I’m the CEO and founder of Sxip Identity.

I’m a strong advocate for user privacy on the web, and have worked for the past five years on a means for a simple, secure and open identity architecture that enables individuals to create and manage their online digital identities. My present work addresses the lack of an intrinsic identity mechanism for the internet –- a single standard identity system for users to unambiguously identify who they are. To that end, we developed a user-centric identity system, SXIP (Simple Extensible Identity Protocol), which provided separate mechanisms of identity assertion and authentication on the web. At OSCON 2006 we rolled the SXIP technology into the OpenID 2.0 specification, of which I’m a co-author.

Based on my background in user-centric identity, we’ve been chosen by the Government of British Columbia to lead a multi-vendor, multi-agency project to define a new identity architecture for the Province of BC (which is the best place on earth).

Previously, I founded ActiveState, which grew to become the leader in dev tools for open source programming languages and where, “if you didn’t know Dick, you didn’t know Perl!” While there, I led the port of Perl to Windows, the first scripting language support of the Microsoft platform. I also oversaw the port of Perl and Python to .NET. In the late nineties we applied Perl’s incredible strength at text processing to filtering email and built a popular app, PerlMx, that evolved into PureMessage, enterprise spam filtering software, just as the spam problem was first starting to cause the enterprise significant pain. I subsequently sold ActiveState to Sophos, a European security software company, in 2003.

My work interests include board membership on the OpenID Foundation and I’m a board member of the Vancouver Enterprise Forum. Previously I was on the board of the BC Technology Industry Association, Python Software Foundation, and Ludicorp (parent company of Flickr). I also support the Major Projects Fund for the BC Technology Social Venture Partners, a charitable foundation to support groups serving children, women at risk and people living in Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

Presentation Videos

• The infamous "identity 2.0" presentation from OSCON 2005
• The "Who’s the Dick on your site?" presentation from the 2006 ETech conference

Blogs

• Professional: identity20.com
• Personal: blame.ca

Contact

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