Identosphere Weekly Highlights #7
November 15 - 22 "More updates in decentralized id than you can shake a stick at"
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Trust Frameworks? Standards Matter.
Tim Bouma makes the case that Trust frameworks need standards to be trusted. He points at the NIST documents about it Developing Trust Frameworks to Support Identity Federations published in 2018. He also points at the Canadian government’s definition of standards.
“a document that provides a set of agreed-upon rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results. Standards establish accepted practices, technical requirements, and terminologies for diverse fields.” He goes on to highlight a lot of the work being done in Canada and where it all sits relative to being a standard - “In closing, there are lots of trust frameworks being developed today. But to be truly trusted, a trust framework needs to either apply existing standards or become a standard itself.”
The Odyssey Hackathon was last week
See the winners across all 21 challenges.
They are actually coming to the Interoperability Working Group this coming week to share results. Here is what they had to say about SSI:
A Self- Sovereign Identity can unlock the full potential of the digital global economy. The identity of people, organizations and things is relevant to any transaction, while protecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is of increasing importance.
SSI enables the necessary exchange of verified data before committing to (proposed) transactions, which for high-value/high-risk transactions includes the identity.
The thing that stuck out to me reading the web page about the event was this diagram.
New Zealand is working with Maori leaders on Identity
Next week we’re celebrating our first Aotearoa Digital Identity Hui Taumata. We’re particularly excited to be bringing you a Kapa Kōrero session with Kaye-Maree Dunne, Jane-Renee Retimana, Belinda Allen and Ben Tairea. The quartet will be exploring perspectives from Te Ao Māori, and the relevance of Te Tiriti in our collective work on digital identity.
Digital Identity New Zealand is having it’s Annual Meeting Dec 10th
CBOR is done!
Mike Jones shares that CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation) is officially a specification at IETF - woohoo! and it is a key part of ISO’s mDL standard (date fields must use it).
The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR), as specified in RFC 7049, is a data format whose design goals include the possibility of extremely small code size, fairly small message size, and extensibility without the need for version negotiation.
Federal Blockchain News - Podcast talking about SSI use at CBP
Vincent Annunziato, talks about his work with The Silicon Valley Innovation Program. He is the Director of Transformation & Innovation Division of the Customs and Border Patrol Office of Trade, talks about shaping blockchain technologies to make imports safer and more secure. CBP's current projects include tracking steel, oil, and natural gas imports from Canada.
Also, This didn’t go out in the email, last week, but was added on the website afterwards. SecureKey was featured on this podcast, talking about re-creating the US Social Security Number system based on decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials. (In related news, this week SecureKey announced KeyFi: AI-Powered DeFi Aggregator)
Overall the Federal Blockchain News podcast is super. Each episode is around 30 minutes, and very much worth a listen to hear about what folk working in and with the US federal government are thinking about blockchain and decentralized identity.
Release the v1 of the verifiable credentials specifications relationship diagram
h/t @michaelruminer “Good for anyone but especially useful when trying to jump in on the deep end. If you walk even this limited tree of specs you know a lot.”
RSK Infrastructure Framework released
A repository of JSON Schemas for Verifiable Credentials
The Credential Schema is a document that is used to guarantee the structure, and by extension the semantics, of the set of claims comprising a Verifiable Credential. A shared Credential Schema allows all parties to reference data in a known way
SSI Featured in Digital Lexicons
A glossary of distributed technologies
Released by the Internet Policy Review Journal on Internet Regulations received an, “open for critique”, entry on Self-Sovereign Identity By Alexandra Giannopoulou & Fennie Wang
Thoughtworks Technology Radar
Adopting and implementing decentralized identity is gaining momentum and becoming attainable. We see its adoption in privacy-respecting customer health applications, government healthcare infrastructure and corporate legal identity.
THE GROWTH FACTORS OF SELF-SOVEREIGN IDENTITY
Adrian Doerk writes, Every new technology, which aims to change the way we live requires certain aspects to be fulfilled. This article provides an overview of five critical requirements to achieve mass-adoption of SSI. While they are ranked from “least important” to “essential” all of them need to be in place to gain a significant market share for the technology.
The post details 5 components necessary for the advance of SSI: Business, Technology, User Experience, Compliance, and Governance.
Michael Becker Interviewed Kaliya re:SSI
Kaliya was recently interviewed by Michael Becker about SSI. You can find a summary of the interview, and a link to the audio.
Kaliya’s purpose is to answer this profound question: “How do we own, control, manage, and represent ourselves in the digital world, independently of the BigTech companies (Facebook, Google, etc.)?”
How to Issue Credentials in Trinsic Studio
Trinsic has released some tools to issue verifiable credentials.
All verifiable credentials come from credential templates. These templates specify what information should be included in a credential. Faber College would most likely want the credential template of its digital diplomas to include a graduate’s first and last name, what they got their degree in, what year they graduated, and thier GPA. Let’s begin!
Launch of CredentialMaster Student Pass Announced
By issuing StudentPass self-sovereign student ID before any other VC, you do three big things for students:
You set an ID anchor for binding other VCs to that student (like skills and achievements).
You can eliminate passwords and personal questions, and Recognize Your StudentTM at every interaction.
You give students their first Verifiable Credential, show them the value of it, and how it works.
Videos
[LECTURE] Why is SSI becoming a necessity and what potential it holds?
Problem 1: CENTRAL AUTHORITY CONTROLS ALL DATA
Problem 2: NUMEROUS SIGNUPS WITH SAME DATA
Problem 3: INCONVENIENCE OF ONLINE FORMS
Self sovereign career identity - a conversation with Meg Bear
The Velocity piece is a way for me as an individual to own my credentials, to say, these are the things that I know. And these are the things I've done. And if I can own that, I have a lot more interest in it. And I can use it in a lot more interesting ways. In the past, that might have just been something that I built as reputation within a company, I can now make that a more dynamic and portable reputation I can take with me anywhere.
Having a look at the Velocity Whitepaper it does mention they are keeping an eye on the work developing in W3C and DIF.
The Velocity Network is a blockchain-based open source verifiable credential exchange utility layer with its basic elements and token mechanics that provides standardized communication protocols, governance, compliance and payment rails, that enable trusted, private and secured exchange of career credentials between individuals and organizations.
Decentralized-id.com Updates
Infominer has begun publishing weekly twitter collections that support this newsletter, on decentralized-id.com. In addition to those weekly lists a Self Sovereign Identity 101 collection has been published there.
There is now a page for BCGov, Zug ID, Hyperledger Foundation, European Self Sovereign Identity Framework, GS1, and……
First guest post submitted
Since the beginning of decentralized-id.com, I (Infominer) have been inviting others to participate in its creation, by submitting content, or editing what’s currently published. After 2 years, finally, the site has received its first guest submission.
Contacted about mentioning Dragonchain’s Factor Identity on decentralized-id.com, I suggested they put some links in a shared doc, and whatever information they felt would be useful. After reading the article that resulted, I was able to ask for some clarity, including their relationship with open standards, which helped to shape it’s final form.
While it’s not entirely along the lines of the standards-based tech primarily featured, it has created something of a bridge for them to become more familiar with our work and makes it easier for the reader to understand what Dragonchain is offering in comparison to what’s happening in SSI.
Finally! A page for KERI just went live!
Of all this week’s updates to decentralized-id.com, I’m most excited about the page highlighting resources related to Sam Smith’s Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI)
A self-certifying identifier (SCID) is a identifier that can be proven to be the one and only identifier tied to a public key using cryptography alone*
* No blockchain needed (KERI for Muggles)
Interesting News (But not necessarily SSI)
DISTIL is being launched by One World Identity claiming to bring together “classes of startups”
In the Digital Identity Standards Technology and Innovation Lab. We can only hope that they have a strong standards-based SSI Focus and help push interoperability forward.
You are not your Data but Your Data is still You.
In the digital age, individual privacy in the broadest sense is about control over protecting one’s personally identifiable information (PII), such as information about health, credit, shopping, or communication. But the types of information deemed ‘personally identifiable’ and the amount of control one has over them varies around the world.
Digital Caribou looks at the future trends impacting Digital Identity
I (Kaliya) was invited to this virtual substitute for hallway conversations.
The state of the art in digital identification are trust frameworks that accommodate diverse technologies, systems and stakeholders
Risks remain even within the most rigorous trust framework:
Achieving inclusion requires addressing both technical and political dimensions
Trust frameworks are complicated so getting governance right requires an ecosystems approach
Building the future of digital identification means reckoning with an analogue past
Marissa Mayer is back and she wants to fix your address book
At launch, Mayer’s start-up is rolling out Sunshine Contacts, an address book app that relies on artificial intelligence to find and merge duplicate contacts, fill out incomplete information and continually keep that data up to date. The app integrates with the iOS Contacts app as well as Gmail and will be free to all iOS users with an invitation.
Simon Wilson writes about using IndieAuth with Datasette
IndieAuth is a spiritual successor to OpenID, developed and maintained by the IndieWeb community and based on OAuth 2. This weekend I attended IndieWebCamp East Coast and was inspired to try my hand at an implementation. datasette-indieauth is the result, a new plugin which enables IndieAuth logins to a Datasette instance.
OpenID Foundation is Hiring a new Executive Director
The OpenID Foundation is seeking an Executive Director with the experience, skills, strategic vision, and commitment to advancing the Foundation’s open standards initiatives. This is a unique opportunity to lead a well-respected, member-driven, vendor-neutral, international standardization organization.
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