[MINUTES] CCG Weekly 2025-06-10

W3C CCG Meeting Summary - 2025/06/10

*Topics Covered:*

   - *Open Wallet Foundation Update:* Daniel Goldscheider recapped the Open
   Wallet Foundation's work over the past two years, highlighting its
   evolution from a Linux Foundation project to a collaboration with the ITU,
   focusing on open-source components for digital wallets and credentials.
   Challenges in unifying standard development organizations and coordinating
   efforts within the UN system were discussed.
   - *Global Digital Collaboration (GDC) Initiative:* The GDC, a new
   initiative convened by over 40 organizations (including W3C), aims to bring
   together governments, companies, intergovernmental organizations, and
   standard development organizations to collaborate on digital identity and
   credentials. The GDC's key features include a collaboratively-created
   agenda inspired by unconferences, a distributed registration process for
   privacy preservation, and a focus on fostering ongoing collaboration groups
   beyond the initial July 1st-2nd meeting. The first meeting will include
   overviews of global projects, major use cases, and deep dives into specific
   topics. The Swiss Confederation provides legal hosting, remaining neutral
   in agenda and participant selection.
   - *Market Adoption of Open Wallets and Digital Credentials in Europe:*
   Discussion touched upon the diverse landscape of open wallet codebases in
   Europe, highlighting the lack of a single dominant solution and the ensuing
   challenges and opportunities this presents for innovation and
   interoperability.
   - *Challenges and Future Directions:* Major challenges were identified,
   including geopolitical complexities, bridging the gap between the public
   and private sectors regarding digital sovereignty, and navigating the
   plurality of credential formats and standards. The need for global
   interoperability, while acknowledging the complexities of achieving
   complete digital sovereignty, was emphasized.

*Key Points:*

   - The GDC aims to be a neutral convener for various stakeholders,
   avoiding the dominance of any single organization.
   - The GDC meeting will feature presentations and breakout sessions
   focused on various aspects of digital identity and credentials, leading to
   the formation of ongoing collaboration groups.
   - The Open Wallet Foundation continues its efforts in developing
   open-source software, while the GDC tackles broader coordination across
   organizations and governments.
   - Achieving truly global interoperability in digital identity requires
   navigating geopolitical complexities and finding a balance between digital
   sovereignty and cross-border collaboration.
   - A diverse range of open-source wallet projects exists, each with its
   own strengths and challenges. This diversity is viewed as both a challenge
   and an opportunity for innovation.

Text: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-weekly-2025-06-10.md

Video: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-weekly-2025-06-10.mp4
*CCG Weekly - 2025/06/10 11:58 EDT - Transcript* *Attendees*

Alex Higuera, Benjamin Young, Brian Campbell, Daniel Goldscheider, Dmitri
Zagidulin, Erica Connell, Geun-Hyung Kim, Greg Bernstein, Harrison Tang,
Hiroyuki Sano, Internet of Things, JeffO - HumanOS, Jennie Meier, Joe
Andrieu, Kaliya Identity Woman, Kayode Ezike, Mahmoud Alkhraishi, Otto
Mora, Phil Archer, Phillip Long, Rob Padula, Simone Onofri, Ted Thibodeau
Jr, Vanessa Xu, Will Abramson
*Transcript*

Daniel Goldscheider: Hello. Good to see you.

Harrison Tang: Hey Daniel, good to see you again.

Daniel Goldscheider: That's interesting. I see new icons that I have not
seen Interesting. This call is open to everyone. Okay.

Harrison Tang: Yeah, this actually manual help us set it up and it's all
automated so I don't have to do any manual actions.

Harrison Tang: it's already being recorded and automatically transcribed
and actually we use Gemini to summarize the transcriptions and it'll be
sent out within two hours basically. Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Goldscheider: That's cool.

Daniel Goldscheider: So I should say Gemini is great to make sure that the
eye is happy.

Harrison Tang: Actually I'm yes that especially the summaries the u
subscribe to the mailing list take a look the summary is really good in
fact it's so good I might be thinking about asking our company to switch
because other services their summaries are not as good so All right. just
want to say thank you for taking the time. I'll wait for about a minute.
other people will stroll in the next five minutes.

Daniel Goldscheider: Thank you very much for the invitation.

Harrison Tang: Nowadays, people join a little bit later and then we'll
start with a quick agendas and then we'll start your session around that
time. Next.

Harrison Tang: All right. welcome everyone to this week's W3C CCG meeting.
today we are very excited to have Daniel here to actually talk about his
latest initiative global digital collaboration. I think couple months ago
almost a year ago we have been talking about open wallet foundations. but
he has some new things to share. So before we get to the main agenda, just
want to quickly remind everyone about the code of ethics and professional
conduct. obviously we've been having very constructive and respectful
conversations here but that's continued to do that. And next just want to
give a quick note on the intellectual property. Anyone can participate in
these calls.

Harrison Tang: However, all substantive contributions to CCG work items
must be member of the CCG with full IPR agreement signed. So, if you have
any questions in regards to getting the free W3C account or the community
contributor license agreement, please feel free to reach out to any church.
These calls are automatically recorded and We will send out the
transcriptions and recordings automatically in the next 24 hours. All
right, just want to take a quick moment for the introductions and
reintroductions. So, if you're new to the community or you haven't been
active and want to engage, please feel free to just unmute. All right.
00:05:00

Harrison Tang: any announcements or reminders, new initiatives for upcoming
events. So, a quick preview. So, next week we'll have Andrea and Jerem here
to talk about the multibase verifiable credentials implementation. And then
the week after that on June 24th we will actually hold our first meet and
greet breakout session. So if you're new to the community please We'll just
have breakout sessions and then have a different people kind of leading
those breakout sessions so people can actually know each other a little bit
better.

Harrison Tang: Any other announcements or reminders? Any updates to the
work items? So, we will have the quarterly work item review on July July
15. So in about four or five weeks. All right, last calls for
introductions, announcements, reminders or work item related stuff.

Harrison Tang: And again nowadays we have a lot of work item discussions on
other meetings such as the incubation and promotions on Wednesdays and data
integrity meetings on Fridays. So you can go to the BPC CCG calendar to see
those dates and times the copy and paste the here. All right, let's get to
the main agenda. So again, very excited here to have Daniel here to talk
about his latest initiatives on global digital collaboration. So Daniel,
good for yours.

Daniel Goldscheider: Much and thank you very much again for the invitation.
I see Khalia joining. Hi Kalia. It's nice to see all of you. I don't know
how many of about the open wallet foundation. Let me maybe just very
quickly recap what we've done in the past two years and then really focus
on as Harrison said on the global digital collaboration. we launched Open
Wallet about two years ago, a little over two years ago and the goal was
essentially to bring developers together to work on open-source components
for digital wallets and credentials as well as to bring essentially all the
stakeholders together that are interested in digital wallets and
credentials.

Daniel Goldscheider: that's of course open source projects but also
standard projects as well as crucially governments that are increasingly
taking an interest in digital wallets and credentials and the surrounding
ecosystems. at the end of year one we had about 50 members including some
innovative startups, some very large tech companies, credit card schemes
and we also had 12 governments that came in via a new initiative called the
governmental advisory council which we pioneered at the Linux Foundation.
But we had also gotten feedback that the private nature of the Linux
Foundation was not necessarily ideal for governments to meet other
governments and discuss requirements or best practices for digital wallets
and credentials.

Daniel Goldscheider: So in year two we launched a sister project called the
open wallet forum hosted at the international telecommunication union the
only tech focused specialized agency of the UN and this was pretty
successful. We attracted over 40 members to the new GCC at the ITU. But we
had also seen that there were still at least two challenges that remained.

Daniel Goldscheider: The first one was to try and bring all standard
development organizations together and there was reluctance by some STOs to
have one standard development organization sort of convene all other STOs.
So we received from quite a few STOs proposals that they could potentially
lead this initiative to bring everyone together. But it wasn't clear
exactly which organization should have that convening role. And the other
revelation was that even within the United Nations themselves, even within
the UN system, there's actually quite a bit of discussion about who is
going to do what. For instance, when it comes to health credentials, the
World Health Organization wants to play a leading role.
00:10:00

Daniel Goldscheider: And when it comes to travel credentials, IO which is
standardizing the e passports obviously wants to play a leading role. So
the challenge remained how do you bring really everyone together? How do
you bring governments and companies together? How do you bring
intergovernmental organizations together with standard development
organizations and open source organizations as well as some
non-governmental organizations and this question really led to the
formation of the global digital collaboration.

Daniel Goldscheider: We started discussing this in Switzerland in Davos at
the World Economic Forum earlier this year and I'm really happy to say that
we will have our first official meeting on July 1st and 2nd and the GDC is
convened I shouldn't say not only by the Open Wallet Foundation or the
Linux Foundation but by over 40 organizations one of which is W3C.

Daniel Goldscheider: you'll find organizations like the European Commission
the World Bank UNCCE as well as standardization organizations like ISO NIC
I mentioned obviously W3C but you also see for instance the phto alliance
or the car connectivity consortium which is standardizing

Daniel Goldscheider: and car keys for digital wallets as well as
organizations like the International Red Cross and of course the Linux
Foundation but also the Eclipse Foundation for instance which in some ways
is competing with the Linux Foundation. So I think we're off to a really
good start to have a lot of organizations convene the global digital
collaboration together. So you may ask what does it mean to convene this
together? in essence, two things. One, we are creating the agenda together.
I am a huge fan of IW and I'm not just saying this because at least one of
the IW founders is on this call. I think it's a really nice way of creating
an agenda.

Daniel Goldscheider: we have space for about 2,000 people. So it would
probably be difficult to ask 2,000 people to come up with an agenda on the
day of the event. But the core organizers together are organizing the
global digital collaboration in a way that is really trying to learn from
unconferences. So there is no content chair, there is no one organization
that is determining the agenda of the GDC. It's all of us together and
hopefully every coreizer is really working with its communities to ensure
that the agenda reflects basically the combined wishes and hopes of the
communities that they represent. The second element is the registration.

Daniel Goldscheider: So the idea is that there is no one organization that
can determine who is welcome at the GDC, but the organizers determine that
together. So you're all part of the W3C community and you can sign up to
join the global digital collaboration via W3C. which means that W3C has its
own registration portal. And if you register there, it's up to W3C to
either approve or deny a request to join the global digital collaboration
and data such as a name or an email address from the W3C community is not
shared with all the other communities. So basically you have a privacy
preserving way for different organizations to convene their communities to
bring their communities to the table.

Daniel Goldscheider: and eventually a lot of different people from very
different spaces different standardization organizations will have a lot of
people there hopefully for all the major credential formats all the major
protocols the major u open source developments both open wallet as well as
open source developments that happen outside of open wallet for instance
the European Commission's
00:15:00

Daniel Goldscheider: EODI wallet. and they're all going to be there. the
URL is global digital collaboration.org and when you click on register, you
see basically a bunch of these different registration portals. we've also
put up an early version of the agenda. You'll see that on day one we have
one large room which can hold up to 2,000 people. so the idea is really on
day one to give an overview of everything that's happening. first a
geographical overview. thank you so much Ted for sharing the URL. so first
a geographical overview what's happening in Europe, what's happening in the
US, what's happening in India, what's happening in how is China working
both mainland China and Hong Kong with Singapore.

Daniel Goldscheider: so the goal is at lunch everyone should have a pretty
good overview of some of the major projects around the world. In the
afternoon on July 1st, we're going to dive into the major use cases,
driver's licenses, health credentials, of course, identity credentials, but
also academic credentials. I have mentioned already the car keys. We have a
session that is organized by the Red Cross with UNHCRs for refugees and
displaced people. So the goal really is to bring as many use cases together
as possible and provide an overview of those.

Daniel Goldscheider: The main focus I think is then on day two where we
will have 12 rooms and the idea is that people can really dive deeply into
those topics. any core organizer can call a session and if they can call a
session single-handedly. So W3C can say I want to talk about the CCG. what
we encourage is that coorganizers partner so that the world bank is working
maybe with one or two standardization organizations and a few governments
and they are presenting something together so that it's not just an
advertising event for something that is happening already.

Daniel Goldscheider: I'm a huge fan of the software that W3C has created
for TAC. we are not as sophisticated at this point, so we're using a Google
sheet, but I think when you look at the agenda, you'll see that it's quite
a dense program. we have weekly co-organizer calls every Tuesday. So, we've
had one earlier today. we hope that we're going to get a little more of the
coorganizers to merge sessions because at the moment we have quite a few. I
think we have 92 sessions so far on day two alone. But yeah, we're excited
to see how people are going to look at this program and we hope that folks
will find it useful. I should say that the GDC is not trying to be
primarily a conference.

Daniel Goldscheider: we are really aiming to create collaboration groups
that are active throughout the year. So whenever people see that there is
some topic that cannot be reasonably addressed within an existing standard
development organization or an existing working group we hope that we might
be able to provide an ultranutral space under neutral governance even
neutral between potentially competing open-source or standard or even UN
organizations the goal is that they can meet in Geneva but

Daniel Goldscheider: We would very much hope that they will continue
throughout the year. So yeah, to give you a few examples, one for instance
would be hardware requirements. What would you like to see in terms of
biometric support or secure key storage on a phone? Now there are probably
even within W3C several communities that are interested in this topic but
it's also a topic that is interesting for IETF and for many folks within
ISO communities. It's interesting for department of homeland security. It's
interesting for the digital agency in Japan or the European Commission. And
of course it's something that is interesting to a lot of individual
companies.
00:20:00

Daniel Goldscheider: Another topic might be postquantum ZKPs. many of the
smartest people I know in the field are looking at those postquantum zero
knowledge proofs. And the idea is not to create a GDC standard. We really
believe that standard development organizations. All the open source
projects should happen ideally at open source foundations. But whenever you
want sort of a coordination layer between different open source
organizations or between those, that's where we hope the GDC can come in
handy. Maybe a last remark. legally the GDC is hosted by the Swiss
Confederation, country of Switzer but the country of Switzerland is staying
out of agenda discussions and they're staying out of the guest list.

Daniel Goldscheider: So it's really our responsibility as core organizers
to create that agenda and to bring people to Geneva. But for instance the
rental agreement with the CICG the big conference center in Geneva the
Swiss government has signed that which comes in very handy because they own
it. and so whenever we need basically a legal structure currently the Swiss
confederation is that legal structure. So that was a quick introduction. I
hope you like it. I am really really happy that W3C has joined us in Davos.

Daniel Goldscheider: Seth was part of the panel discussion that we
organized with other STOs the phyto alliance like the open ID foundation
like ISO NIC and I'm incredibly happy that this idea took flight at least a
little bit and we're going to try and turn it into reality on July 1st and
second. If there are any questions, if there's anything I can answer, I
would be delighted to do so.

Harrison Tang: questions. wait. please.

Harrison Tang: I don't think we can't hear you. Yep.

Otto Mora: Sorry. Yeah.

Otto Mora: You guys can hear me, Excellent. Daniel, I just wanted to
congratulate you on this. This is great to see this. I mean, I very much
agree with some of your thinking there, The standardization work needs to
happen in these individual forums, but I see policy makers and other, folks
within governments that just don't even know where to begin to navigate all
of this, right? so complex, so many layers, so many different SDOS's and
even, technological, SDOS's like ITF and such that are just very very
detailed. So, I think this is great. I'm hoping that our co-founder at PVAD
ID will be there. I've u already made him aware of it and I think he will
be attending. He's based in Switzerland.

Otto Mora: But maybe for those of us that for get there are you planning to
record some of those sessions…

Otto Mora: which I think would be invaluable for us to show to even other
folks in other governments that maybe may not be there. just curious about
that.

Daniel Goldscheider: Yeah. …

Daniel Goldscheider: we are exploring if we can record it. we have quite a
few breakout rooms, so we're not sure if logistically we're able to do it.
But to use IW again as an example, I think that there should be ideally
reports. so we're hoping that every session on day two is going to be one
hour. We hope that we will find at least one person if not an AI that is
going to summarize the session. I should say there is no voting. and there
shouldn't be any voting.

Daniel Goldscheider: this is not something where three countries and 29
companies can outvote 31 countries and six companies. The idea is simply to
have a place where people can say what they think and we hopefully are
going to record the opinions in the room and day two is going to be under
Chattam house rule so we don't want people to feel uncomfortable I think it
might make a lot of sense to have these reports sort of as products from
the GDC for people who cannot be there and then really the goal goal is to
turn the GDC into hopefully at least half a dozen collaboration groups that
will continue to meet online and the idea is that the organizers of this
collaboration group will determine their own rules.
00:25:00

Daniel Goldscheider: So if W3C were to get together with the phyto Alliance
and the Linux Foundation and maybe the ITU or the World Bank on a specific
topic then it's up to those organizations to decide is this under Chattam
House rule who can join if another coorganizer wants to join it's up to
them to decide whether they want another organizer or not. So the idea
really is to just create sort of this neutral space that anyone of the
organizers can use because one of the epiphanies I had is that W3C is a
neutral home. The Linux Foundation ISO is a neutral home. the Internet
Engineering Task Force is a neutral home. But we're not always 100% neutral
when it comes to each other.

Daniel Goldscheider: And so the basic idea for the GDC is that it's this
space for neutral conveners. It's a neutral space for neutral conveners
basically and bring them together and feel that they can work with each
other without any one organization having the upper hand and being a little
more equal or…

Daniel Goldscheider: a little more in charge than anyone else.

Otto Mora: Perfect. Thank you.

Otto Mora: Appreciate it.

Harrison Tang: So Daniel this is more of a tangent question but what's the
kind of market adoption for lack better terms in regards to kind of open
wallets and…

Harrison Tang: digital credentials in Europe especially?

Daniel Goldscheider: Yeah, it's a question that is not super easy to answer…

Daniel Goldscheider: because there is not one open wallet codebase. So, we
have different code bases. we have now over 20 different code projects and
they are seeing various degrees of success. Of course, we're rooting for
all of them, but we're also not trying to tell the world that, this is one
sizefits-all. We're as open wallet and even more so, of course, it's GDC.
We would never say this is the best protocol or this is the best credential
format or this is the right codebase.

Daniel Goldscheider: and we have an interesting situation in that we have
code bases that are contributed just from a few individual developers all
the way to for instance Google contributing code that is used in the
official EODI reference implementation. So we see that the European Union
quite a few companies are using this code but what's incredibly nice
earlier today I received an email from someone who's going to be at the GDC
and they told me that they're using a project called credo and I had no
idea and I think this is part of the promise and the premise of open source

Daniel Goldscheider: course that we don't even know sometimes where code is
used because literally anyone can just go to GitHub and look at that run it
change it there's not even an obligation to if you modify it letting us
know that you are using it but I think in the future there is an
interesting question which is how would growth look like?

Daniel Goldscheider: So when we started this we didn't have a single code
project unlike many other open- source projects which start with a big code
project we started just with an idea we have about two dozen code projects
today and I think even in a growth scenario there would be two very
different possibilities one is that we go from 25 to 50 maybe 100 code
projects eventually the other one is that maybe we'll see something that
will look a little more like code in the browser space where you have a few
browser engines and almost every browser in the world is either based on
blink and chromium or it's based on webkit and maybe a little bit of gecko
but I think there are pros and cons for both of these things.

Daniel Goldscheider: I'm old enough to remember a time when you browse the
web and you would see this page is optimized for Netscape version whatever.
and I haven't seen compatibility issues in a long long time and I think
that's partly because of those browser engines. On the other hand, having
just one or two code bases can also stifle innovation. So, it's going to be
really interesting to see where the market goes and if we can have
something that ideally marries the best of both worlds that we have a few
really important code bases that are used by a lot of players in the wallet
space in order to foster interoperability and hopefully also help create
really secure and privacy preserving solutions and at the same time really
have a playground
00:30:00

Daniel Goldscheider: ground and we call it lab at open wallet to have a lab
stage that is really healthy with lots of different projects so that it's
not just one or two people deciding the fate of this ecosystem which I
think would really be a pity Harrison,…

Harrison Tang: Thank And kind of followup question on this is more on the
open wallet foundation side there are so many projects that open wallet
foundation is kind of shephering. which one kind of in regards to you're
more excited about or I guess there is a impact section that talks about
ACA pie right but I'm just curious which one of these projects maybe you
want to highlight to the communities here?

Daniel Goldscheider: can I ask you if you have kids? How many?

Harrison Tang: Yes, I do. I have four I don't have a favorite.

Daniel Goldscheider: Four. What is your favorite?

Harrison Tang: That's a very good question.

Daniel Goldscheider: So, I would say, it's really important that Open
Wallet doesn't have favorites. And, we're trying to live that at Open
Wallet. and I think that's also the ethos we need at the global digital
collaboration. that there is no favorite SDO and within that SDO there's no
favorite standard or there is no favorite code project and I think the
truth is that different projects are exciting for different reasons and
maybe it's good even to have one standard be implemented in different
programming languages and maybe one person cares more about Rust and
another one probably wants

Daniel Goldscheider: a different programming language. So my feeling is
that this is not just sort of a koi way of trying to get out of the
doldrums here. I do think honestly that it's good to have a plurality of
projects and we're always encourage our projects to speak with each other
and to see if it might make sense to potentially merge a project.
Conversely, anyone can decide to fork a project and, create two projects
out of one. I think this is part of a really healthy dynamic. so I wouldn't
expect you to give me a favorite child. I hope you don't expect me to have
a favorite code project. but I can tell you I'm really excited.

Daniel Goldscheider: I'm really excited that there is this mixture that
it's not just individual developers or trillion dollar companies but that I
think it's a really healthy mixture of both. and you mentioned impact
projects. So we have a lab stage a growth stage and an impact stage. And
the idea there is basically just to give the market a hint of whether
something is basically an interesting project that people can look at to
maybe see some cutting edge ideas or early implementations of a new
standard. but a lab project is not something that we would recommend a
country or a company to use in production.

Daniel Goldscheider: is really more as the name suggests experimental and
then on the opposite end of the spectrum you have as you mentioned you have
impact projects and impact projects really are projects that have on the
one hand a lot of developers that contribute so we're reasonably sure that
those projects will continue to be supported they have been around for a
long time we have done license scans for these projects and we feel much
more confident that those are projects that you could use for production
even in a large scale and then of course eventually there can also be a
sunset stage so that developers come to the conclusion that it doesn't make
sense to develop something further and then they can sunset a project.

Daniel Goldscheider: What's interesting is that in the first two years of
open wallet, we've never had sort of a dispute where developers said this
is impact and then the technical advisory council which is ultimately
making that decision at open wallet would say no actually we think that you
are growth or that you're a lab. It's really a very collaborative effort
basically to try and see what the developer community behind the project
wants and then how we can help them best to get to the stage that they want
to be in.
00:35:00

Harrison Tang: Thank you. anyone have any questions for Daniel?

Daniel Goldscheider: If not, Tristan, let me end with an invitation. I
think the URL of the conference has been shared. If you click on register
and you scroll down, you will see W3C as one of the core organizers. So if
anyone here is interested to come, it's completely free. I'm sure W3C will
be delighted about anyone in the community to be there. So please click on
that scroll down to W3C, do register. the conference is only going to be as
good as the people who show up. and we really need we need people from
different standard communities from people championing different credential
formats to be there.

Daniel Goldscheider: I think it's going to be a really good opportunity to
meet governments and I hope that the CCG is going to be there in force July
1st and…

Harrison Tang: Yep. …

Harrison Tang: it's July 1st, right? Right.

Daniel Goldscheider: 2nd. the date is a little bit awkward at the beginning
of summer but it has to do with the fact that the biggest UN tech
conference whis is immediately after that and we initially had second and
third and then we thought we want people to be able to get back on time for
4th of July to the United States.

Daniel Goldscheider: So if you do decide to come and if you are in the
United States, the idea is that you can easily fly back either on the
evening of the 2nd or the 3rd and people will be with their families on the
4th

Harrison Tang: Sounds good.

Harrison Tang: And by the way, followup question to kind of end the call is
what are the other challenges or are there big challenges at whether it's
open wallet foundations or…

Harrison Tang: global digital collaboration what are the challenges and how
can the community Help us.

Daniel Goldscheider: Yeah, I think there are so many challenges.

Daniel Goldscheider: I mean, let's start maybe with the big picture. We all
know about the geopolitical challenges. And again, I'm old enough to
remember an easier time, a time where the term global collaboration would
have been a lot less controversial. so I think in my mind the first
challenge we face is the challenge to even muster the will to say that we
want global solutions and I would hate a web browser that I download from
the internet and then it would say it's the French web browser because it
works with the French web and then I want to browse a website in
neighboring Germany and I need to download another browser and god

Daniel Goldscheider: forbid I would want to browse a website in the United
States and I would somehow find myself needing to download a US web browser
and we take it for granted with the web we take it for granted with email
you can send an email pretty much anywhere in the world and doesn't matter
where that person is you would never think about downloading a localized
email client in order to be able to send an email to a specific country So
I think to me that's one The second big challenge is the gulf between the
public and the private sector sometimes and I've seen both challenges on
both sides. You have companies that think we have figured this out.

Daniel Goldscheider: I don't even understand why, X or country Y is not
simply taking my specification and implementing it because I have more
engineers, maybe even more money than this country and the country should
just do what I think they should be doing because I know best. And then you
have conversely some countries that think that the private sector has
literally nothing to offer that it should be countries that are essentially
creating this solution because the way they interpret digital public
infrastructure is that the public in DPI stands for provided by the
designed by the public sector, certified by the public sector and I really
believe the truth is in the middle.

Daniel Goldscheider: I think we need the public and the private sector to
come together to collaborate because both need each other. It is true that
there are more engineers and standards architects and experts in the
private sector than the public sector. But it's equally true that digital
passports or driver's licenses central bank digital currencies are things
that countries must focus on and they cannot simply say great let's
outsource this to one or even a consortium of private companies. So I think
bringing different geographies together is one big challenge and bringing
the public and the private sector together is another. And then of course
underneath those two large challenges, you have so many more challenges on
a more granular level.
00:40:00

Daniel Goldscheider: better than me about the plurality of credential
formats and some people feel very strongly about their credential formats
and I wouldn't say that it's a religious war but it's certainly a
confrontation sometimes of very strongly held opinions or that format is
superior or more privacy preserving that you cannot trust something or that
something else is not going to scale so I think there are a lot of
challenges on the standardization front. There are challenges on the
regulatory front because you have countries jurisdictions that create
things without much regard of what's happening left or right west or east
of their borders.

Daniel Goldscheider: And it's very easy I think to look at all of these
challenges and give up and say yeah this is just too difficult. I don't
know how to standardize this in one country. how can we even hope to create
a solution that is globally interoperable? But now Harrison I know that you
have four kids I have three kids. I think we owe it to our children to at
least try to try to come up with a infrastructure for wallets and
credentials that is as global and as versatile as the web.

Daniel Goldscheider: And the stiffer the headwinds and the harder the
challenges, the more I think it is on us as people who take these digital
tools for granted every day to fight for digital infrastructure that takes
that same ethos on a global basis between the public and the private sector
and just try to make it work. I don't know if that's a satisfactory answer,
but there's certainly a lot of challenges.

Daniel Goldscheider: Our kids and our grandkids will have their work cut
out for them.

Harrison Tang: Yeah. No,…

Harrison Tang: I no thank you for sharing the insights. It's aligning
different stakeholders perspective is always hard and it's fascinating that
you share about different countries perspectives and things like that.

Harrison Tang: Thank you. And by the way I think all of us in the community
pretty much all agree that we want the open standard as well. thank you for
please

Daniel Goldscheider: And I see a hand up,…

Daniel Goldscheider: but let me just add, we had some success with Open
Wallet. we're very profitable from day one, which is We have enough capital
to do this. We have a strong backer with the Linux Foundation. We have a
good home. but we failed in our mission to attract enough countries. It
became incredibly clear that the hypothesis that we had and ultimately when
I launched this was flawed. countries did not want to meet in any private
sector organization with other countries by and large.

Daniel Goldscheider: and even the term governmental advisory council which
we copied from I learned that there are some countries that are deeply
unhappy with the term DAC saying we are a powerful country why would we
advise anyone our role is not to advise anyone we're telling you what to do
so then we did the second attempt with the ITU and hopefully will continue
to have success but this too failed to be the home that brings everyone
together. So the GDC is the third attempt basically. We will continue to
work in the open wallet foundation on open source software. the open wallet
forum will continue to bring governments together to talk about
requirements for wallets.

Daniel Goldscheider: But hopefully the GDC is going to be the place that
will bring that original dream to fruition to really bring everyone
together and not just create another silo. where people look at the GDC and
say, " but I don't want that because I don't want to support these sponsors
or I don't want to work under this executive director. I don't like the
chair, which is why the GDC doesn't have a chair and the GDC doesn't have
an executive director. it's literally just collaboration between existing
organizations. Sorry, Otto, I see that you have your hand up.
00:45:00

Otto Mora: No, I wanted to ask, it's very interesting what you just read,
The tension between the private and public sector. do you find that perhaps
some governments are less willing to give up what some would call their
digital sovereignty, like their control their let's say ability to exercise
this, whereas others are more content to let the private sector come in and
kind of run the show and then they just get involved when they really need
to, I think of it almost to the PKI, debates back in the '9s. My country,
for instance, Costa Rica, they've insisted, no, we need to have a root of
trust determined by us,…

Otto Mora: Very based on civil law, not so much on common law becoming this
concept of sovereignty, but similar is this also translatable to the
digital identity space and how do we resolve that tension?

Daniel Goldscheider: Yeah, I think it's a really good question.

Daniel Goldscheider: We have two sessions in Geneva on digital sovereignty.
I think one it's absolutely clear that different countries have vastly
different views on how the private sector could or should participate even
within the European Commission or the European Union. I think you will see
very different approaches between member states of the EU.

Daniel Goldscheider: when it comes to private sector collaboration, I would
say that complete digital sovereignty is a pipe dream or at the very least
the cost of digital sovereignty would be enormous because we are all
relying on microchips that come from one place of the world and then we
rely on operating systems that come from a different place. and maybe the
phone and the hardware is produced or the phone is assembled in yet another
country.

Daniel Goldscheider: So real digital sovereignty I think would basically
mean going backwards to the digital stone age and say that we need our own
microchips and we need our own operating systems and our own web browsers
and the entire infrastructure needs to be built and maintained and
developed basically within one country. I believe that is an incredibly
tall order even for the largest and most powerful countries in the world
and it's completely and utterly impossible for almost anyone else.

Daniel Goldscheider: So personally my feeling is that in a world where
complete digital sovereignty cannot be achieved we need mutual dependence
and we need to make sure that we don't have a situation where a single
country or a single company has a kill switch and where you as Costa Rica
can make a decision to turn off a system in Switzerland. and that should be
true for every country, right? And it should be true for any company.

Daniel Goldscheider: So my feeling is the best we can hope for is not
complete digital sovereignty, but the best we can hope for is sort of
mutual interdependence and a clever way to distribute capabilities and
responsibilities to ensure that we are all in a space where we don't depend
on any one player. But that does not mean that we do everything ourselves.

Otto Mora: Very interesting

Harrison Tang: Any last questions for All right. Thank you, iel. Thanks for
jumping on and…

Daniel Goldscheider: Thank you very much.

Harrison Tang: giving us a quick update on the open wal foundations as well
as the global digital collaboration initiative. So, thank Thanks a lot. All
right, this concludes this week's CCG meeting. So, please join us next week.
Meeting ended after 00:50:02 👋

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