Identity Commons is a community of groups working together on the creation of an open identity and relationship layer for the internet while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities. This challenge is not just technical and so we cover the whole range of social, legal and technical issues that arise.

Originally founded in 2001 the current community activity really began with the Identity Gang Mailing list started in 2004. We formally incorporated as a nonprofit in 2007. You can see our quarterly reports of activity (Q4 2007), (Q1 2008). This spring we was the 6th Internet Identity Workshop our main face to face community gathering.

We are an open, inclusive, and bottoms-up, community of groups that share a purpose and agree to abide by common a principles. Membership resides in the Community Groups. There is a Stewards Council - with a representative from each group.

We provide a minimal structure for supporting community activities, and we hold space for the entire community to collaborate, and facilitate dialogue. You can learn more about our History and Background and organizational details such as Articles Of Incorporation and Bylaws.

We invite your participation:

• Join one of the Community Groups - Identity Commons is organized as a set of distributed working groups.
• If you are new to this topic and trying to get oriented to the subject join a group of Newbies supporting other Newbies - sharing resources, getting questions answered by the community - sense making of all this material.
• Subscribe to the IC Community Mailing List - the publicly available list and list archives that accompany this wiki for discussion of topics affecting IC as a whole. Some of the Community Groups also have their own lists. (There is the Identity Gang List that has been active for several years)

To Learn more about the identity space you can look at these resources:

• Identity Landscape is a community-wide project to produce a living "map" of the Internet identity space, including efforts both inside and outside Identity Commons. All community members are invited to contribute.
• The Identity Gang Working Group maintains a list of resources for the user-centric identity space.
• Lexicon is a project of the Identity Gang to harmonize vocabulary for user-centric identity architecture.