Re: When Technical Standards Meet Geopolitical Reality

On Sat, Aug 9, 2025 at 5:47 PM Daniel Hardman <daniel.hardman@gmail.com> wrote:
> If we do it the way I'm recommending, then tribal elders or doulas in remote highlands somewhere naturally function as peers of judges, which is factually accurate, reasonable, just, and inclusive.

What you're talking about sounds a lot like how OpenCVRS works wrt.
birth declarations, where multiple people make claims about a
particular birth, their relationship with the new baby, and there is a
journey from "independent witnessing" to "governmental process
approval". The only difference here is when that digital credential
pops out of the process. See the "Usability of form" section and
"Workqueues" portions of this link:

https://www.opencrvs.org/product/features

> My beef is with the easy conflation of "source" and "issuer". A government process can produce personhood evidence, but I don't want the identifier of the government to be used as the *issuer* of that evidence. EVER. Hard stop, exclamation point, non-negotiable human rights core principle that we don't stray from even in version 0.1 of a system. And I believe we can actually achieve and enforce this by being very careful with our definitions, which is why I'm trying to be so picky about language.

I need to focus on a use case to see if I'm understanding you. Let's
choose birth certificates to see if they work with your model.
Typically, when there is existing healthcare infrastructure, the
individual that assists in the birth (doctor, doula, attendant, nurse,
someone associated with the healthcare system, etc.) makes an
attestation, which is then ratified by the local government; typically
the vital records office for the state/nation. In this system,
government officials don't go traipsing around witnessing every birth,
but rather delegate that authority to the people more directly
involved and the organizations that they're associated with. This all,
more or less, happens "in one go" -- where the long form birth
certificate lists things like "certifier", "attendant", and the
parents. Those are the original witnesses and they are included in a
request for a birth certificate. That request is then, more or less,
just approved by the local vital records agency (after doing some
checks) and out pops a birth certificate a few weeks later.

Now, what you might take issue with is that if the vital records
agency rejects the application for whatever reason, then what happens?
In some areas, there won't be a birth record and that might be what
you're suggesting is the fundamental human rights violation.

What it seems that you're looking for is for digital credentials (of
some form) to exist by the certifier, attendant, and the parents
first. Those are the things you are saying must be foundational and
the government should only recognize (or not) those foundational
things as a second digital credential.

Translating that to something concrete, it means that if we were to
use verifiable credentials for this activity, there would be VCs from
the certifier, attendant, and the parents, and then a VC that would
refer to those and/or wrap those by the local vital records agency (as
a second step).

Is that accurate, and if not, where did I go wrong?

What I'm trying to figure out here is if we need changes to the
technical specs, or if this is more of a higher-level (and equally
important) architectural discussion. Do we have the primitives we need
to build what you're talking about today (I think we do) or is there
some technical thing that's missing?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/

Received on Monday, 11 August 2025 15:59:33 UTC