Last Friday the White House officially launched the NSTIC, now that it has been signed by the president and published for all to read.  Overall I am optimistic about the impact that the NSTIC can have on identity on the Internet, but there are three particular areas of progress that I am going to be watching to assess how positive the impact ultimately will be.

• International engagement & collaboration - It is no secret that the Internet in its best form knows no boundaries.  That makes it imperative that the identity ecosystem envisioned by the NSTIC also know no boundaries.  This does not mean that every country needs to have the same approach to verifying online identities, just that the approaches should evolve to be interoperable with one another.  Also many other countries (Canada, New Zealand, Holland and others) are already well down the path towards applying the federated approach to the Internet identity challenge.  It is important that the U.S. learn from them.
• Business models/economics - If the envisioned identity ecosystem is to takeoff, it's important that the benefits outweigh the burdens for each of the participants.  Appropriately a lot of focus is on the user, but the relying parties and identity providers must have significant focus as well.  For example the identity or attribute providers can't be expected to provide their services without attractive levels of compensation to justify their ongoing investments.  This is particularly true as the required level of identity assurance goes up.
• Deploy real projects soon - It is also very important that the NSTIC not evolve into purely a discussion or debate initiative.  Setting up and using even a small identity ecosystem will be very important to keep the momentum of the approach going.