About: David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company in the world. Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID. In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the web. During a year and a half at VeriSign, Recordon played an active role in refining and evangelizing OpenID, bringing it from an experimental technology to one that's been endorsed by major companies ranging from AOL to Microsoft, and implemented for over 120 million identities on the web. Recordon's history with open source software and open standards stretches back to the beginning of his career, when as a sophomore in high school he volunteered his time to lead an open source message board project with over forty members worldwide. This interest led to his co-founding of a message board hosting provider that still services tens of thousands of users around the world, and that he has since sold. Recordon was recently recognized by Google and O'Reilly as the recipient of a 2007 Open Source Award for his efforts with OpenID and is the youngest recipient in the history of the award.