Who makes the decisions at DIF? It could be you! — Part 2

Next week we start DIF’s Steering Committee Nominations, but if you want an influential role at DIF, you don’t need to be elected–you can step up to chair one of the Working Groups at any time. In this second in the series of how DIF operates, we go into what it means to be a WG chair and why you might want to step into this role. 

TLDR:

• Time commitment = 3-10 hours/ month. 
• Available seats: typically 2 per WG, but larger WGs can have 3 or even more chairs. Currently, we are actively looking for co-chairs for the Trusted Agentic AI Working Group, Identifiers & Discovery, and DID Methods Working Groups. Across all the WGs, most chairs have been in their position for two or more years, and they may be quite pleased to pass on institutional memory and rotate out or to share the position with one more person.
• Why? = Fun! Great training in how to work collaboratively on open source and open standards, mentorship and insight into slower-moving standards processes and infrastructure economics, ability to move work items forward, participation in Technical Steering Committee (technical strategy for DIF), and an eye-catching CV/LinkedIn profile
• Reviving a paused WG (Claims and Credentials, DID Authentication) or creating a new WG is easy, with the right mentor/baton-passer
• Money = This is a volunteer position, no money is involved, although we are happy to discuss with your supervisor or sponsor on the nature and scale of the work, if it helps you secure support for a long-term commitment
• Who? Any Associate or Contributing member (no Feedback / individual members can be a chair).

What do Working Group Chairs do?

Working Group chairs are at the heart of everything DIF does. Chairs take responsibility for WG meetings, moving work items forward, and coordinating the Github repositories. This means you’ll be tracking deadlines and todos across the WG members, teaming up on work items, and contributing to one another’s work. 

Chairs set the WG agenda, take notes (or recruit participants to take notes), and approve pull requests on the work items. As a co-chair you’ll learn to work well with your other co-chair, divide and delegate work, and work through differences of opinion among the working group participants.  Being a chair allows you to submit your WG items to the Steering Committee (SCO) for official DIF ratification, and steer versioning/release strategy for community projects. 

As a chair, you’ll be part of DIF’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC), which meets once a month to discuss and make recommendations to the Steering Committee. For example, the TSC created and recommended DIF’s recent policy on AI contributions. The recommendation was presented to the Steering Committee (SC) for final ratification.

The TSC is a resource to help you make sure the work coming out of your WG maintains DIF quality standards or standard operating procedure. For example, the KYA-OS recently consulted the TSC about the frequency of updates of their protocol.

How much time do I need to commit?

Depending on the frequency of WG meetings and how you and your co-chair divide the work, WG chairs contribute 2-10 hours weekly. For example, the TAAWG meets only half an hour each week, and each task force meets an hour per week. However, the task forces are quite prolific, so that means a lot of reading in between meetings. The DID Methods WG has traditionally divided the work such that each chair takes a look at the Recommended Methods they’re interested in, so you might not even need to come to every meeting. When no methods are under review, meetings are skipped. In that case, you might have some weeks where you put in 4 or 5 hours, and others where you don’t have any work at all.

How do I become a chair?

Any DIF Associate or Contributing member can become a co-chair.

Really, all you have to do is ask. If you’re interested in a particular working group, reach out to the WG chairs to find out if they’d be open to your joining as a co-chair, or reach out to Bumblefudge or Grace if you’d like them to make the initial approach. Generally, you don’t need any permission other than that of the current WG chair(s). 

What if I want to revive a WG that is currently paused

It’s easy. In fact, this Friday you’ll see on the DIF calendar a special topic call to discuss further work on the DWN (Decentralized Web Node). One of our long-time members mentioned that he was interested in bringing the DWN back to life. The DIF staff put out the word, and 10 people answered that they want to explore the revival of the Secure Data Storage working group, of which the DWN was one work item. If two people are up for co-chairing the group, we’ll simply put it back on the calendar, website, and Slack channels, and give Github repository access to those new chairs. 

What if I want a new WG?

It’s fairly easy to make a new Working Group, as long as the work falls into the category of “Decentralized Identity” or adjacent topics. You’ll need to find your co-chair, fill in a form, and submit it to the Steering Committee for final approval with at least one clearly-scoped initial work item. (That initial work item can be as humble as a problem-space analysis, literature review, or scoped taxonomy, as long as it’s a first step towards scoping additional work items that are roughly DIF-shaped and novel).

Before you do that, speak to us about whether your work is large enough to require a new WG, or whether it would be best as a work item under an existing group. Sometimes we’ll know of a past WG you could revive. For example, some members have been discussing wallet interoperability lately. The DIF interop working group has been revived more than once, so if this group comes together, we’ll see a re-re-activation rather than a new group.

Reasons you might want to be a WG chair

As usual, fun and meeting new people is the main motivation for WG chairs. 

DIF provides training for chairs. For those of you who are interested in making some form of standards and/or developer-community work a core skill of your long-term career, DIF is a great place to start and learn from veterans and long-term maintainers. You’ll always have support of the DIF staff in learning the role, managing Github, and dealing with any issues that come up along the way.  

That’s it?

Yup. You can volunteer to be a WG chair at any time. If this sounds like a good opportunity to you, please reach out to one of the staff or to the current working group chairs directly.