"The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in cooperation with the Australian Federal Government agency, Centrelink, will hold a public workshop on July 13-15, 2009, at the NIST Gaithersburg campus. The workshop is open to the public but requires registration. The goal of the 3-day workshop is to explore potential commercial implementations of the Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of Identity (PLAID) and the potential usefulness of this protocol to U.S. Federal agencies.

PLAID public resources are available from the following site: http://www.govdex.gov.au.

The principle of the workshop is that each attending vendor has two days, with the assistance of Centrelink, to “port” existing source code, or develop new code for their device or card. All the information vendors need will be available to them ahead of the workshop on the http://www.govdex.gov.au site. Vendors may obtain as much or as little assistance as they please from other vendors in the workshop. (Card vendors might, for instance, assist device vendors.)

On the third day, end-users are invited to view the efforts of all of the vendors. Each vendor will use their space to demonstrate their PLAID implementation to attendees. Attendees are invited to interact with the vendors and discuss their PLAID implementation."