DIF Newsletter #41

June 2024

DIF Website | DIF Mailing Lists | Meeting Recording Archive

Decentralized Identity Foundation News; 2. Conference Season wrap-up; 3. Announcements at DIF; 4. Community Events; 5. DIF Members; 6. Get involved! Join DIF

🚀 Decentralized Identity Foundation News

Credential Schemas launches

The Credential Schemas work item is up and running following a successful kick-off meeting earlier this month.

“There was strong attendance and great energy. We had participants with deep experience in schema development and KYC (Know Your Customer) compliance, as well as newcomers to decentralized identity. We are currently focused on establishing the scope and use cases,” said DIF’s Executive Director, Kim Hamilton Duffy.

“It’s not too late to participate. We’re looking to involve a broad range of expertise, including people familiar with KYC reusable ID use cases, such as compliance experts.” she added.

The work item meets every other Tuesday at 10:00 PST / 13:00 EST / 19:00 CET, with the next meeting scheduled for Tuesday 2 July.

Join DIF to get involved.

Linked Verifiable Presentations
Photo by FlyD on Unsplash

The Linked Verifiable Presentations specification has been approved.

The spec defines how to share, discover and retrieve Verifiable Credentials publicly via a service entry in a DID Document. It complements existing technologies for sharing VCs privately, like DIDComm messaging and OID4VC. Use cases enabled by Linked VPs include

Discover verifiable data about a website
Simplify the onboarding of suppliers and customers by linking relevant non-sensitive data such as to business registration credentials to the organization’s DID
Make mandatory data verifiable: provide imprint pages or terms of use statements as machine-readable, verifiable credentials
Decentralized business network: people share their educational background and work experience as verifiable credentials publicly

The specification is available here: https://identity.foundation/linked-vp/

Working Group training

DIF provided our first WG training session. Check out the session recording and slides (recommended viewing for all DIF members).

Operational Excellence @ DIF

Work to automate DIF’s operational processes continues to make excellent progress thanks to our star Systems Administrator Pratap Mridha (pictured above).

🛠️ Conference Season wrap-up

European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC) 2024

This year's EIC felt to many like a defining moment in decentralized identity's journey from idea to reality.

The event took place as Germany was gearing up to host the Euro 2024 football competition.

Decentralized identity luminaries were in abundance. Rolf Rauschenbach, Anil John, Daniel Goldschneider of OpenWallet Foundation, Kim, Ramesh Narayanan of MOSIP, and Damian discuss standards collaboration outside of the Berlin Congress Center.

Long-time decentraliezd identity leaders and visionaries Kaliya Young and Phil Windley catch up in between sessions.

Executive Director Kim Hamilton Duffy and DIDComm WG co-chair Steve McCown of Anonyome Labs delivered a Decentralized Identity Technical Mastery Sprint to a packed seminar theatre on the opening day of the conference (see this summary of their session on the DIF blog)

DIF Steering Committee Members Markus Sabadello of Danube Tech duelled with OpenID Foundation chairman Nat Sakimura over how to realize SSI principles in their joint keynote presentation, Les Miserables of the Cyber Frontier (session summary here)

Kim teamed up with Wayne Chang of SpruceID and Linda Jeng of Digital Self Labs to explore the key role of decentralized identity in building trust in AI (session summary here)

Misha Deville, co-founder of Mailchain, spoke about lessons learned from Web3, including the importance of network design in achieving the target outcomes of decentralized identity ecosystems

Kaliya Young gave a presentation about institutional memory, and the implications for organizations, individuals and society

Nick Lambert of Dock Labs and Nick Price, who co-chairs the DIF Travel & Hospitality SIG, joined other industry experts to explore how decentralized identity can help upgrade Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) - summary on the DIF blog here.

Riley Hughes of Trinsic, Sam Curren of Indicio and Kim were joined by Abbie Barbir to discuss reusable identity and bootstrapping decentralized identity ecosystems.

Fraser Edwards of cheqd and Sharon Leu of JFF Labs spoke about incentives for wallet developers during a panel discussion addressing usability challenges of digital identity wallets

The German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND) selected several companies including Sphereon to develop prototypes for the European Digital Identity Wallet

Identity Week Europe

DIF members including Polygon ID / Privado, Mailchain, Indicio, Hypermine, PassiveBolt and Tonomy Foundation converged on Amsterdam for another European identity industry gathering.

AI, and the rapidly changing cyber-threat landscape were major themes.

Decentralized identity also generated great interest at the event, which is traditionally dominated by IAM, physical and cross-border ID: see this summary of several decentralized ID themed discussions on the DIF blog.

Digital Identity unConference Europe

Europe's own IIW-inspired event returned to Zurich, Switzerland, where many of those present at last year's inaugural event were joined by a throng of new participants.

The eIDAS 2 regulation and EU Digital Identity Wallet were key topics.

Practical questions such as how to kick-start a DI ecosystem, onboard customers using government-provided PID (Personal Identification Data) credentials and make life simpler for technology implementers and users were at the heart of the discussions.

Organizational identity and B2B use cases were also recurring themes in many of the sessions.

📢 Announcements at DIF

DWN users - share your use case!!

Do you use Decentralized Web Nodes? We want to hear about it! Let us know how you're using DWNs here.

DIF Labs

The DIF Labs working group is coming soon; contact membership@identity.foundation to learn more

🗓️ ️Community Events

Coffee Breaks

If you missed this month's DIF Coffee Breaks, moderated by DIF's Senior Director of Community Engagement, Limari Navarrete, be sure to check out the recordings:

Andres Olave, Head of Technology at Velocity Career Labs
Cole Davis, Founder and CEO at Switchchord

Last month's coffee breaks

Tim Boeckmann, CEO and Co-founder of Mailchain
Nara Lau, Founder at Fise Technologies
Ankur Banerjee, CTO and Co-founder at Cheqd
Humpty Calderon, Advisor @Ontology and creator of Crypto Sapiens Podcast

Follow https://twitter.com/DecentralizedID to get updates

🗓️ ️DIF Members

New Member Orientations

If you are new to DIF join us for our upcoming new member orientations. Please subscribe to DIF’s eventbrite for upcoming notifications on orientations and events which can be found here.

🆔 Join DIF!

If you would like to get in touch with us or become a member of the DIF community, please visit our website.

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