Re: DHS Silicon Valley Innovation Program Virtual Demo Week

On 9/27/21 11:54 AM, Adrian Gropper wrote:
> Our community needs DHS leadership in dealing with serious issues.

I'd suggest that we'd like to have DHS input while noting that the
problem space being alluded to is far broader than DHS or any single
government.

I'll also note that people inside and outside the community love to play
both sides of this coin. "Please provide guidance <government entity>!",
and then turn around a few months/years later with "<government entity>
is providing guidance, what a terrible overreach!" (see most recent
objections to the DID spec). So, any government that expresses an
opinion is simultaneously praised and chastised... it rarely results in
consensus on topics where there is dissent. It ends up being just one
more voice in the conversation (which is a positive, but not an end state).

Government involvement in these matters usually signifies a market
failure of some kind, so starting w/ government opinion/intervention is
rarely a good place to start (and is an appeal to authority).

I only bring this up because of the recent formal objections to the DID
Core specification and the suggestion that this group is just blindly
doing the bidding of certain government organizations. If resolving
conflict in the community were only that simple. :P

No, we'll need to debate these things for a long time before we end up
at consensus... and for the things where there is no consensus, there
will be no standard, and the market will fill in the gaps.

So, while the opinion of various government agencies is important here,
so are the opinions of implementers, customers, academics, citizens,
researchers, writers, educators, politicians, and anyone else with a
constructive perspective. :)

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
Our Verifiable Credential Deployments
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/case-studies

Received on Monday, 27 September 2021 20:11:54 UTC