RE: Prioritizing Individual Sovereignty over Interoperability

As I continue to meet with many groups who are using DIDs for as many diverse application domains as possible (including, this week, several leaders from the IBM Blockchain Labs, Microsoft, etc. who were in Toronto this week for the Blockchain Research Council's Blockchain Revolution Global conference), I now have a clearer way of explaining what I’m doing: it’s the Universal DID Specification and Universal DID Processor platform (see the diagram below).



What my Universal DID project represents is a technology for processing DIDs anywhere on any platform – it’s like JDBC for DID processing, ODBC for DID processing, ADO.NET for DID processing, and/or LINQ for DID processing, etc.  The Universal DID tent is infinitely wide …truly infinitely wide.



[Drummond attended one of my talks/explanations given to the Indy Semantics team …I think he gets it.]



So why is this important?  To me, it indicates that more people with very deep software backgrounds need to be part of the “Thursday” DID specification project …to drive the software-based architectural thinking represented by the Universal DID spec and processor.  This is important because once you have this type of software capability/utility/technology in your hands, the real questions that you need to ask and want to ask are completely different.  For example, what does it mean to have a DID Method that runs:

  *   Entirely in thememory of an Indy Agent?
  *   As a set of related SQL server tables?
  *   As a collection of text files living on a Windows or Linux file system?
  *   On a distributed ledger?
  *   On IPFS?
  *   etc., etc., etc.



Originally, I advocated that the spec for “DID”s needed to factored out into its own document but wasn’t able to easily backup the claim “I just knew it was the right way”.  Now I’m more convinced than ever that it still needs to be in its own document.  Use what you can from my work on Universal DIDs and bypass the rest.



[cid:image002.jpg@01D4FC58.1ACF1E90]


Best regards,
Michael Herman (Toronto/Calgary/Seattle)
Independent Blockchain Developer
Hyperonomy Business Blockchain / Parallelspace Corporation

W: http://hyperonomy.com<http://hyperonomy.com/>
C:  +1 416 524-7702




-----Original Message-----
From: Markus Sabadello <markus@danubetech.com>
Sent: April 26, 2019 2:45 PM
To: W3C Credentials CG <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: Prioritizing Individual Sovereignty over Interoperability



Hello list,



In light of the discussions in the W3C CCG, DIF, and recent threads on GitHub concerning proposed changes to the W3C DID spec (related to "decentralization" and the "big tent" idea), Joachim Lohkamp (Jolocom), Kai Wagner (Jolocom), Eugeniu Rusu (Jolocom), Sean Baldwin-Stevenson

(Jolocom) and myself (Danube Tech) have prepared an open statement and call to action for the community.



https://stories.jolocom.com/prioritizing-individual-sovereignty-over-interoperability-95ec17a36c9b




We invite you to read, share, and add your perspectives on that blog post with the aim of broadening the discussion and developing a more comprehensive and rigorous assessment of how to address the challenge of achieving interoperability without diminishing user sovereignty.



Even though I won't be at IIW, I know sessions around this topic will be held, and I hope this statement will serve as useful input.



Markus