About

personal

My name is Will Norris. I’m 26. I’m a christian, a husband, a Mac user, and a computer programmer. I don’t normally eat breakfast, but sometimes enjoy a white mocha on my way to work. I like Hanes socks and t-shirts, Barq’s root beer, and Pentel pencils (presently, the Twist Erase III). I bowl about 150, type around 75-80 wpm, and couldn’t run a 7 minute mile if my life depended on it. I haven’t found a single beer that I like, but love a good glass of red wine. I have two tattoos and three current piercings, but have had a total of 8 over the years. I stopped liking professional baseball after the strike in 1994, but still have all my cards in a box somewhere. I’ve accepted the fact that I won’t finish my bachelor’s degree in computer science before my 10 year high school reunion.

I can be found on the web.

professional

My current focus is the DiSo Project, working to develop a viable model for distributed social networks. This involves leveraging a number of existing “Open Web” technologies such as OpenID, OAuth, microformats, Atom (and AtomPub), and XMPP. We believe strongly in using whatever existing technology is available, but are not afraid to charge ahead into uncharted territory with a new specification if necessary.

Previously, I worked in the Identity Management space in Higher Education for a number of years. I spent a lot of time focused on enterprise wide solutions for identity consolidation, account provisioning, federated single sign-on, and very finely controlled access to identity data by end-user applications. I spent two years as a member of the core development team for Shibboleth, an open source web single sign-on product very popular in universities all over the world. I continue to contribute to the project, but in a lesser capacity and with a slightly different focus.

I also have professional bios of varying length and headshots suitable for publication.

contact

All of my contact information can be found on the front page of this site.

colophon

This site is powered by Wordpress and uses the Thematic theme framework with a custom style. The style was heavily inspired by jeffcroft.com and the background image was taken from localh0st.org (though I’m still technically waiting for official approval to use the image).

I’ve gone through many hosting companies, but have settled with the good folks at Joyent… their new Accelerators simply can’t be beat.