Edentity

PIB is a peculiar field in that a solution cannot be adopted by just one organisation alone, no matter how large. Rather it is an element of infrastructure - similar in some ways to telecommunications or payment systems - that must be adopted by multiple organisations before it becomes useful.

Back in the early days, and with this peculiarity of PIB in mind, we thought that progress could best be made using a consortium approach and, accordingly, led groups of organisations to submit three different bids for development funding, as described below. All three missed the cut, generally by the slimmest of whiskers.

• EC Bid 2003. In April 03, Edentity worked with the City of Sunderland to assemble a funding bid to the first call of the EC's Sixth Framework IST Programme. The project was structured around digital identity applications of increasing complexity, starting with simple single-point-of-sign-on, and culminating in transactions - found mainly in the health and social care fields - where the individual gives consent to the exchange of relevant information, but leaves the decision as to what information is relevant for a given purpose to the appropriate professionals. Consortium members included Ericsson Telecom, Sun Microsystems, Experian, and the City of Rome.
• ISB Bid. In late 2002, Edenity facilitated a bid to HM Treasury's Invest-to-Save Budget, seeking start-up funding for a Virtual Home Trust. The bid was led by the Improvement & Development Agency (IDeA), with support from the North East Regional Smart Card Consortium, the Department for Education & Skills, and one part of the NHS.
• EC Bid 2002. In spring 02, Edentity worked with the City of Newcastle to assemble a bid to the final call of the EC's Fifth Framework IST Programme, seeking development funding for the Virtual Home concept. Partners to the bid included one part of the NHS, the City of Rome, Moviquity, & Unisys Italia.

In retrospect, it is probably a good thing that none of these bids succeeded. Although well thought through for their time, the premise of each bid now seems rather naïve, and the burden of managing such disparate consortia would have been significant.

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