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Credentials CG Telecon

Minutes for 2021-11-02

<christophera> Good morning everyone!
<mprorock> hey Chris!
<christophera> 4 years!
Heather Vescent: Minutes: https://w3c-ccg.github.io/meetings/
Ryan Grant is scribing.
Ryan Grant is scribing.

Topic: Introductions

Dazza: Dazza Greenwood. Here for Wyoming personal digital identity act.
Heather Vescent: Reintroductions
<christophera> I can hear you <sigh>
<christophera> ok
<heather_vescent> Yay Jitsi issues~
<heather_vescent> Chris, I will have you reintro after Manu gives the infrastructure update.

Topic: Announcments: DID Spec and infrastructure.

Christopher Allen: :+1:
... minutes publication infrastructure has been broken due to a gmail probem with an old email address. minutes publication now auto-emailed.
... all infrastructure is now operations.
S/operations/operational/
... Jitsi mostly working, but bugs with Safari WebRTC and some with other browsers unmuting.
... end of December break will see us updating Jitsi software. there may be new bugs. there may be less bugs.
... question to community: what infrastructure do you want to see?
... we'll prioritize stuff that helps running meetings. then broad support.
Christopher Allen: Sidenote: it doesn't appy to this community, but we've been working on security upgrades to Jitsi to support JWT authentication for private meetings.
... autoscribe feature, driven by speech recognition, is on the list.
... what do you want?
... other update is DID-core. formal objections have received much traffic.
... good news: things have calmed down a bit.
<manu_sporny> Summary FAQ of DID Core Formal Objections: https://msporny.github.io/did-core-formal-objections/
... FAQ is Manu's writing and personal view
... good/bad news is that points have been made and communicated
... formal objection council will be created to deal with the formal objection. this is a very rare case.
... advisory committee mailing list access has some (paywalled) stats that Manu computed
Heather Vescent: There is an issues list
<heather_vescent> CCG issue for jitsi feedback: https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/217
Kerri Lemoie: Want to be able to search for our minutes in the scribe tool
Heather Vescent: We have that request recorded somewhere
... will merge issues from main CCG list into infrastructure issues.
Manu Sporny: Please elaborate feature request
Kerri Lemoie: There is calendar search, but it only does CCG and not other task forces

Topic: Reintroductions

Heather Vescent: Hopefully Christopher Allen is back
Christopher: architect and principal director of Blockchain Commons. invited to VC task force 6 years ago.
... joined by Joe Andrieu and Kim Hamilton shortly thereafter, trying to do weekly meetings.
... didn't run for co-chair renewal a year ago, to focus on code. BC has been working on did:onion and other "trustless" methods. also a lot of work on the wallet side and key management.
... how to bring som of the best technology from the trustless side to the DID community, in new ways that are trust preserving.

Topic: Work Item Discussion

... review of Work Item Extravaganza has resulted in review of work items. did:tz method requires co-lead correction.
Juan Caballero: Can help on that
Ryan Grant: [Scribe aside] feature request (please help catalog) need name completion when scribing from IRC
<heather_vescent> Co-operative Credentials: https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/215
<heather_vescent> Thank you Angus for attending.
Nick: shoutout to Angus from Australia
... we're a cooperative
... working on VCs for cooperatives
... idea is common cooperative membership. there are 1.2 billion members, globally, of cooperatives. we should share our technical efforts, rather than use the large tech company proprietary products.
... come from a [name lost by slow cribe] cooperative in the music industry.
... we're trying to grow a respectful privacy-preserving identity
Angus: [name lost] is a cooperative
<christophera> I like that there are multiple platform cooperatives with different models involved in this work item!
<juan_caballero_(spruce)> FairBNB and Resonate
<juan_caballero_(spruce)> the latter is the music cooperative. Both are ESSIF-LAB grantees!
... looking at VCs and have developed an open source plugin for Discourse that uses presentation of a VC to get access to a forum.
... will be adding to that with FairBnB (?)
Ryan Grant: Scribe requests links for all proper nouns introduced.
<angus_mcleod> coopcreds.com
<heather_vescent> Love this work item!
Nick: use case is similar to VC-EDU work
Manu Sporny: +1 To that, super excited about this work item.
... bring your cooperative membership from one cooperative to another without requiring too much PII
.. Better than PII capitalists can offer
... coop sector can help in ecosystem governance, democratic principles, and the ethics of cooperations
... trying to break the mould of dependency on major identity providers
... keen to take the guidance of this community to achieve best practices
... Internantional Cooperative Alliance (ICA) carries the brand
Manu Sporny: Thrilled about this work item
... VC spec started as a way to help artists publish music online
... +1 to the music side of this
... great to see coops working together - a very laudible goal
... you're among friends
Nick: we're honored
Heather Vescent: +1 To this work!
Agropper: my project is modelling patient cooperatives and has the same goals in terms of privacy preservation.
... do you see coops acting as notaries, as part of a federation?
Nick: yes
Agropper: or is the method verifying signatures by others?
AAngus: we're starting with a centralzied issuer.
Dan Burnett: +1 To this work. At RWOT 8 in Barcelona in Mar 2019, one of the work items concluded that the best way to bootstrap the VC ecosystem was through cooperatives, where the members of coops have an incentive to adopt recommendations by the co-ops. Can't find the paper on this, but I'm pleased to hear what you're doing.
Agropper: edu-coop working on data model a lot. a notary need not read the contract or credential
<mprorock> Time check on main agenda - maybe take work item discussion to Github
... can serve identity blinding function
Angus: we're new to the concept and interested in learning more about this. please join us and help us parse this.
Agropper: would be delighted!
<agropper> agropper@healthurl.com for invite to coop work
Nick: also looking at sustainable music tourism so that we can try this and show it in use
... we expect many different scenarios
<angus_mcleod> Thanks, will send you an invite later this week
... an ecosystem of issuers and verifiers.
... we don't want to reinvent the wheel here
Christopher:
... trying to make sure that DAO are not solley token based
... there's a lot of interest in proof-of-personhood on risks that we've begun to discover - adversaries and how to work around them. you're invited.
<tallted> s/solley/solely/
Nick: cooperative voting (one member one vote) is one of our key needs
Heather Vescent: Process is to begin 7 day waiting period for comments
<juancaballero> @ChrisA sorry, I didn't follow the reference to a WG or event. do you have a link for the PoP stuff?
<christophera> I'll start
<angus_mcleod> Definitely interested in that group Christopher, if you could invite angus@thepavilion.io and nick@resonate.is
<angus_mcleod> Thank!
... main event is Christopher Allen, Daza Greenwood and [name lost]

Topic: Wyoming's approach to digital identity

<manu> s/[name lost]/Clare Sullivan/
Christopher: we've been tustling around our technology and property law, and intellectual property law. as a tech community we've avoided terms that would confuse the domain. we have not had a good answer on the law side
... Wyoming task force subcommittee has been trying to figure out how to advance this topic. people come in and make suggestions that are a couple steps back on progress, but Agency Law and Principle Authority help set the frame
... as a person you have the right of authority over certain things
... heath care, asset advice: you can delegate these and undelegate them
... difference identified are advantageous for us
... we can shift from "theft of" to "abuse of delegated authority" helps keep us out of propert law approaches
... see linked article
<christophera> “Personal digital identity” means the intangible digital representation of, by and for a natural person, over which he has principal authority and through which he intentionally communicates or acts.
... proposed last year and signed into law, but lacking teeth
... coming year's work is to find these abuses of authority. this won't prevent misuse of property law, but it is a new tool.
Clare: this came out of Chris's work on SSI
... there's a lof of compromise in legislation
... i'm a lawyer with a specialty in digial identity
... elsewhere in the world it's based on rights, but rights under US law are a very different things. bringing in Principle Authority helps, but we're using it just in the definition.
... i'm with Georgetown University in DC, and [scribe lsot - request assist]
Dazza: Dazza Greenwood. i run [names lost as usual]
<manu_sporny> Wow, practicing legal professionals on a CCG call providing input wrt. the technology we're building here -- hooray, and more of this please!
<manu> s/[names lost as usual]/Civics/
... headline for this statute, Principle Authority, is to bind a name for further development
... it's tech neutral, so there acan be other methods for people to express this dimension of their identity.
... there's now something that you can cite to in Wyoming law.
Bob: fascinating subject!
... i have 30 year old patents on this issue. an old issue: when you delegate, what is delegated? is it the identity or rights associated?
Clare: rights associated
Bob: it's a very important point for people to understand
<manu_sporny> This is a super important point -- and is one of the reasons why ZCAPs (authorization capabilities) are designed the way they are...
Clare: the other element is that we wanted something that could flow through to public sector. it's a key principle around the world that identity cannot be delegated, so it's important to clarify
Dazza: this is an identity that a natural person acts through
... the source of things happening through a digital identity is the natural person
<christophera> We have positioned this work under Agency Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency
<christophera> and laws of custom
<christophera> (adjacent)
Mike Prorock: +1 Chris
<manu_sporny> The "reasons" were we had a huge ranked choice vote on it and the term "holder" was what we could agree to at the time. :P
Agropper: your innovation was to switch from property law to agency law. a question (buried in old CCG/SSI work) regards the label the subject of the identity as the holder instead of controller. relabel?
<tallted> well... It's often possible to effectively share one's identity ("here, Horace, use my passcard to get the thing from my office"), which is typically done where it's not possible to provide specific delegation (e.g., adjust systems to permit *their* passcard to open your door). Sharing one's passcard is obviously problematic (e.g., as it makes it appear that *you*, not Horace, went through that door), but very common.
Christopher: never intended the SSI principles to be more than a starting point for a conversation. changes possible given sufficient consensus. a recent paper incorporated the principles in a list with more. it may be time for a new generation of principles. we jsut didn't want to say, five years ago, "owner".
... that would confuse judges
<bobwyman> If anyone wants to talk about did:tag, I would be pleased to do so during this afternoon's CCG Information DIscussion meeting.
Angus: also a laywer and id thesis on philosophy of law. we're talking here about a relationship of rights.
<kerri_lemoie> I'd be interested in a workshop(s) on the SSI principles and moving them to next generation.
... there's a similar concept that ownership is a bundle of rights.
<christophera> agreed.
... where is this coming from ? there's a terminological issue here, but there's also the legal implications. a judge looking at this may find it similar to the bundle of rights theory
<kerri_lemoie> In education we struggle with "ownership" of ed data. Many have agreed that ownership belongs to the issuer but access/persistence belongs to individual.
Clare: difference is between US and Australian law
... statue law impinges upon this and had to be navigated around
<bobwyman> But, are they "natural rights" or rights delegated by states?
<kerri_lemoie> Can we cover this topic more regularly?
Dazza: thing to keep an eye on is [lost details and] that this doesn't foreclose property viewpoints
<tallted> "... unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ..." and digital identity
Christopher: request for CCG is to look at privacy violations as a coercion of authority
Heather Vescent: Thanks
<christophera> open for a short term item!
... open to supporting a CCG session on this
... concluding and thanks everyone
<kerri_lemoie> Thanks!!