IBM, Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Novell and Parity Communications on Feb. 27 announced that they are contributing code to an open-source initiative, code-named the Higgins Project, which will help give people more control over their personal online identity information.

The Higgins Project announcement, which comes just weeks after Microsoft announced a similar initiative, called InfoCard, at the RSA Conference, is for a user-centric identity management system where users actively manage and control their online personal information for things like bank accounts, telephone and credit card numbers, or medical and employment records, IBM officials said.

The project is named after the Tasmanian long-tailed Higgins mouse. It reflects the Web 2.0 theory of the "long tail" of micro-markets that complement traditional industries, IBM officials said.

The open-source Eclipse Foundation is heading up the effort and is promoting the use of open standards, so Higgins will support Linux as well as Windows or any operating system, or any identity management system, IBM officials said. IBM and Parity Communications contributed software code to the Eclipse Higgins project, and Novell has pledged its support for the effort and will contribute code of its own. Other companies are expected to join the project. The SocialPhysics.org group at Harvard's Berkman Center initiated the project at Eclipse.

"To move online security to the next level, there has to be fundamental resolve among consumers, government and business to quickly adopt a system where the individual has more control over how information about them is managed and shared," said John Clippinger, senior fellow for The Berkman Center, in a statement. "Our aim is to construct an open and widely accessible software framework that puts the individual at the center of the identity management universe. With this framework in place, it will be easier for society to begin the migration to more secure online environments, where trusted networks can not only be easily formed, but effectively enforced. For in the end, security is not just technological, but social."