The past year and a half has been amazing! Not only have I grown by leaps and bounds, but have been an integral part of a team at VeriSign who put out an awesome product last month. Along the way I've met and worked with great people and this year worked for Gary Krall who is a truly amazing manager! I've grown as a presenter and evangelist from OSCON 2006 to OSCON this year where Simon Willison and I gave a three-hour OpenID Bootcamp tutorial. The OpenID community has grown and flourished from under 20-million OpenIDs and 320 sites accepting OpenID when I joined VeriSign to now over 120-million (including every AOL user) OpenIDs and almost 5,000 sites. The OpenID Authentication 2.0 specification has matured and extensions have been developed to add functionality upon OpenID in many ways. VeriSign has made great contributions such as the ability to describe stronger authentication mechanisms within an OpenID flow. Most recently I was recognized by Google and O'Reilly as the recipient of a 2007 Open Source Award for my efforts with OpenID and am the youngest recipient in the history of the award. None of these things would have been possible without the support, flexibility, and encouragement of VeriSign, my colleagues, and managers.

One of my growing interests this year has been taking the ever increasing infrastructure which is provided by OpenID and building really cool things on top of it. Now that I've helped to shape the latest VeriSign Labs PIP release, this is a good time for me to move on and follow this passion of building new things only now enabled by OpenID. The VeriSign Labs team is on a great path and I look forward to continue seeing amazing new things coming from them. This certainly is not a desire to become less involved in the OpenID community, though traveling as much as I have has grown a bit tiresome. :)

brad started thinking a lot about social network portability earlier this year and it is an extremely interesting topic to me as well. Brad describes his thoughts, which I helped him pull together and edit, as well as some goals he has to see this happen. While Brad has definitely earned his own change of pace after nine years of working on LiveJournal, it's a credit to Six Apart that all of his work on social network portability was incubated there. Combining this with all of their great open infrastructure which "powers Web 2.0" and Movable Type 4 incorporating OpenID and becoming Open Source, Six Apart certainly has made the right moves to be a leader in this space. So I'm excited to say that I'll be joining them later this month as their Open Platforms Tech Lead to help make it a reality.

So more overtime, but I'll be at BarCampBlock (along with Brad) this weekend if you're interested in discussing this further!