RE: Digital Press Passes and Decentralized Public Key Infrastructures

Connie,

Thank you. You raise an interesting point about economics. Hopefully, the revenue from issuing organizations’ membership fees and/or digital press pass fees would exceed the costs for any labor, software, and computing involved (e.g., cloud).

You might also be interested in this letter: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2021Jul/0204.html . It includes some more ideas about digital press pass possibilities and, more broadly, technologies which can equip any professional organization.

Yes, please do feel free to email me with more information about digital-press-pass-related initiatives.


Best regards,
Adam

From: connie im dialog<mailto:connieimdialog@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, July 23, 2021 4:18 PM
To: Adam Sobieski<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Cc: public-credibility@w3.org<mailto:public-credibility@w3.org>; public-credentials@w3.org<mailto:public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Digital Press Passes and Decentralized Public Key Infrastructures

Hi Adam,
I believe the folks at Muckrock Foundation have considered this (in connection with a project named 'PressPass' as it happens), as a kind of ORCid for journalists. But think there may be some long-term resource issues (ongoing maintenance costs). Happy to connect you off thread though with that team if of interest.

Cheers,
Connie

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 5:23 PM Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>> wrote:
Credible Web Community Group,
Credentials Community Group,

I would like to broach the topic of “digital press passes” towards a more credible web.

As envisioned, “digital press passes” could be provided to organizations and individuals utilizing decentralized public key infrastructure.

Webpages could include URLs to their “digital press passes” in link elements (<link rel="press-pass" href="…" />). This information could also be encoded in documents in a manner interoperable with Web schema. News content could be digitally signed by one or more “digital press passes”.

Upsides include: (1) end-users and services could configure which certificate authorities that they desired to recognize, (2) end-users could visually see, in their Web browsers, whether displayed content was from a source with a valid “digital press pass”, (3) news aggregation sites could distinguish content digitally signed by “digital press passes”, (4) social media websites could visually adorn and prioritize shared content which is digitally signed by “digital press passes”, (5) entry for new news organizations and recognition as such by existing services would be simplified, e.g., a new newspaper organization, the new news organization would need to obtain a “digital press pass” from a certificate authority.

Downsides include: impact on citizen journalism, where users other than journalists desire to publish or distribute news content.

Have these ideas been considered before? Any thoughts on these ideas?


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski

P.S.: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikifact