Re: PR for playground

Hi Adrian,

In my experience the general goal is to address governance, and I think the
list is far more than 4. For me the negative example is e-commerce
exchanges. There were something like 10,000 of thee created or proposed by
2000, the most visible being Covisint, and every industry, every large
corporate, had their own proposals. Within a few years 10,000 out of 10,000
had crashed. What we have instead now are a few large commercial
organisations (eg Amazon, Alibaba).

Governance is needed particularly when things go wrong, when things need to
be fixed, and when things need to be updated. Standards are a strong
governance mechanism. For comparison I look at the Internet, which (and
this can be debated) has no central point of control, but for which we can
find around 300 governance organisations around the world.

The views of what will be standardised tend to reflect the views of how
important blockchain will be to the future of technology. Coming from a
data comms background I would love to see agreement on a protocol stack,
but most of the diagrams I see are less linear. In particular I am keen on
international common approaches, because the hard problems that blockchain
solves (eg in supply chain) are usually multi-jurisdictional ones. If there
isn't a standard, it is that much harder to have a global application.

I wear two hats in this area, participating in the Standards Australia
IT-041, which is the secretariat for the ISO TC307 (meeting next week in
Sydney), as well as chairing the IEEE SIG. There seems to be good
cross-initiative cooperation at the moment. My recent background is
financial services for a large bank (trade, payments, correspondent
banking), but in a past life I also worked in health informatics, so I am
involved in some pharma work. For much of my life I have worked in aspects
of supply chain.

Regards, Greg
Dr Greg Adamson
Principal, Digital Risk Innovation
Chair, IEEE Design for Ethics Ad Hoc
+61 423 783 527

On Sat, Apr 1, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Adrian Hope-Bailie <adrian@hopebailie.com>
wrote:

> Hi Pindar, Greg, Manu,
>
> I think the list of organizations doing "Blockchain Standardization" now
> includes ISO, the IEEE, ISOC and W3C. I am interested to hear from those of
> you involved what the goals of these initiatives are?
>
> What are you trying to standardize?
>
> Adrian
>
> On 31 March 2017 at 03:09, Pindar Wong <pindar.wong@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Manu,
>>
>> FWIW, the Internet Society <http://www.isoc.org> has also formed a
>> Blockchain Special Internet Group where I serve as the interim-Chair.
>>
>> I hope that we can all find a way to move the ball forward together.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> p.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 1:25 PM, Greg Adamson <
>> greg.adamson.engineer@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Manu
>>>
>>> IEEE has been developing a SIG on blockchain over the past year which I
>>> chair, and will be announcing an "Industry Connection" on identity and
>>> blockchain next Tuesday in Vancouver at our Blockchain Summit. An IC is a
>>> pre-standards engagement activity.
>>>
>>> The blockchain standards / governance space is going to be chaotic and
>>> fragmented for a while (I am also part of the ISO process as a member of
>>> the Australian TC), but if you see any pain points that seem to fall into
>>> IEEE's areas of expertise, point them out and we will see what can be done.
>>>
>>> Regards Greg
>>>
>>> On 31 Mar. 2017 4:02 pm, "Timothy Holborn" <timothy.holborn@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, 31 Mar 2017 at 10:51 Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 03/25/2017 06:55 PM, Tony Arcieri wrote:
>>>>> > I would recommend Blockstream's secp256k1 Schnorr signature
>>>>> > algorithm, although unfortunately I don't think there are existing
>>>>> > standards describing it published through any sort of standards
>>>>> > body.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Just introducing Greg re: blockchain / IEEE
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I'll close the loop on this w/ Christopher Allen, who works at
>>>>> Blockstream. We'll be collaborating on this and other things at the
>>>>> next
>>>>> Rebooting Web of Trust 4 Workshop in Paris at the end of April:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.weboftrust.info/next-event-page.html
>>>>>
>>>>> > In all of my personal and professional work we are using EdDSA, which
>>>>> > is a Schnorr scheme and standardized in RFC 8032.
>>>>>
>>>>> I've raised an issue to implement this:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://github.com/digitalbazaar/jsonld-signatures/issues/21
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't expect it to be done any time soon, as we're heads down on
>>>>> other
>>>>> things, but demand for it is rising and as soon as we get an
>>>>> implementation in Forge, we can move forward with it in the Linked Data
>>>>> Signatures stuff.
>>>>>
>>>>> -- manu
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
>>>>> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
>>>>> blog: Rebalancing How the Web is Built
>>>>> http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>
>