Re: I Nominate Wayne Chang for W3C CCG Chair Seat C

Hi all, thanks for all the support and especially to Orie for the nifty campaign slogan.

I'm nominating myself, Wayne Chang, for the W3C CCG Co-Chair Seat C position from 2020 to 2023. I think I'm a good candidate to help us fulfill our goals in the new charter[1].

If elected chair, my focus areas would cover (1) encouraging global adoption of standards, (2) better aligning the digital credential ecosystem, and (3) improving Asia-Pacific engagement.

My background is in software engineering and product management. I worked at ConsenSys for the past 3 years, 2 of them on digital identity, and was a technical startup founder before that. Now I'm using our credential standards in deliverables as a software consultant. My hobbies include security research, programming languages, and riding my motorcycle.

If that's all you needed to know then you can stop reading here, and I hope you elect me. Otherwise, I have expanded on my proposed focus areas and professional background below.

My focus areas as chair, expanded:

1. Encouraging global adoption of standards. Our top focus should be removing all blockers to standards proliferation across technologists, governments, and industry groups globally. We should engage existing cooperatives, as demonstrated by the early traction seen in VC-EDU which is already gaining ground with major universities, governments, and educational standards bodies. We should further support these efforts by, for example, surveying what topics our membership finds most interesting or dedicating meeting time to foster communications and accountability for these initiatives. Future efforts could focus on how our standards can become adopted and used in finance (KYC/AML, digital assets, business auditing), healthcare (patient records, provider qualifications), and connected devices (IoT data, manufacturing, device security). This is our opportunity to further our use cases[2] by putting them in front of the right stakeholders to foster real world usage in a structured effort.

2. Better aligning the digital credential ecosystem. Our ecosystem has many different groups working on various important pieces, and we should figure out alignment to best fulfill the promise the technology. Could the DIF help with standards testing efforts and reference implementations? What is the relationship, if any, between our credential standards and identity efforts such as eIDAS, OpenID, UMA, and LDAP? How does our work relate to trust frameworks that aim to bring identity proofing? Do we interact with the blockchain ecosystem mainly to host schemas and DID Documents or could our work benefit through things like upgrading existing cryptocurrency wallets into CHAPI-speaking credential wallets? Should we worry about credentials and zero-knowledge proofs or is there a better group for that?

Find out some of these exciting answers if I'm elected chair! This is probably the hardest and hairiest challenge on my list by far. However, I did pick the longest term, and I think the conversations need to start now.

3. Improving Asia-Pacific (APAC) engagement. W3C covers the globe while we span about half the continents with our one meeting. By making our discussions more accessible, we can expand the active membership with a more diverse set of perspectives towards open standards. As chair, I would be willing to host a second W3C CCG meeting friendly to APAC time, acting as a conduit between both meeting groups to ensure high quality meeting notes possibly with translations and correspondence across both meeting agendas. In APAC, there has been keen interest at the government and industry level in our work, and we would then have the opportunity to support and encourage those efforts, thereby covering the other half of the globe and best ensuring digital credentialing efforts there are built on open W3C standards.

About me, expanded:

I've spent the past three years on the implementer's side of things at ConsenSys, two of them leading product and engineering teams to apply VCs and DIDs to enterprise problems around the world. We shipped software that was directly concerned with standards implementation; for example, we wrote a DID parser grammar[3] for a Rust project. At the end of the day we still had a customer, so I especially value direct user feedback, which I think can also serve as a key input to standards decisions and ultimately unlock widespread adoption, whether the users are developers or industry group members.

While I'm relatively new to the credentials ecosystem, I've been working in adjacent security-focused software ecosystems for years, including as the CTO and Security Officer of an acquired health-tech startup that compliantly handled high volumes of patient records. I've also developed authorization and digital asset management systems for brand name institutions as a consultant. Today, I am currently one of three chairs in the DIF Claims & Credentials working group, a position which I hope will help to better coordinate our collaborations with the DIF. I am currently working as a software consultant delivering on an UMA 2.0 implementation project for user-managed educational credentials across institutions, likely to use our credential standards soon.

Thanks for your consideration, and I hope you elect me as one of your chairs.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/15_7noTaKsqN-TBR7VgECpy-H-zS05rNds81GyRw95jE/edit#heading=h.9fyeyfch5770
[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-use-cases/
[3] https://gitlab.com/alpinefresh/freeclaims-v2/-/raw/parse_did/fc-vc/src/did/did_grammar.pest


On Thu, May 21, 2020, at 3:39 PM, Orie Steele wrote:
> I have worked with Wayne on the DIF Claims and Credentials working group https://identity.foundation/working-groups/claims-credentials.html
> 
> As one of the chairs of that group, Wayne has helped coordinate with industry professionals in gathering feedback on proposed structures for verifiable credentials.
> 
> His focus on the needs of businesses, and of seeking contribution from parties often not included in highly technical credential formats debates has been very helpful.
> 
> I think he could do an excellent job of keeping DIF and CCG in sync... I would love to see someone from hyperledger fulfill a similar role.
> 
> Chang for Change! __mic drop__
> 
> OS
> 
> 
> -- 
> *ORIE STEELE*
> Chief Technical Officer
> www.transmute.industries
> 
 <https://www.transmute.industries/>

Received on Friday, 22 May 2020 00:34:10 UTC