First, I think it’s fair to say that Microsoft applied quite a lot of pressure to the project representatives: there were at least 7 Microsoft people in the room (that I recognised… maybe others too), all of whom asked variants of the question “Why aren’t you using Infocard for this project?”. Over 2 1/2 hours that not only became quite wearing, it also made it quite difficult for anyone else to raise substantive questions/issues.

Second, as you say, there are legitimate questions about the scale of adoption of Infocard, and whether it can genuinely claim to be an established, proven technology which represents a technological industry consensus. There is a timing issue too: as the project team pointed out, it took 2-3 years of work to even get to the point where STORK could be launched as a project. For much of that period it simply wasn’t tenable to say that Infocard/Cardspace was viable for a deployment on the scale envisaged – certainly not tried-and-tested.

Finally, there’s the question of whether the project team made the kind of commitment which is suggested. I am not sure I remember it the same way. The crucial word is “consider”. After all, you can consider a technology without ever implementing it. Maybe that’s what they agreed to do. I think it would be premature to imagine that the STORK team are about to revise their architecture, at this stage of the project, to such an extent that it will accommodate Infocards in the foreseeable future. But then, the EU Framework Programmes look at the long timescale.