So as I mentioned in my previous talk, this industry is additive. We build on one another's work and we all benefit from this. If you have been around the sort of infectious intellect, the curiosity that was Kim, you can't come away unaffected by it. And frankly, if you are using verified credentials, you have a lot to thank him for as well. His contributions in so many different ways from this stage, from his work at Microsoft, from Zoom, it have been so felt throughout the industry and it's something that set a very high bar for all of us as practitioners.
Similarly, last year we lost our good friend and Vito's passion for standards both to contribute and to create. He has more OAuth and open entity connect related profiles than I think even Mike does is absolutely felt. If you use OAuth, you have a Toyota thank in a lot of ways. But more importantly, more importantly is the wonderful videos and articles he wrote that actually explain it. Here's the rare person that wanted to contribute to standards, not only for the technical merits and strengths, but also then to follow up by explaining 'em.
That is truly powerful and truly something that we needed to find a way to memorialize. So some of us started to think about how do we honor people like Kim and Vittorio so that we could help actually all of us in the process.
So that's when about November or so of last year when we were talking about this, we looked at starting and in fact did start the Digital Identity Involvement Foundation. And the idea behind this was how are we going to foster the next generation of identity people to join this community?
And I'm sure all of us who are here knows that coming to events like this and events like iVOS, it's not cheap, especially if you're right in the beginning of your career or you're trying to get involved. Those financial roadblocks to be able to get into these kind of events are real. And so we started looking at it and saying, this is how we can actually try and get new people to come into the organization, new people to come into this community and start building our next Giants onward shoulders to stand.
So the two awards that we are working with right now is, as Ian just said, the Kim Cameron Award, which is specifically to bring new attendees into both this conference as well as inverse that we have in the us. And so giving people who otherwise wouldn't be able to come to these events and then fostering that a little bit and bringing them into the community.
Likewise, when we start looking at Vittorio, he was a little bit of a standards guy. And so being able to bring people into the standards organizations, being able to come to the meetings that we have in really strange, exotic places that we get to go to with things like IETF and Open ID Foundation and all of these different organizations to get involved in those standards.
And so this year I am thrilled to announce the first crop of Kim Cameron award winners for 2024 last week. People that were ident diverse got to meet Sophie and Matt this week.
You get to meet Raj and Supr, they're walking around. If you see them say hi, they have, they shared their journeys really about being an identity this morning. It's wonderful. They're got great and curious minds about what they're interested in and what they've learned along the way. And then lastly, if you're gonna be attending authenticate later in the year, you'll get to meet Grace. And this has been really amazing to go through the process of selecting new awardees and actually hearing about their experiences at these events. And we've been thrilled to be able to do this.
And Alan and I sort of talk about we, so it's not just the two of us, Erin Crow, who you may know from all of her work at Fido. And at AWS, we round out the sort of leadership volunteers, cooks, cleaners, everything to do everything with the organization and have been doing this as volunteers over the last couple of months, going back actually the last summer when we really got support from one of our first and most important sponsors.
So when we talk about our sponsors, right, we are not doing this alone. We are doing this with people who are giving us the resources to be able to do it.
And right up here on the slide, we've got the Open ID Foundation looking at the history of this. That's where the, the Kim Cameron Award started. They incubated the idea, they started in the process. And as we were looking at it last summer, there was sort of this discussion is, well, it's not really the standard organization kind of placed to fit it. We need somewhere dedicated to this mission. And that was, we then started having discussions about there, about transferring it over into the, the DAF or the Digital Identity Advancement Foundation and start building up these awards.
However, open ID is only the Open ID Foundation is only one of those sponsors. There's a whole list of sponsors up there along with many of the people in this room, many of the people in the community that we are working with in identity. So we've just, Ian just announced the award winner's for the Kim Cameron Award. We've just closed applications for the Vitoria Award.
I, I guess it was 29 or something. Yeah, we had an
Enormous number,
A pile of applications that we've got going through this, which is specifically looking, not necessarily at conferences like this one, but it's to get to go and participate in the standards organizations. And we've got two tracks in that sort of an entry level or a, a beginner track as well as an advanced practitioner track, a professional track to be able to sponsor them to go into those.
So definitely come and talk to us and we can give some more details and dive into those as we go through the evening and through the week.
So we have these first two awards, but we've set ourselves a lofty goal, right? We wanna remove financial barriers from participation. There's many other ways that we can do that. Some of which will think up, some of which I'm sure you have ideas about. And so as the organization matures, as we eek towards our first birthday, we're looking for more ways to help more people and gain scale. And that's where you come in.
That's where I come in.
So, and it's also the opportunity now that we can go down and have beer, which is a good important thing. But digital id advancement.org is a long domain name to type in. So we have this very nice little link, which is DAF Link, which will take you to the website DAF Link about, takes you to all of the details. There's a very nice page there you have to visit. It's called DAF slash Donate, which brings up a nice page that sets you child.
Any help is always accepted and valued, because any money that we get in from anybody who's willing to sponsor, I mean it's, it's not, doesn't have to be a whole lot. 50 bucks or a hundred bucks helps pay for somebody's lunch when they come to these events. Schedule helps pay for a hotel room. So get involved with it as well as the email address info@digitalidadvancement.org.
If you have thoughts, ideas, awards that you would like to get behind and try and facilitate, send in those ideas because this is the way that we are building the next generation of identity professionals to be able to come and join our community. And this is a very welcoming community. It's a community that we all care passionately about and bringing new people into that can only bring forth new great things.
And with that, Alan and I just wanna say thank you for your past support, your current support, and your future support. Have a great rest of EIC, everybody. Thank you.
