MaSSSoftech

Some of the country's top technology companies will participate in a new pilot program to change the way U.S. citizens access and participate in government Web sites, hoping to further the openness and transparency goals set by the Obama Administration's Open Government Initiative.

AOL, Acxiom, Citi, Equifax, Google (NSDQ:GOOG), PayPal, Privo, VeriSign (NSDQ:VRSN), Wave Systems and Yahoo (NSDQ:YHOO) are among the organizations that said in a joint statement Wednesday they would support initial pilot programs in single authentication for government Web site access from the Open ID Foundation (OIDF) and Information Card Foundation (ICF).

The goal of the pilot is to increase the way Web surfers interact with the federal government by giving them a single authentication protocol -- an OpenID user name -- to access government Web sites. In practice, all users would need is a single OpenID to look up information through, say, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), or download documents from the Federal Communications Commission.

"This comes at a critical time in the history of OpenID, of which there are now well over 500 million OpenID-capable accounts in the wild," wrote Chris Messina, a member of the OpenID Foundation, in a Wednesday blog post. "Given the wide deployment of this technology, it only makes sense that the government should leverage this wide potential user base to facilitate interaction with its citizens."

The open identity initiative will be piloted with HHS, the U.S. Center for Information Technology, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. The government will certify participating technology companies under the federal Identity Credential and Access Management Trust Framework Adoption Process.

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is scheduled to discuss the pilots and other open government initiatives Thursday at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C. (Gov. 2.0 is co-produced by TechWeb, whose parent company, United Business Media, is also the parent of Everything Channel.)

ODIF and ICF were quick to underscore how the pilots encourage citizens to interact with government but not compromise their personal information.

"Open government cannot and will not compromise either security or privacy," said Drummond Reed, executive director of the Information Card Foundation, in a statement. "By working with private industry, the U.S. government is harnessing the innovation and efficiencies of the open market and letting citizens choose their preferred means of engaging with government agencies."

The idea of openness and transparency in government technology -- and collaboration with private sector thought leaders -- has been a staple of President Obama's White House, as well as in the agendas of Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra.

It's high on the minds of solution providers, too, whotold Channelweb.com they are continuing to adapt solutions for a government that embraces Web 2.0, social networking advances and cloud-based solutions more than ever before.