DIF Newsletter #38

March 2024

DIF Website | DIF Mailing Lists | Meeting Recording Archive

Decentralized Identity Foundation News; 2. Working Group Updates; 3. Open Groups; 4. Announcements at DIF; 5. Community Events; 6. DIF Members; 7. Get involved! Join DIF

🚀 Decentralized Identity Foundation News

Spring conference season

The community is gearing up to put decentralized identity centre stage during the upcoming identity conference season.

Steering Committee and core team members, working / open group co-chairs and member orgs are representing DIF and participating in a range of activities to raise awareness of decentralized identity and DIF contributions, drive engagement in DIF and our key initiatives for 2024, demonstrate the viability of DI-based solutions and help people get started with DI.

Check out the Announcements section below to hear about DIF's confirmed and planned activities at IIW 38, the ID4Africa AGM, EIC and other events.

Veramo User Group

The Veramo User Group has been powering ahead since the group's first meeting on 15 February, with new SD-JWT functionality nearing release. All are welcome to participate in our thriving community of users and contributors - see Open Groups, below, for details.

China SIG

We're excited to formally welcome China SIG to the Decentralized Identity Foundation, marking a key step toward global adoption of decentralized identity to enable secure foundations for next-generation architectures. See Open Groups, below, for details of how to join the China SIG meeting on 17 April.

DIF Coffee Breaks

Our Senior Director of Community Engagement, Limari Navarrete, has kicked off a weekly Coffee Break on Twitter Spaces, with some fantastic guests lined up for April:

April 4th: MG co-founder of GoPlausible
April 11th: Otto Mora from Polygon ID
April 18th: Evin McMullen co-founder & CEO of Disco.xyz
April 25th: Key Pillars of Quark ID: Mexico City and Buenos Aires

Past Spaces so far:

Nick Dazé CEO of Heirloom: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1ynJOyjEqLXKR?s=20
Damian Glover, Senior Director of Communications @DIF https://x.com/DecentralizedID/status/1770882034162172386?s=20
Kim Hamilton Duffy, Executive Director @DIF https://x.com/DecentralizedID/status/1768336239168782566?s=20

🛠️ Working Group Updates

💡Identifiers and Discovery Work Group

Andor Kesselman presented his work on Service Profiles for DID Documents: https://service-profiles.andor.us/

Daniel Buchner presented the did:dht method: https://did-dht.com/

The Linked Verifiable Presentations work item will soon progress to "Working Group Approved", reviews are welcome: https://github.com/decentralized-identity/linked-vp

Identifiers and Discovery meets bi-weekly at 11am PT/ 2pmET/ 8pm CET Mondays

🔐 Applied Crypto WG

Open source code implemented for BBS pseudonyms and BBS pseudonyms with hidden PID (based on Blind BBS).

The DIF Crypto - BBS work item meets weekly at 11am PT/2pm ET /8pm CET Mondays

📦 Secure Data Storage

Decentralized Web Node (DWN) Task Force
Nearing 1.0 of the DWN spec and implementation, with a reference app to be debuted at IIW.

DIF/CCG Secure Data Storage WG - DWN Task Force meets bi-weekly at 9am PT/12pm ET/6pm CET Wednesdays

Claims & Credentials Working Group

Credential Trust Establishment (CTE) is gaining traction as we approach IIW, with a plan to advance it to formal V1 status. Check out the latest post on the DIF blog.

If you are interested in participating in any of the Working Groups highlighted above, or any of DIF's other Working Groups, please click here.

📖 Open Groups at DIF

Veramo User Group

The Veramo User Group has been meeting weekly since the middle of February. In addition to discussing Veramo use cases amongst our members and educating each other, we've been working to collaboratively improve Veramo and have new SD-JWT functionality nearing release as well as improvements to EIP-712 credentials underway. If you want to discuss use cases or have any bandwidth to help with improvements, please join us on Thursdays!

Meetings take place weekly on Thursdays, alternating between Noon EST / 18.00 CET and 09.00 EST / 15.00 CET. Click here for more details

📡 DIDComm User Group

The DIDComm User Group has been exploring and prioritising themes / opportunities including Authentication, Enhanced Chat / Group Chat, "Please call me" / Phone call related protocols, Implications of UX (App -> App?), WebRTC coordination, Using DIDComm to protect cloud-storage, DIDComm for IOT, Push Notifications and Webhook, DIDComm as a VC and B2C Protocols.

The DIDComm user group meets weekly at 12pm PT/3pm ET/ 9pm CET Mondays

📻 China SIG

The China SIG has officially launched after DIF’s Steering Committee voted to accept the China SIG Charter following a well-attended SIG kick-off meeting last month. The next meeting will take place on 17 April. All are welcome, here are the details:

Topic：DIF China SIG Monthly Meeting
Time：2024/04/17 20:00-21:00 (GMT+08:00) Beijing Time
Meeting Link: https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/ScmnTNk3pTL6
Meeting number：437-967-238
Meeting Password：2404

You can download the recording from the kick-off meeting in February here

🏦 Korea SIG

The SIG met online last month, following a face to face meeting in Seoul in January to plan activities for the year ahead.

Everyone can join us via the SIG website.

🌏 APAC/ASEAN Discussion Group

We invite everyone in the APAC region to join our monthly calls and contribute to the discussion. You will be able to find the minutes of the latest meeting here.

The DIF APAC call takes place Monthly on the 4th Thursday of the month. Please see the DIF calendar for updated timing.

🌍 DIF Africa Discussion Group

We are in need of someone to chair this process. Let us know if you’re interested in building, organizing and hosting monthly meetings.

Occurs on the first Thursday of the month at 9am UTC

☂️ DIF Interoperability Group

If you are interested in speaking in the User Adpotion and Interop series, or simply want to bounce around some interop thoughts and ideas, please reach out to group co-chairs Bonnie Yau, Brent Shambaugh or Elena Dumitrascu on Slack.

The Interoperability Group meets bi-weekly at 8am PT/11am ET/5pm CET Wednesdays

📢 Announcements at DIF

Public events calendar

DIF now has a public events calendar. 🎉

Here you will find not only DIF events but also conferences we'll be attending and participating in over the coming year. We look forward to connecting with you at these various public events! See below for how to subscribe.

Subscribe to the Calendar: Public URL; ICal Format.

Or find our calendar on the DIF Website.

Universal Resolver

DIF hosts and maintains the Universal Resolver, which is valuable public infrastructure for resolving DIDs across different methods. Experiment with it here.

🗓️ ️Community Events

ID Management Day

DIF's Executive Director, Kim Hamilton Duffy will lead a session on "Decentralized Identity for the People, and for the Non-People (NPEs that is): Updates, Trends, and Killer Use Cases" at ID Management Day on April 9. Check out the agenda for this virtual conference (hosted by IDSA) and register for free here.

Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) #38

DIF is busy gearing up for the Internet Identity Workshop's upcoming gathering at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View from 16 to 18 April. DIF's Executive Director Kim Hamilton Duffy and DIF's Senior Director of Communications Limari Navarette are looking forward to meeting with you at the event.

Planned DIF-themed sessions include The future of DIF; DIF Projects: From idea to demo (including the DIF Hackathon); and a discussion about DIF's proposed new Implementations and Applications Working Group.

Other sessions include Extending DID Documents for better service discovery with Service Profiles; Presentation Exchange v2.1 and where does it go from here?; and Credential Trust Establishment.

Look out for some exciting demos, including a decentralized social networking app built using DWNs and Open ID Connect and DIDComm working alongside each other.

This is shaping up to be an IIW not to be missed! Grab your ticket with DIF's 20% off discount here.

ID4Africa 2024 Annual General Meeting

DIF will be in Cape Town from 21 - 24 May for ID4Africa to share our insights about how VCs can be integrated with national identity programs and systems, and to connect with policy makers and implementers.

Steering Committee member Catherine Nabbala and Senior Director of Communications, Damian Glover will join Anand Acharya, Senior Project Manager of the Bhuthan NDI scheme to deliver a plenary presentation, From Policy To Reality: A Non-Technical Journey To Integrate Verifiable Credentials at 09:30 local time on 23 May.

Cathie and Damian will be available to meet throughout the event - our base is Stand A07 in the conference hall - we look forward to meeting you there!

European Identity & Cloud Conference 2024

DIF is set to play a prominent role at the European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC) in Berlin from 4 - 7 June, with DIF staff, Steering Committee members and other member orgs participating in a series of keynotes, presentations and panel discussions.

Our involvement kicks into gear with Road to EIC: Leveraging Reusable Identities in Your Organization, a webinar hosted by the event's organisers, analyst firm KuppingerCole, on 3 April.

DIF members are eligible for a 25% reduction on their ticket to attend EIC (on top of any other discounts). Simply enter code eic24dif25members during the last step of booking: click here to buy your ticket.

Also look out for more details of our partnership with Kuppingercole on the DIF blog next week!

IEEE Intelligent Systems ’24

DIF member Ivan Lambov is chairing a session on "Beyond the hype: exploring the real-world impact of Blockchain" at the IEEE 12th International Conference on Intelligent Systems, which takes place in Varna, Bulgaria from 29 - 31 August.

Ivan would like to extend an invitation to the conference to the entire DIF community. "It will be nice to get together and meet in person with members of the DIF community from the EAME region or elsewhere this summer. This conference presents a great opportunity to get global recognition for the work the DIF is doing and the projects it is involved in. And last, but not least, the conference takes place in a beach resort at the end of August:)," Ivan added.

Check out the agenda and register here.

🗓️ ️DIF Members

Guest blog - Mailchain

tim (1).png

Mailchain, founded in 2021, aims to revolutionize decentralized identity and communication with its services, including Vidos and the Mailchain Communication Protocol, simplifying the integration and adoption of decentralized identity technologies.We spoke to co-founder Tim Boeckmann who shared the company's journey to date.

Guest blog - David Birch

DIF caught up with David Birch, author of Identity Is The New Money, who shared his views on the development of the digital identity space, and some key challenges and opportunities for decentralized identity.

Gataca

Gataca is introducing the Higher Education Program, an initiative aimed at European universities to boost the adoption of ID wallets and verifiable credentials in education.

This program gives 20 universities free access to our decentralized identity platform for one year. They can issue and verify credentials with the universities and third parties in the program, eventually extending to all eIDAS 2.0 compliant organizations.

See the program's landing page for more details.

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.