Kantara Initiative

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Kantara Initiative

Founded	2009
Type	Information Technology and Services – Industry consortium and professional trade organization
Focus	Trust framework conformity assessment, assurance and Trust Mark operations for digital identity management and personal data privacy
Origins	Founded by private sector identity management industry vendors, later joined by government agencies and individual subject matter experts
Method	Programs, Recommendations, Conferences, Publications
Key people	Kay Chopard (Executive Director) Lynzie Adams (Executive Programs Manager) Andrew Hughes (Chair of the Leadership Council)
Website	kantarainitiative.org

Kantara Initiative, Inc. is a non-profit trade association that works to develop standards for identity and personal data management. It focuses on improving the trustworthy use of identity and personal data in digital identity management and data privacy.

Kantara translates to "wooden bridge" in Kiswahili, which is the inspiration for the bridge of Kantara’s logo. The name is attributed^{[by whom?]} to Nat Sakimura, a Kantara founding board director and Open ID Foundation chair, who spent his childhood in Africa.

Kantara drafts technical specifications and recommendations for industry use and submits them to standards development organizations, such as Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C),^[1] Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)^[2] and SC27 (Security Techniques) Working Group 5 (Identity Management and Privacy) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Kantara provides input to policy bodies such as OECD as well as some inter-government initiatives related to identity management and personal data agency.