This is our official announcement on the claimID blog:

ClaimID proudly announces it has joined a consortium of ten forward-thinking companies to fund the development and adoption of OpenID. ClaimID utilizes OpenID, a standards-based identity protocol; it lets you do cool stuff like log into LiveJournal or Wikipedia (very soon!) with your claimID URL. Not only is that cool, it just makes sense – OpenID is decentralized, scalable, easy-to-use and it saves you from having to create new accounts at every site you log into.

Announced by JanRain CEO Scott Kveton at OSCON, the consortium’s first project is an OpenID code bounty. The consortium will offer $5,000 to ten open source projects that successfully implement OpenID. I know what you’re thinking – “$5,000 to implement OpenID – sign me up!” Well, there are a few conditions. Your project must be OSI licensed, and there must be either 5,000 downloads a month or 200,000 users of publicly installed instances. Software like Wordpress, phpBB, Drupal or Joomla are great examples – and you can suggest others. Not only will each of these projects be getting $5,000, but they will also be investing in the future of identity, and making it easier for people to use their projects. It is a win-win all around.

The consortium is made up of forward-thinking companies that share a goal to make identity better on the net. They are Verisign, JanRain, Cordance, ooTao, Opinity, Four Kitchen Studios, Zooomr, NetMesh, Sxip and claimID. We’re looking to expand our consortium, so if you’re interested in supporting this important cause, please contact us. The coordinating site, located at http://iwantmyOpenID.com, and bounty program were organized by the OpenID community.

We’re so happy to be able to take part in this very important goal. We feel that OpenID is great way to give people the identity solutions they need. With this bounty program and consortium, we hope that people will take this opportunity to collaborate, converse and compromise. We’re convinced we’ve made a great decision in supporting OpenID, its community and this consortium, and we look forward to the important progress this initiative will make.

Big news indeed. This is very exciting – I’ve only been working in the identity space with real code for about six months, but only a few minutes after hearing about OpenID, I got it. It made sense.

If we can get that few minutes to happen for more people, through open source software, all the better. This is a first step to much more powerful applications. It will help bring our social connections and trust into the online arena with grace and beauty.

Meanwhile… Brian Ellin sees a giant snowball causing an identity earthquake (a mixed metaphor, but who cares!):

Imagine a snowball teetering, getting ready to roll down the mountain. With a little push to get it going, that ball could turn into something really huge. Something disruptive.

Announcing the OpenID code bounty. $5,000 to ten popular open source projects who implement OpenID in their applications. Announced this morning at OSCON, and the word is already spreading:

• iwantmyopenid.org – bounty homepage
• Kveton on the code bounty
  
• ClaimID on joining the consortium
• Johannes Ernst talking about the bounty
• other blogs talking about the bounty at technorati

Spread the word.