Re: the intersection between Swagger-style APIs and SSI/decentralized identity

I want to thank everyone who has participated in this thread for being 
thoughtful, specific, and concrete. I personally agree that this is a 
very important and urgent topic, yet one where acting too quickly could 
set a bad precedent, and I share Daniel's concern for squandering the 
"momentum" we are currently experiencing, both in adoption terms and in 
co-operation terms.

I want to add a "+1" to Oskar's suggestion that we keep a diverse set of 
use-cases not just in-scope but foregrounded.  It might seem onerous, 
particularly to people working on DHS/OT use-cases, to keep offline, 
PKI-free, and/or symmetrical use-cases in scope at this early stage, but 
perhaps excluding them is a case of "robbing Peter to pay Paul."  I am 
no expert, but from where I sit, it looks like recent EU, EC, UK, NL, 
and DE tenders seem to keep these kinds of use-cases in-scope at least 
some of the time; this implies that interoperability between government 
infrastructures could be the next rushjob on the horizon. (Someone else 
can chime in if the APAC/Antipodean investments I know almost nothing 
about changes the terms of this intercontinental interoperability roadmap).

I do not know very much about David's work with ISO on digital driver's 
licenses, but it sounds like it could be a particularly good source of 
such use-cases, exactly because it resonates with the aforementioned 
European interoperable infrastructure planning happening in parallel to 
DHS's investments. If hashing out or incorporating some driver's license 
use-cases in dialogue with others working in that space is marked as a 
work-item, please reach out to me: I would love for this to be the first 
work item I contribute to on Spherity's behalf.

Returning to Daniel's historically-informed suspicion of a bifurcated 
standard that could ffectively becomes two divergent standards, I would 
venture to guess that it is one that most people here share, regardless 
of how often or how rarely they think about Bolivian farmers using 
Bluetooth on the Altiplano. The difference seems to me one more of 
strategy and tactics than of goals.  Perhaps a little terminological 
clarity might help-- would it help to rephrase/re-conceive SVIP/DHS's 
ask? Namely:
If
A.) DHS/SVIP is asking for a pragmatic and institution-centric reference 
implementation,
and
B.) most of us wants the unitary, Bolivian-farmer-honoring W3C standard 
to be more general than that reference implementation,
then
C.) how *specifically* could that reference implementation be written to 
prevent it from being mistaken for a standard by decision-makers new to 
the space and more beholden to their product roadmaps than to our 
community's ideological commitments? Is it a matter of flagging some 
items as legacy-oriented, or temporary, or deprecated?  Would marking 
to-do items as "urgent-- W3C won't approve until this item is done" make 
explicit to even the laziest casual reader how this reference 
implementation relates to the more binding, internationally-balanced, 
and forward-looking standards that will come after?

Thanks for reading, sorry for the verbosity!
__juan

-----------------
Juan Caballero
Communications, Research, Press at Spherity GmbH
Berlin-based: +49 1573 5994525
Signal/whatsapp: +1 415-3101351

Received on Thursday, 2 January 2020 02:03:30 UTC