Re: Call for Focal DID Use Cases

On 2018-06-05 8:58 AM, Samantha Mathews wrote:
> Been enjoying reading through everyone’s user stories and use cases. 
> I’m struggling a bit to understand what group is working on a solution 
> for the individual to be in control of their own data. ... 
> ...snip...
> What could possibly be more pressing? I’m furious that terms like Self 
> Sovereign Identity have become your protocols and jargon. 
> ...snip...
> Is there a larger more collaborative  group besides the W3C that deals 
> with these overarching human crisis or are the silos created by these 
> very specific groups all there is?

Hi Samantha,
Welcome.
I share your concerns, but I've been lurking here, and occasionally 
contributing to the discussion, since before DID, and before 
Verifiable Claims -- when this was "Web Payments", well over a decade.

During that time, there have been massive changes in focus, but 
especially in the last three months the changes have been explosive.

My belief is that DID is bigger than expected; it can do everything. 
It may be bigger than the W3C. It may need its own guiding 
standardizing body; one controlled by "one person, one vote", not by 
"one corporate/bureaucrative paid member, one vote", like the W3C.

Yes, as you say, recently -- the last year or two -- I've seen the 
VC/DID central work drift towards corporate/government use-cases. But 
that doesn't mean that DID and VC are limited to those cases. It's 
been set up to deal with everything; it's been a long hard fight. I 
believe those capabilities have survived in the protocol so far.

But somebody has to write the code for the private use cases. My hunch 
is that people are already doing that. Perhaps that's not true.

In fact another thing, which your post has prompted me to put here, 
appeared recently: Microsoft is buying GitHub, where the DID/VC work 
(and thousands of other 'open source' projects) are being developed. 
Only in the last year or so has the DID/VC work been moved to GitHub.

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-microsoft-billion-github.html

Perhaps some other list members can clarify this more. My belief is 
that it doesn't matter; that the truly private-data DID systems can 
still be made now, and that won't change.

But whether W3C is the best place to standardize and ensure that 
capability isn't subtly removed is still moot, I think.

Steven Rowat

Received on Tuesday, 5 June 2018 17:10:49 UTC