talk of potential and possibilities, news of a concrete step towards a more "2.0" government came out of today's Gov 2.0 Summit. HHS, NIH, and a handful of other federal offices announced that they are launching a pilot project that will enable Open ID on some government websites. With a single sign-on, users will be able to create and maintain a persistent identity when they visit and revisit government sites. In the first stage of the project, Open ID will be enabled for users as they access research materials, register for events, and user collaborative tools like wikis. Of course, the whole idea of identity gets tricky when it comes to interacting with government, and so a sort of mediated form of Open ID is being implemented for the project. Kaliya Hamlin, a.k.a. Identify Woman, has details:

Those already familiar with OpenID know that typically when users login with it they give their own URL – www.openIDprovider.com/username...There is a little known part of the OpenID protocol called directed identity – that is a user gives the name of their identity provider – Yahoo!, Google, MSN etc – but not their specific identifier. The are re-directed to their IdP and in choosing to create a directed identity they get an identifier that is unique to the site they are logging into. It will be used by them again and again for that site but is not correlatable across different websites / government agencies. The good news it is like having a different user-name across all these sites but since the user is using the same IdP with different identifiers (unlinked publicly) but connected to the same account they just have to remember one password.

Note that, as far as the pilot project goes, the participating agencies are all related health offices. That makes this a project of limited scope. But as long as the privacy concerns of users are a central concern as the project develops, enabling Open ID for government is a step towards creating a government that better supports its citizens.