User-centric identity starts with the individual, and his or her needs and relationships with other people, companies and organizations. This is and extremely active and growing conversation involving many converging development efforts -- by open source communities, by vendors large and small, and by customers of all sizes. They are working towards a powerful vision of a web-wide distributed identity meta-system. At the heart of this conversation is a community of amazing people, a shared lexicon and some core principles 'the laws of identity' put forward by Kim Cameron of Microsoft. Kaliya will give an overview of the identity landscape focusing on the core elements that have lead to the current developments and help orient those who want to implement the emerging open standards into Web 2.0 tools.