In a potentially important step in establishing federated identity structures, Microsoft has announced support for OpenID in CardSpace, a digital identity framework recently incorporated in Microsoft's Vista operating system.  OpenID is broadly similar in both intent and operation to Internet2's Shibboleth technology, although it is lighter weight and naming authority is fundamentally more distributed.  It relies on i-names and i-brokers, with registrars for i-brokers. 

One can imagine a university being an i-broker for its community, and indeed there have been conversations between the Internet2 shibboleth middleware community and OpenID principals.  

 ITPRO has a good descriptive post on OpenID and the agreement.  

Originally designed by Brad Fitzpatrick, chief architect at blogging platform developer Six Apart for use in cross-blog authentication, OpenID has rapidly become a key digital identity technology, allowing identity assertions to be shared across multiple systems. While other identity systems work well in closed enterprise networks, OpenID has been designed from the ground up for handling identity on the public internet. Microsoft's collaboration with the OpenID project will add support for strong credentials. As many sites and services already use OpenID, this approach will open up much more of the web to Microsoft's fledgling CardSpace.

Using an i-name, I can be contacted at http://xri.net/=peter.brantley; my i-name can be referenced simply as =peter.brantley.