[public-credentials] <none>

I nominate myself, Kim Hamilton Duffy, for Seat A (term 2020-2021).

I'm the architect for the Digital Credentials Consortium, a university-led
effort that promotes learner-controlled credentials and more equitable
learning/career pathways. The Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized
Identifier standards are core to our technical approach.

I've been a CCG co-chair for nearly three years. While I'm happy with what
we've been able to accomplish as a group, there are areas where we can do
better, and where I would like to help in my remaining year, if elected.

1. Improving alignment among decentralized id groups

We've made solid progress through efforts like secure data storage. But we
can do a lot better. The CCG leadership should work proactively with other
decentralized id groups to determine our strengths/interests and plan how
best to work together. There's a massive amount of work to do, and we can
do it together in a way that energizes and improves the overall community.

2. Strategy and planning

Related to the above, I want us to create a roadmap of community goals.
This last year has been a mad flurry of work. This includes many exciting
developments like the DID WG and a variety of draft specifications, but I'd
like to work with the other chairs (and the community) to create a clear
set of goals that the chairs can more actively support, which ties to...

3. Inclusion and nurturing the next set of leadership

Over the last few months, I've developed a hypothesis for why we struggle
so much with non-technical work items, which is that our use cases are
often not sufficiently grounded in real-world scenarios. This murkiness
often makes it hard for non-technical participants to understand where they
can help. Because the technical people are all off debating esoterics (no
offense to matrix parameters intended).

I've heard statements along the lines of "maybe we're only good at specs,
code, etc" and we shouldn't try. But we would do that at our own very great
peril, because otherwise we cannot properly evaluate the suitability of our
solutions. I want the CCG leadership to take a more active role in
addressing these shortcomings, and encouraging the next set of leaders.

4. Other notes

A lot of my focus as a CCG co-chair so far has been process improvements.
That includes automation around meeting coordination and minute generation
(which was formerly quite a tax, since community groups have no w3c support
staff), as well as simplify CCG work item processes. The end goal of all of
that was to make our community more self-sustaining and open by reducing
the unnecessary barriers to participation (technical or otherwise).

We're in a much better state now, which does free up time for chairs to
focus less on tedious tasks, but that's just a small start. I'm hoping to
be part of the much more expansive (and exciting!) work remaining, and
supporting the new CCG co-chairs in their leadership roles.

I think I've spent most of this email saying why you should elect other
leaders, because I've not done nearly enough to address the above. :) And
that's also a reasonable outcome. Either way, it's been an honor to serve
you as chair.

Kim