10 Best Identity and IAM Communities to Join in 2026

Why It Fits the Moment

The single biggest shift in identity right now is the explosion of non-human identities and the security challenges they create. Machine credentials, service accounts, and AI agents acting on delegated authority now dominate the identity landscape in numbers and in risk, and most existing communities are still oriented around human identity. A community that treats machine identity and IAM security as first-class technical subjects, rather than an afterthought to human-centric IAM, is positioned exactly where the field is moving.

What You Get

Beyond articles, Start with Identity offers practical reference material: vendor profiles and capability matrices, practitioner guides, and a glossary, alongside current analysis dated into 2026 on topics like the machine-identity crisis and AI-powered IAM tooling. The free newsletter is explicitly no-pitch, and the community extends through a LinkedIn group with additional channels expanding over time. It functions as both a reference and a place to engage with peers on the technical realities of modern identity.

How to Get Value

Bring the hard technical problem you are actually working on. Start with Identity is most useful when you engage with a specific architecture or security question, because the depth of the community rewards specificity. It is a working space for technical practitioners, so the return comes from participating with a real question rather than passively reading.

The Body of Knowledge and CIDPRO

The Body of Knowledge is a living reference written and maintained by practitioners, anchored by editors with deep standards-world pedigree, and free to access. The CIDPRO (Certified Identity Professional) credential reflects actual practitioner knowledge rather than a vendor's product line, and IDPro provides the Body of Knowledge, reference resources, and a practice exam to prepare. Together they make IDPro the credible grounding layer for the profession.

The Slack Community

The IDPro Slack space is one of the most active places in identity, where members hash out real daily problems across dozens of channels and coordinate virtual meetups and study groups. Individual members can access the community Slack, with additional channels for corporate members. It is where the practical, day-to-day questions of running identity programs get answered by peers.

How to Get Value

When you are about to design something you have never built before, read the relevant Body of Knowledge article first. It will not give you code, but it gives you the mental model and the vocabulary to evaluate every vendor pitch and forum answer that comes after. For people early in an identity career, working through the foundational articles in order is one of the highest-value things you can do.

Agentic AI and the AIIM Community Group

The Artificial Intelligence Identity Management Community Group has become one of the most active and consequential spaces in identity. As agentic AI created urgent new questions about how autonomous agents authenticate, delegate, and are held accountable, the group published the October 2025 whitepaper Identity Management for Agentic AI and, in March 2026, filed a response to NIST's request for information on securing AI agent systems. If you want to see where identity is heading before it arrives, this is the room.

Open Process

The OpenID Foundation stewards the protocols the rest of the industry implements, OAuth and OpenID Connect chief among them. Its process is relatively open, with public drafts, mailing lists, and traceable discussions, so you can watch ideas evolve from proposal to standard without being a core contributor. Subgroups meet regularly and the work is genuinely public-facing.

How to Get Value

Follow the working groups relevant to your work, and read the whitepapers even if you never join a call. The forward visibility is the point: by the time a concept reaches mainstream tooling, you will already understand the problem it solves and the tradeoffs it makes. For deeper context on the infrastructure behind agentic AI identity, see guptadeepak.com/tools/top-10-non-human-identity-security-2026/.

The Engine Behind Passkeys

FIDO is the community driving the move away from passwords, producing FIDO2 and, with the W3C, WebAuthn, the standards that make passkeys work. It reports billions of passkeys created worldwide and publishes UX and design guidelines to help organizations roll them out well. For anyone working on authentication, this is the source of truth for the passwordless shift.

How It Operates

FIDO works differently from the OpenID Foundation: it is more closed by design, with membership agreements that restrict what participants can discuss while work is underway, and tiered organizational dues for those who want to join working groups and certification. The specifications, certification programs, and passkey adoption resources are public, so non-members can still ground their implementations in FIDO's output even without a seat at the table.

How to Get Value

Use FIDO's published resources and certification programs to ground your passkey implementation, and follow the public-facing output even if you are not a member. For a practitioner's view of the workforce passwordless landscape that FIDO standards underpin, see guptadeepak.com/tools/top-5-passwordless-mfa-platforms-2026/.

The Landscape, Weekly

Running since 2019, Identity at the Center covers the identity landscape weekly with hosts Jim McDonald and Jeff Steadman, balancing depth and accessibility. In 2026 the show has focused on exactly the topics defining the field, from agentic AI and non-human identity to delegation models and the standards work happening across OpenID, FIDO, IETF, and W3C, and it remains actively producing, including coverage of major 2026 industry events.

Threat Reports and Themes

Beyond interviews, the show reviews the major industry threat reports and surfaces the recurring themes practitioners need to track, which is a useful filter on an overwhelming volume of vendor research. It turns the firehose of identity news into a digestible weekly briefing.

How to Get Value

Treat it as your landscape scan. You will not get deep implementation detail, but you will know what is happening across the whole field and which deeper sources to go read next. It pairs especially well with the standards bodies for the depth it intentionally leaves out.

The Unconference Format

IIW has run twice a year since 2005 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, using an open-space format with no keynotes or panels: participants set the agenda live each day. That structure makes it one of the most dynamic gatherings in identity, and it is where a lot of the early thinking on decentralized identity, verifiable credentials, and emerging models actually gets worked out, often years before those ideas reach the mainstream.

What It Is For

IIW is less a place to learn established practice and more a place to participate in shaping what comes next. The room is full of the people building the future of identity, and the agenda reflects whatever they bring. If you want to influence emerging standards and models rather than consume finished ones, this is the venue.

How to Get Value

Go in person if you can, and propose a session on the problem you are wrestling with. The unconference format rewards people who show up with a real question rather than a passive audience, so the return scales with how much you contribute.

The Human Dimension

Women in Identity is a global community focused on inclusion and on the human edge cases that purely technical communities tend to miss. Identity systems make consequential decisions about real people, and the failure modes often hit the people least represented in the rooms where those systems get designed. This community brings that perspective, which matters for building systems that actually work for everyone rather than the median user the designers had in mind.

How It Engages

Volunteer-run and international, Women in Identity organizes through regional and global chapters with forums, virtual sessions, and a presence at major industry events. Its mission is to drive the industry to build solutions with diverse teams that enable universal access, and joining the community is free.

How to Get Value

Engage with the perspective on inclusive design and real-world identity failure cases. It will make you a better systems designer, not just a more informed one, because it surfaces the failure modes that homogeneous teams routinely miss.

Protocol-Deep Education

Where Identity at the Center scans the landscape, Identity, Unlocked goes deep on the protocols themselves: how SAML actually works, how OpenID Connect picked up the innovation torch, and the mechanics of tokens and federation. Hosted by Vittorio Bertocci in partnership with the OpenID Foundation and IDPro, it is some of the best protocol-level education available in any format, and the explanations remain accurate and valuable years after recording.

An Archive, Honestly

It is important to be accurate about its status: the podcast released its final episode in September 2022, and Vittorio Bertocci passed away in October 2023. It did not continue with new hosts, so it is now an archival resource rather than an ongoing show. The back catalog remains available across the major podcast platforms and endures as both a teaching resource and a tribute to one of the field's most generous educators.

How to Get Value

When you need to truly understand a protocol rather than just use it, work through the relevant episodes. Pair it with the OpenID Foundation's current drafts to bridge from the timeless fundamentals it teaches to the latest developments it predates.

The Casual Layer

Reddit threads and practitioner Slack and Discord servers are the casual end of the identity community spectrum. They shine for quick gut-checks, for discovering that a frustrating problem is widespread rather than yours alone, and for the social pulse of the field. The IDPro Slack and various topic-specific workspaces are among the more reliable, while subreddits like r/IdentityManagement are real but low-traffic.

Use With Caution

The honest caveat is signal-to-noise. This layer is fragmented and changeable, with no single authoritative server, so treat what you find as a hypothesis rather than an answer. It is great for fast, low-stakes questions and poor as a final source for anything consequential.

How to Get Value

Use these for fast, low-stakes questions and for the social pulse of the field, then confirm the important things elsewhere against IDPro's Body of Knowledge or the relevant standards body.

The In-Person Layer

Regional user groups, including IDPro-supported groups and identity-focused Meetup groups such as the Twin Cities and Seattle identity meetups, provide in-person, vendor-neutral relationships with peers solving the same problems in your region. These groups host talks, share what their organizations are doing, and create the kind of trust that only develops face to face. IDPro even publishes guidance on how to start one.

Why It Matters

Online communities are efficient but flat; local groups add the human relationships that make advice trustworthy. A local peer who has already solved a problem you are facing is worth a great deal, and the candid, off-the-record sharing at a regional meetup often goes deeper than anything posted publicly.

How to Get Value

Find the group nearest you and show up regularly. The value compounds over time as the relationships deepen, so consistency matters more than any single event.