Working Group

Identity Working Group

Working Group Health

The working group is doing well. Identity continues to be a hot topic in Hyperledger and in the broader world in general. We have had good participation, including a few new members per call. To improve community health, in addition to the chair, we have a volunteer (Sze Wong) to welcome and guide new members to contribute. Steady progress is being made on the paper. There is almost always a presentation on an identity related topic on every call. We continue to welcome community member groups who are interested in incubating new Identity related projects in Hyperledger. Planned work: paper, presentations on Identity topics, help in incubating Identity projects.

Issues

We are debating the existence of two separate identity papers in Hyperledger Working Groups(Architecture & Identity). For now we have decided to adhere to the current separation and possibly combine them into a single paper later. Usual difficulties due to promised contributions not being made or delayed and incomplete contributions. To speed up work on paper we will add an occasional working session focused on the paper probably on alternate Fridays (staggered against the WG calls).

Overall Activity in the Past Quarter

Mailing lists are active and so is the chat channel. We had missed only one call during the Hyperledger Global Summit, we kept going through the holidays albeit with reduced attendance. Meetings are well attended with a core group of around 12-15 people with a few new folks showing up every call. There is slow but steady progress on the paper including a couple of reorgs that have happened in the last quarter. Mainly in terms of flow and content. The next big push is to get the paper into a draft form by the March bootcamp. There is a proposal to improve the flow of the paper.

The other main activities of the group focus on discussions around Identity and DLTs in conferences, cross pollination of identity projects in Hyperledger, regulation on Identity in multiple geographies and reconciling the structure of Identity solutions in Hyperledger DLTs to cross jurisdictional settings, building bridges to groups like the EEA, DiF, the W3 etc.

The other important aspect of our work is being the portal for new identity focused projects to join Hyperledger. Our great success story here is Indy. We are looking into helping a new project for off chain secure identity exchanges properly supported by on-chain proofs to incubate inside Hyperledger.

A selected list of achievements from last quarter:

• Significant rework and progress of the paper

Selected Presentations:

• European expert commission on eIDAS

• Setup of Sovrin testnet

• DPKI - Infocert

• Presentation on Iroha Identity

• Solid-W3 C project

Bridge building

• EEA

• W3 Credentials working group

Planned Work Products

We have started engaging with the technical editor to prepare for a final draft, working through his comments on readability and flow. Some rework is planned through improved organization of the paper, as thinking and practice on Identity in DLTs is changing rapidly.

Help incubate a new project which creates components to do off-chain exchanges backed by proof on chain of Identity credentials.

Presentations on a variety of Identity and Blockchain related projects, meetups, conferences.

Participant Diversity

We do have geographic and industry diversity; but gender diversity continues to be a challenge as it is for many working groups and projects. We hope to address all of these with outreach during the calls and events like the hackfests, bootcamps and meetups. We have a volunteer (Sze Wong) who will take on the job of welcoming and getting new participants up the contribution ramp. We are looking for ideas on improving this.

Additional Information