After the Bandit press interviews and announcement on Monday, I spent most of this week at the Catalyst conference in San Francisco. The whole experience has been great validation and boost to the Bandit project. Some of the highlights of the last few weeks for me were to work with Sarah Mees — and to finally meet Bruce Lowry in person (both from Novell marketing). As a technical guy, I don’t get out much.

Now I’m sitting in the last session at Catalyst. The conference has strongly affirmed the need and opportunity for Bandit. Many of the companies and individuals that gave supportive quotes in the Bandit announcement are here this week. I participated on a panel discussion with representatives from Higgins, IBM, Microsoft and Bandit/Novell. Not only did no one get hurt, but there was progress and many significant points of collaboration. There is very deep consensus that identity services must be interoperable, and we need to work together to build them. Novell’s experience in identity systems such as eDirectory and Identity Manager, as well as our open source perspective and experience, give us a unique voice in the discussion. This has also been validated in hallway discussions, after hours, and in other presentations and panel discussions. We are seeing an explosion of interest in building a consistent set of identity services, and it is very clear that open source implementations such as Higgins and Bandit are key initiatives in this ecosystem.

Now I need to attend a few more sessions. Next week I will be on representing the Bandit project on a panel discussion at the Identity Mashup conference sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. And the Bandit project rolls on.