OASIS has formed a new technical committee to make it easier to validate the trustworthiness of businesses, projects, and people working and socializing in electronic communities. The new OASIS Open Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) Technical Committee will define common data formats for consistently and reliably representing reputation scores.

According to recent media reports, the average American spends about 160 hours online each year. For many working professionals, this number skyrockets into the thousands of hours. A Pew Internet and American Life Project survey conducted in early 2007 reports that nearly half of all internet users have searched for information about themselves while online, more than doubling the figure reported just five years ago.

The 7th annual NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) IDtrust Workshop, co-sponsored by the OASIS IDtrust Member Section (MS) was a great success. Over 170 attendees participated from various industries and academia worldwide. The event generated an enthusiastic response from attendees and stimulated a great deal of 'hallway' conversation.

Analyst group, Kuppinger Cole + Partners, has unveiled the ten predominant topics and trends in Identity Management in 2008, with Identity 2.0 unsurprisingly leading the way. Also featuring in this year’s top ten trends is a growing ‘superstructure’ of GRC (Governance, Risk Management and Compliance), which has become the driving force of Identity Management with a strong impact on the change from administration-focussed to business-orientated Identity Management.

OASIS has opened a fifteen-day public review of the Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) Resolution version 2.0 Committee Draft. XRI provides a uniform syntax for abstract structured identifiers. The public review ends 26 March 2008.