Editorial

Scottish Government joins OIX

Holyrood: the organisation that aims to accelerate the adoption of digital identity services based on open standards is ‘a natural fit with the aims of what we are seeking to do in Scotland’

Posted 23 August 2018 by Gary Flood


The Scottish Government is to become a member of the OIX (The Open Identity Exchange) – a move that could see the pair collaborate much more closely in the rollout of the Scottish Online Identity Assurance project, ‘Alpha‘.

OIX is a technology agnostic, non-profit trade organisation of leaders from competing business sectors focused on building the volume and velocity of trusted transactions online, with members including Barclays, Google and Microsoft.

Announcing the decision in a blog post yesterday, the Scottish Government’s Digital Service explains its thinking:

“We have looked at best practice worldwide, especially the way that the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) have collaborated with the private sector to tackle common issues around digital identity verification and authentication.

“Over the last five years they have collaborated on a large number of projects with the Open Identity Exchange to advance understanding of, and develop solutions for particular problems around identity.

“As a worldwide, non-profit, cross-sector membership organisation that provides industry leadership for online identity assurance, OIX are a natural fit with the aims of what we are seeking to do in Scotland. They collaborate with governments, councils, identity providers and a host of others to address complex challenges around assurance.”

The move will be supported by two joint workshops to be convened in Edinburgh, bringing members of the Service’s project team and other interested areas of the Scottish public sector together with OIX members including specialist technical companies and identity providers active within the OIX’s community of interested partners, to explore in detail the current plans for Alpha and how they could form part of those plans.

OIX is a sponsor of our upcoming (Thursday, November 29th) Think Digital Identity for Government 2018 conference in London – go here for more details.