U.S. citizens will soon be able to log in to government websites using their Google account, or the URL of their Yahoo profile. It's a significant embrace of the open and emerging tech standards the Obama administration promised.

The U.S. government pilot program will allow people to interact with various government websites using an OpenID or an Information Card, the nation's information technology officer will announce Wednesday. These are two of the most popular emerging technologies that let web users manage their identities across multiple websites.

Under the new program, which will go into effect in the coming weeks, people will be able to sign in, request information, participate in forums and build user profiles on the government's websites without having to set up a new user account. Anyone will be able to interact with the government sites using credentials provided to them by Yahoo, Google, AOL, VeriSign or PayPal, among others.

The pilot is scheduled to be announced by the U.S. government CIO Vivek Kundra at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., Wednesday morning.

The win here for the user is twofold.

First, you'll have fewer logins and passwords to manage — your OpenID is a skeleton key that gets you in to every site. It eliminates the scenario where you'll have to create one user account to interact with Homeland Security, another to access housing records, and another to ask a question about healthcare. Second, OpenID and the other technologies that support it afford you a high level of control over exactly how much information about you gets shared with the site you're logging in to. Those who only want to pass along the minimum can do so, and those who want to build a fullblown user profile can do so, as well.

This initiative is a major step toward opening government services and making public data accessible on the web, according to Chris Messina, an OpenID board member and the CEO of Citizen Agency.

"The U.S. government taking real steps to adopt open technologies has the potential to enhance and simplify citizen engagement," Messina said. Because it has blessing of the administration's top techie, he stressed, "This isn't just some little skunkworks project off to the side."

It also comes at a time when public discourse over issues like health care reform, global warming and education are reaching a fever pitch and many citizens are itching to have their questions answered or their grievances heard.

The government agencies participating in this program are the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). All of their websites will begin accepting OpenID and InfoCard credentials within the coming weeks.

That's only a handful of government agencies, but the OpenID Foundation, the nonprofit governing body that oversees the growth of the open source technology, hopes Wednesday's announcement will kick off a domino effect across Washington, according to board member David Recordon, who now works at Facebook.

"For us, this is a helpful way of saying, 'Hey all of you other government agencies, if you've been wondering what you have to do to adopt these technologies and increase public participation, here's a stake in the ground you can point to that will help you get up to speed more rapidly,'" Recordon said.

OpenID is a digital identity standard that lets people use a single ID, like a Google username or an AOL profile, to log in to multiple websites. Several major companies are already OpenID providers, including Yahoo, Google, AOL, MySpace, and Microsoft. Facebook is expected to become a provider soon.

InfoCard is a similar standard, championed by Microsoft and Equifax, to help users manage their digital identities.

However, the new pilot program won't allow users to log in using credentials from just any ID provider. People will only be able to use OpenID or InfoCard credentials provided by the ten companies in the pilot program: Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, CitiGroup, Privo, Equifax and Wave Systems.

These companies have undergone a certification process — designed by the Information Card Foundation, the OpenID Foundation and the federal government — that guarantees certain privacy safeguards. For instance, the sites have to use SSL to handle logins, and they have to provide psuedonymous identifying information so the government can't correlate user identities (and track a single user's behavior) across multiple agency websites.

This trust framework is there to reassure to the public, says Recordon. "You shouldn't have to sacrifice security and privacy to participate in open government," he says.

Messina contrasted OpenId to Facebook Connect, the popular social network's way of letting users log in to other sites such as news sites using their Facebook ID. Comments on that site can then be shared on a user's Facebook page.

"Facebook Connect spews user data all over the net, but when it comes to the government, that's the last thing you want," Messina said. "Using OpenID, if you don't want to reveal any information about who you are, you are completely pseudonymous."

The feds plan to start small. One plan is to let users of the National Institute of Health website – which is full of detailed medical information – to save their research by bookmarking articles, without the government having any idea who actually controls a given account.

While that may not seem like a huge step, Messina says federal agencies are good at adopting what works at other agencies.

"Once we get a few successes going, this will happen very quickly," Messina said.

Additional reporting by Ryan Singel.

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