[MINUTES] CCG Weekly 2025-05-20

CCG Weekly Meeting Summary - 2025/05/20

*Topics Covered:*

   - *Verifiable Credentials 2.0 Updates:* Announcement of VC 2.0 becoming
   a global standard, along with seven accompanying specifications. Adoption
   by the UK government and retail sectors was also noted. Future pre-standard
   work was highlighted.
   - *GS1's Verifiable Credentials Strategy:* Phil Archer from GS1
   presented GS1's exploration and planned adoption of verifiable credentials.
   This includes several use cases focusing on improving supply chain
   efficiency, such as onboarding new sellers to online marketplaces and
   streamlining customs processes. The presentation detailed GS1's "crawl,
   walk, run" approach, starting with a limited-scope implementation by
   September 2025, using DID Web, JOSE signing, and aiming for
   interoperability with existing systems like the UN Transparency Protocol.
   The emphasis was on practical implementation and gathering evidence of
   value before larger-scale investment.
   - *Community Collaboration and Fragmentation:* Discussion centered on
   the fragmentation within the digital credential ecosystem and how the
   community can foster greater convergence and interoperability. Points
   raised included the need for simpler demos to demonstrate the value of VCs,
   the importance of render methods, and the consideration of various DID
   methods (with DID Web and DID Webv highlighted as potential choices for
   ease of implementation).

*Key Points:*

   - Verifiable Credentials 2.0 is now a global standard, signifying
   significant progress in the field.
   - GS1 is strategically adopting VCs to enhance supply chain efficiency,
   beginning with a focused pilot project.
   - The community acknowledged the challenges of ecosystem fragmentation
   and discussed potential approaches towards increased interoperability,
   emphasizing the importance of practical implementation and user-friendly
   demonstrations.
   - GS1's approach prioritizes simplicity and ease of implementation for
   its initial VC adoption, opting for DID Web and JOSE signing. However, they
   remain open to future evolution and adapting to the evolving landscape.

Text: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-weekly-2025-05-20.md

Video: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-weekly-2025-05-20.mp4
*CCG Weekly - 2025/05/20 11:57 EDT - Transcript* *Attendees*

Alex Higuera, Benjamin Young, Dmitri Zagidulin, Erica Connell, Harrison
Tang, Hiroyuki Sano, Hugo Sheng, James Chartrand, JeffO / HumanOS, Jennie
Meier, Joe Andrieu, Kaliya Identity Woman, Kayode Ezike, Mahmoud
Alkhraishi, Manu Sporny, Markus Sabadello, Phil Archer, Phillip Long, Rob
Padula, Tim Bloomfield, Vanessa Xu, Will Abramson
*Transcript*

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Harrison. Hey,…

Harrison Tang: Hi. Hey, how's it going?

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: can you hear me quick?

Harrison Tang: Yes, perfect.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Excellent. Hi Phil,…

Harrison Tang: I think everyone is joining late today. Hey, thank you for
jumping on

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: thank you for joining.

Phil Archer: Hi. You're welcome. Is there a RC channel that should be in or
something? Okay.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: No, it's just chat and no call. Nothing else.

Phil Archer: Thank I thought I better join on time in case I had to do
something. My office recently wiped my laptop and started again. There's so
many things that I need are just not available.

Phil Archer:

Harrison Tang: Yeah,…

Harrison Tang: we're probably starting about two three minutes. I think
recently people have been joining a little bit late. So not the case I
think two years ago everyone is pretty much on time…

Phil Archer: Everyone does. I know I do.

Harrison Tang: but nowadays I don't know what happens. Yeah.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: We're just going to give it a minute until we get
critical and mass and then we'll get started.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: We'll give it one more minute and we'll
00:05:00

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: All right, let's get started. welcome to the CCG call
for today, Tuesday the 20th of May. As a reminder, we have a code of ethics
and professional conduct. Please make sure that you have reviewed it and
that you are abiding by any introductions or reintroductions that anybody
would like to bring up? Anyone new to the team want to say All right. Any
announcements that anybody would like to make? I know there's a few pieces
of big news that happened last week. I don't know if anybody wants to talk
about that.

Manu Sporny: …

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Mano place.

Manu Sporny: so for those of you that didn't see on the mailing list,
verifiable credentials 2.0 O is now a global standard along with seven
specifications in the family which include VC hosy cozy all the data
integrity stuff ECDSA EDSA bitstring status list and I'm sure I'm
forgetting a couple but they're all global standards now which is awesome.
thank you Mahmud. that is the press release that was released by the
worldwide web consortium. there are a number of testimonials in there that
you should probably really great stuff if folks didn't also see the UK
government has adopted verifiable credentials 2.0.

Manu Sporny: So, it just became a standard, but they just announced that
they will be supporting verifiable credentials 20 in their government-based
wallet. there were also press release testimonial announcements made by the
retail sector. so this is the national association of convenience stores
their conexus standard setting body the international forcord standards
foundation these are all retail standards noting that they will be adopting
verifiable credentials 20 as well including a number of specifications that
we are incubating here including verifiable credentials

Manu Sporny: API the render method stuff a variety of things of that
nature. verifiable credential barcode. so that's all really fantastic news
and a huge huge thank you to this community and all of the conferences
rebooting IW that participated in the creation of these standards over many
years. So, congrats to all, their global standards and now we have a whole
bunch of other, pre-standards in the pipeline that we're trying to move
forward as well. that's it.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you, And if you would like to be involved in the
pre-standards that Mano just mentioned, please feel free to join us
tomorrow and every Wednesday at the CCG incubation and promotion. I don't
know specifically if we're hosting it tomorrow, Mana,…

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: do you know if that schedule is set yet?

Manu Sporny: Yes. Yep.

Manu Sporny: We are going to meet tomorrow.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: And the schedule is set for every Wednesday at 11 now,
right? Since the visa working group is Okay.

Manu Sporny: That's Yep. Dup.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: So please feel free to join us there, and have your say
and incredibly happy and proud of all the work that everybody here has
done. Thank you for that. Does anybody have any other announcements they
would like to make? All right, hearing none. Phil, you have the floor.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Phil shared a wonderful article a couple of months ago
about VCs at GS1 and…
00:10:00

Phil Archer: Of course,…

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Phil probably needs no introduction but for those who
do not know would you mind introducing yourself and what you do and all the
wonderful things. Yeah, you see your

Phil Archer: of course. Yeah. So, hopefully things are happening. and
everything works. So, hi. yeah, you see that? Okay, What's this thing in
front of me now? Hopefully that still works out if it doesn't. so, yes,
I'll introduce myself. some people may know my name, a lot of you will not
and know nothing about me at all. which is fine and that's normal. my wife
barely knows who I am. I've been married to her for 30 years. and even a
fewer number of people in the world have ever heard of GS1. So I'll
introduce a little bit about that as so first of all, Mud Harrison, thank
you very much indeed for inviting me today and thank you to all of you for
being here. I hope what I have to say will be of interest.

Phil Archer: Normally when I talk about VCs, it's often the case that
around the room I probably know more about VCs and dids than other people
there. That clearly is not the case here. I'm actually slightly nervous
today because all of you without exception are the experts on this and I'm
very much an amateur. GS1. I can tell you about what we're doing, but I do
not pretend to have a fraction of the knowledge that a lot of you have
about this technology and I'm very grateful for the time to be able to
speak to you today. Thank you. the first thing to say is that I need to
learn how to use a computer which would make my life so much easier.

Phil Archer: is building on what we were just talking about with the
announcements that all the recent recommendations and I know that the did
resolution spec is coming on very nicely and all the work that this
community has done for many years. a sincere and heartfelt thank the work
that this community is doing is enormously important. as you know, it is
being picked up by governments and trading partners and other people all
around the world and I dearly wish that I had time to be an active member.
I'm very conscious that I have contributed exactly nothing recently. so I
genuinely grateful so is the rest of the organization that I'm representing
today. So a bit about me. I was on the W3C team for eight years starting in
February 09.

Phil Archer: This is the first time I got to go to an event where we all
had our picture taken. if you've been to a W3C event, it's actually quite
remarkable how many of those people are still there. Some are not. but I
can see one person who's actually died since this picture was taken. But,
15 years ago, a lot of the same people were still there. but, in July 2017,
I moved to join this organization called GS1 that most people have never
heard of. although everyone is familiar with the barcode and we are the
organization behind the global barcode. if you add up all the staff that
work at different bits of GS1, there's quite a lot of us. but we're a
federation. We're not one organization. I work for global office. There are
individual bits of GS1 all around the world.

Phil Archer: including obvious places like GS1 US and GS1 Germany and less
obvious places like GS1 North Korea is a real thing. GS1 Iran and I think
Rwanda's joining us soon. I'm not quite sure. We're everywhere. so we're
quite a well-known standards body in our community which is the retail and
supply chains. We got a long history. we date there are various dates we
can give any oldish organization you could pick various dates but here's
one for you 3rd of April 1973 that was the date on which a committee that
had been formed a couple of years previously by the American Grocery
Association mixture of retailers and manufacturers got together and chose a
winner having advertised a competition for choosing

Phil Archer: what would be the barcode that they knew they wanted to use.
And you can see the one there that everyone's very familiar with. It was
designed by a team at IBM led by George Lauer. And for context, 52 years
ago, it was Killing Me Softly was number one by Roberto Flack. That's how
old this thing is. And that is the best copy we have of that page that had
those different types of barcode on. It won because it was simple. It was
much easier to print than the circular ones. And of course it's been used
ever since. Now very conscious in this community that organizations like
GS1 are exactly the kind of people you want to get rid of. We are exactly
the kind of federated identity providers that s are designed to make
obsolete. I understand that. We're not the only ones. Digital object
identifiers, internet domain names, you name it.
00:15:00

Phil Archer: There are all sorts of numbers that are and different kinds of
identifiers that are issued and we are one of them. This is some of our
high-profile members. I mean overall we've got about 2 million of them but
these are the ones that most of these will be household names and you'll
see the kind of people I mean if you think about W3C who do whatever Google
and Apple and Microsoft tell them we do whatever these people tell us to.
so the Proctors and Gambles, the Nestles, the Walmarts, the Tesco's, the
Metros, so these are the big names behind GS1 and their predecessors and
current versions have been with us all the way.

Phil Archer: which leads me to the point about today, which is this barcode
has been around for 52 years and is used throughout those supply chains
throughout the retail sector. And most people don't even think about it. It
just goes beep and that's it. You've forgotten about it. And the people who
trust it are the people who help create it. The people who are our members,
the brands, the hospitals who do a lot of work in healthcare, the
retailers, the people who are involved directly in the creation and
maintenance of GS1 standards like any standards body are the people who
trust it most. But not everyone trusts us. Some people are requiring more
evidence. Prove it. Okay, you say that's your global trade item number.

Phil Archer: what and who are they? those are all the people that you're
more familiar with, The regulators, the certificate issuers, online
marketplaces, not just Amazon. There are loads of them, thousands of them
actually around the world customs and border officials, people who are not
part of the GS1 community and yet are seeking some sort of verification
that the identifier on this product on this pallet on this shipment
whatever it may be is actually something that they can get behind and trust
and that's a bit of a challenge for us.

Phil Archer: I mean after decades of comfortably being part of the supply
chain world in especially grocery and healthcare and apparel those are the
ones where we are strongest increasingly now in DIY or hard goods as you
might call them that's our community but what about these other people they
want more evidence trust but verify so for some years we've been looking at
this and different myself and other colleagues have been involved one way
or other I think that picture is from 2018 an early IIW. that's my
colleague from GS1 US, Paul Dietrich. If you've been to IW many times,
you've probably met Paul and a few others from GS1 US. four years ago now,
Paul and I and other people worked on this video that we did with the
company formerly known as Transmute.

Phil Archer: this was a theoretical proof of concept we were working on
where GS1 would issue a verifiable credential to prove that the product
identifier was genuine from our point of view and that we knew the
customer. and it turns out that was actually a use case that now happens in
the real world. But we did all this work four years ago. I was happy to
work with Joe on the use cases and requirements for decentralized
identifiers. who knows it might even get back to doing that again for the
new one. and then more recently, with Marcus Sabadillo, I chared the RDF
data seconicalization working group, which was useful obviously for data
integrity, for those proofs. So, I've been around for a while. but I admit
that more recently I've done absolutely nothing at all to contribute to
this community. And again, I'm grateful for the work that you all do.

Phil Archer: And throughout this time, we've been talking about it and
talking about it and talking about it. This is Karen, one of my colleagues
from GS1 Belgium, Luxembourg, and two of the old guys of GS1 out of focus
there. We've been talking for ages about what should we do? Should we do
nothing? Should we do this? Should we do that? I don't know. So we hired a
couple of consultants as you do and said to Kevin who used to work for GS1
therefore knows us very well and a woman who some of you may have the
pleasure of knowing yourself Blesvki she's been around open standards
government data public sector stuff more recently was working in the
national health service in the UK they did some work for us that took six
months or more and they're the ones who had
00:20:00

Phil Archer: to explore the technology that you've developed and put it in
the context of GS1 and make recommendations for what we should do with it.
And that work is what has focused our minds and is what we are now enacting
because their recommendations were accepted. So there's a bunch of use
cases, some of which you will be very familiar with because they're ones
that you talk about quite a lot. This is actually one of our biggest
drivers. I mentioned that four years ago we worked with Transmute on a
theoretical idea where a new seller wanted to sell their product through a
marketplace. and the verifiable credential would come from GS1 that says,
"Yep, this really is our global trade item numbers. this is" GS1
Netherlands has done that exactly that with the biggest marketplace in the
Netherlands. It's not Amazon.

Phil Archer: It's bold.com which is part of the same group as Albert Hind
and Delars. and the process on boarding a new race a new seller on B.com is
a sevenstage process. But if you turn up with your GS1 verifable
credential, it only takes four steps because it bypasses that. And they're
now GS1 Netherlands is working with the Chamber of Commerce. and so that if
you turn up and you want to sell on B.com and you got a verifiable
credential from the Chamber of Commerce and from GS1 Netherlands, it's only
a three-step process. It's increasing efficiency in that kind of world. So
the GS1 Netherlands and Bold.com use case is really important.

Phil Archer: It's a real one. Real VCs being issued, being verified by
bold.com and used to improve the efficiency of selling stuff online.
Another one people here are very very familiar with, but I mention it
because it's relevance to GS1 is the true age work that Manu and his
company and David Isel and others have done at NACS. This doesn't evolve
GS1 at all, but it's relevant to us because this selective disclosure way
of proving that you're of age to buy products, that's that kind of retail
environment. That's us. So although it doesn't use GS1 standards, doesn't
need to, it's not what we do, it's relevant to us that the technology is
there and the integration of the technology in things like point of sales
systems is important and noteworthy that it's happening and we think that
might be useful to us in future as well. Again, people on this call are
more familiar with this than I am.

Phil Archer: I'm well aware of that. But colleagues at GS1 US work with
Vinnie and the others and on the US Customs of Border Protection on the
pilots that went on last year. A lot of you here may well have been
involved in that. But that's another sign to us that this is an important
technology that this can actually improve efficiency, can reduce the time
that a container sits on the dock side before it's moved off to its
destination. This saves millions of dollars if you can improve the
efficiency and that's what We're about helping businesses shift stuff
around the world and sell more stuff. So it is very much relevant to the
work that JS1 the Barco people are involved with. And then there's the work
that Syong talks about from Singapore the digitalization of trade
documentation. Again huge potential for saving very substantial sums of
money.

Phil Archer: This is Kevin and I down the road from me here at the port of
Felix, Britain's biggest container port. I'm on a trip there together. but
the processing of those documents and there's work going on with the
international chamber of a unit based in Singapore called the
digitalization standards initiative that my boss chairs trying to improve
the speed and efficiency with which trade documentation is moved as the
physical goods move as well in New Zealand.

Phil Archer: again this is about business numbers the relevant government
agency there and so work going on there that's directly relevant to our
colleagues on New Zealand very similar to what manu was just talking about
there in the UK so government use of the technology matters in a world
where we are talking about regulated goods and digital product passports
and certifications and everything else that's what matters to us. this is
some work that I have been slightly more active in of recent months or
actually about a year now. the UN transparency protocol UNP this is all
about tackling greenwashing. It's about documentation and claims about
products at scale. And you have a barcode, you scan that, you get to a set
of links.
00:25:00

Phil Archer: Some of those links will be leading off to verify the
credentials that form the digital product passport or the country of origin
certificate or whatever it may be. So very exciting work going on there
heading towards completion of that I hope this calendar year getting a lot
of traction there as well. So a lot of stuff that we've done at GS1 is
conformant with is consistent with the work at UNP. Didn't VCs come into
that as well. I mean VCs are exactly what it's about. And so that work that
those consultants did led to a bunch of recommendations to our senior
managers at the end of last year.

Phil Archer: And I don't know whether you do this in your organization but
it's very common for us to think in terms of a crawl walk run approach to
start off small do a little bit and then decide whether you want to carry
on to walk and then maybe more work in future and the recommendation we
made this is where you're going to start shouting at me was to do crawl and
stop the evidence for why GS1 should invest substantially money,
substantial effort into VCs, ain't there? There's strong evidence that we
should do something. There's very strong evidence that we should be
prepared. There's strong evidence that we should take this seriously, that
the pilot work we've done, that the examinations we've done are very real
and pointing in one very positive direction.

Phil Archer: But the evidence that says okay you got to invest serious
money in this ain't there. Therefore the proposal was to do actually a very
limited amount of work with a very specific aim and a short timeline and
then we can build on that. So I'll talk a bit about some of the things that
we thought about because there is this balance between yes we should do it
and hang on be careful maybe not. This will be familiar to absolutely
everybody. How much more can you take on? We're kind of busy right now.
something that's to conversation, at least not directly relevant. all those
billion barcodes we have around the world. We're in the middle of changing
them to 2D barcodes to embedding our identifiers into a URI. which you will
see increasingly on R codes on products and some other 2D codes as well.

Phil Archer: when you're in the middle of changing something that's 50
years old, that's a lot of work, We don't have a lot of spare capacity. At
the same time, we're doing that. We have this idea for how we want GS1 to
evolve in the next 5 years. The details of that don't matter today. What
matters is we have quite a big program of change and evolution within the
organization that's going to take us for the next 5 years. Plus, we have a
bunch of other stuff going on and we're dealing with all these new
regulations.

Phil Archer: and we just got to do the regular licensing of numbers stuff.
So, any organization, we have a limited capacity and any work on DIDs and
VCs has to compete with those if it's going to get any Very conscious of
who I'm talking to, but when you look at it from the outside, the
technologies, yeah, making big progress. Of course they are. The version
two recommendations last week, of course, Of course, there's huge work
that's been going on for years.

Phil Archer: years has gone into this. Of course, everyone recognizes that.
But the fact is that today there are lots of different standards. Eidis in
the EU, I think, is using SD JOTS whereas UN UNP and US Customs and Border
is using V W3C VCs signed by Jose. Those differences matter. One part of
GS1 in Canada, they're doing a lot of work with Hyperledger, which doesn't
always fit together.

Phil Archer: And then there's the work at IETF on Kerry and AC/DC and the
work at DIFF about different DIB methods. Lots of different stuff going on.
It's fantastic. Everyone putting huge amounts of effort and skill and
expertise. It's brilliant, but it ain't mature yet. And so if you're
looking at investing in stuff and you're a global organization with 119
different bits all called GS1 and you're going to choose one and not the
other, that's dangerous because you might then have to find yourself
engineering that's a risk for us. So, it's helpful when we have a look at
the UN transparency protocol and see this which is the current list of
things that they do. and we have a look at that and we compare that with
what the US Customs and Border Protection people say. And actually, it's
more or less the same, not quite. That's got to be a good start, right? So,
that's kind of where we think we're going to be heading because other
people are doing the same thing and we want to support that and we think
it's important that we carry on.
00:30:00

Phil Archer: And so part of that work that Kevin and Era, the two
consultants did was this document that I pointed you to when I wrote to the
list back in February. And I am very very very aware that it's not
complete. There are lots of things people sent some really helpful feedback
for which I'm very grateful indeed. Thank you. I'm very conscious that this
is not a complete survey of the entire landscape because that would take
forever. it was just what Balashesky found and what she put together to
help us understand the technical landscape. Of course, there's more to it
than that. I understand that. This is a quote we got from Vinnie, which you
can't do it all right. You're not going to have everybody in the entire
chain all using the same thing. if I can get a few signals that helps me
shift a container off the key side a bit quicker, that's going to be good.

Phil Archer: And if it comes from third parties, that means so much more
than the person who actually wants you to trust them offering it in the
Sinong, as many from Singapore, and I said to him during TAC last year, "So
you think we should be issuing VCs?" He nearly jumped at me. Yes, we've
been asking you to issue VCs for years at GS1. Get on with it. What are you
waiting for? And so yes, we should engage. GS1 should prepare.

Phil Archer: Yes, we should work on this and do it seriously and mean And
if we issue a VC, we should stand by it. Not as a pilot, not as another
thing that we've done Real signed by a real private key somewhere buried
away. That's what we have the evidence to do. We have the evidence and the
support and the direct yes from our management to proceed with crawl. But
we haven't asked for anymore because we don't have the evidence yet.
Hopefully we will get that. So what that means is that by September this
year, which is a very short timeline, the bits of GS1 that want to, which
is only going to be a handful, the ones that want to will be able to issue
and verify credentials that support those GS1 identifiers. They'll have a
common data model, a common format, and a common render method.

Phil Archer: some of the specifics. this will please some of you and upset
or disappoint others. I'm sorry. This is what we've seen so that niches
from Netherlands where they're issuing VCs that are used by bold.com on
board new sellers. They're using the Spirion library for doing that. That's
been updated to work with VCDM2. We're going to wrap that up in a Docker
container and make it available to our network so those that want to can
use it. So we're using that software as the basis. We're using version two
of course of BD CM BCDN bit string status list. we're definitely going to
be signing with Jose. We want to also support integrity proofs as well.
We'll include a random method.

Phil Archer: In terms of DIDs, we think dead we think did webv is almost
certainly where we're going to end up. we kind of want that to succeed. for
various reasons because it's easy and who features really good. so we
expect to move to that, but we're going to did web for now because it's
just easy. And again, although they're not pilots, which is a very limited
scope. we have a data model which is the same as every other issued
identifier in the world. There's a central office which is where I work and
we issue little tiny bits of number space to our members and they then
issue longer number strings of numbers to their members. That's how that
works. We're going to be consistent with the work that's gone on US customs
and border and UN transparency protocol.

Phil Archer: And you can see some of the bits of GS1 where we are confident
that it's expect these things to be available. In order to introduce this
and make this part of what GS1 does all day every day is an enormous amount
of work that will take years not just because you got to educate People
have got to understand why it's important. They've got to just do it and
feel confident about it. Heavens above moving from one-dimensional barcodes
to two-dimensional barcodes. I spend most of my time explaining what a URI
is to a lot of people. it's endless. So, the amount of work to make this
part of what GS1 does is huge. But, we've made a start and that's what we
hope to do. After September, we're going to be gathering evidence. Is it
useful? Does it actually add value to the system? We believe it will, but I
need proof. Is it practical? Should Let's hope. Maybe it's not. Get that
experience.

Phil Archer: and then in less than a year's time we can then decide whether
to pitch to the management to make it more of a thing. And it's possible
that I want to say on this occasion that later on this year we might be and
I hope we are open to taking part in more work with other people and maybe
this is a place to find some of those partners. I've talked a lot. The
slides are available and there are links as well on there but I will stop
talking now and see if anything there prompts any questions. Thank you very
much indeed. I'm trying to stop.
00:35:00

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you so much, opening the floor for questions.
Man, I see you have your hand up. Would you like to go ahead?

Manu Sporny: Yes, absolutely.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: And I put a link in chat to the presentation.

Phil Archer: Thank you.

Manu Sporny: Wonderful. thank you, That was wonderful as always and you are
all always so kind to the community. we also you a huge debt of gratitude
the work that you did at W3C to get link data further along the chairing of
various groups that were fundamental to the standards we have today you did
all of that and we really appreciate that.

Manu Sporny: So I think that the most critical question is I totally hear
you on the crawl and that there's this kind of digital credential
fragmenting going on in the space and we would all like to have just one
thing that we could just focus on implementing…

Phil Archer: Yep.

Manu Sporny: but as you know there's disagreements on what the best path
forward is right what can this group specifically help with in that
capacity? Right now we have a list of specifications that are standards
that we're incubating. So for example you mentioned render method. I'm sure
you're going to go out with something there but that is one of the things
we're trying to really hone in on and settle.

Manu Sporny: There's work on verifiable credential barcode. So the ability
to take a verifiable credential and put it into a QR code which is a 2D
barcode.

Manu Sporny: There's work on that that we could do. and clearly all that
stuff is I mean it's a bit cart before the horse. You've got to make the
decision to adopt verifiable credentials at scale before any of those other
things matter. But as you also know it takes years for us to get those
things through the standardization process. So what can this community work
on concretely to help help you and…

Phil Archer: Yep. I don't think there's a single thing I can point to and…

Manu Sporny: and GS1 decide to go on to the walk stage?

Phil Archer: say if you did that everything would be great. I think all of
you I mean collectively are doing is what's necessary and of course
everybody learns as they go.

Phil Archer: There are things now that are seen as normal that would have
been seen as way off the scale a while ago and other things have been
dropped and other thing and just one does evolve. I imagine most of you
work for commercial companies. You do what your customers tell Everyone
does. You have to. In our case we have 118 customers that is 118 bits of
GS1 around the world who are members of our community. the render method
thing is important because it's the thing that worries me most in that if
you do a demo for somebody and the person you're talking to is
non-technical and has no idea what a digital signature is or what a
verification step is, all he or she is going to see is, " that looks good."
And they couldn't care less how it works.

Phil Archer: And so the render method sort of it almost covers up the fact
that there's that verification going on. And yet that's the important bit
without it and so something I struggle with and I have struggled we since
started down this line ages ago. How do you show somebody a simple demo of
a VC and DID interacting to do all the proofs and the control and
everything else that you want to do in a way that shows that non-technical
person why it's better than sticking a green check mark on a website. Why
that green check mark is not what you're showing them. Because It looks the
same and it feels the same to them.

Phil Archer: in my work I'm very careful I don't want a demo app because
all people are going to see is that's an app I've got 1700 apps on my phone
already I don't need another one so I think manu that the answer to your
question is there is no single answer it's carrying on what we're doing
evolving accepting change accepting cherished ideas may need to be
jettisoned accept new ideas that's why I think web could be a really good
one but I don't know because the industry will decide, help us show that
it's not just a green check mark on a web page, cuz anyone can do that.
00:40:00

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you, Phil. Mano, did you have a followup or are
you good?

Manu Sporny: No. Good for now.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you. I did have a question for you,…

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Phil. you shared a report earlier in the year and I
know some of the findings were in the presentation that you just linked and
you got quite a bit of feedback on that report. Are you expecting to be
making any updates to it or…

Phil Archer: Mhm. Yeah.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: or is it locked in so to speak?

Phil Archer: I don't know whether we'll come back to that specific report…

Phil Archer: but what we will be doing and must do is to publish stuff as
soon as we can that we have that we think is ready. I'm afraid we simply
don't work in the lovely open way that W3C does. that's not to say I'm
hiding one of the links that's in the PDF of the slides just now is to the
data model that's being done in GitHub. Anyone can see that and comment on
that. so yes, the feedback is helpful and we will be publishing more and
we're very happy to be challenged on any of the decisions that we have made.

Phil Archer: As I say, we're being very tentative about it. And I could
imagine, to answer your direct question, I can imagine that we would
publish something that says this is why we made the technical choices we
made and this is what we think is clear and this is where we're kind of
hedging our bits and we're not quite sure. So I don't think that particular
assessment would be updated. But I do think it would be perfectly I think
we must publish something before long that talks about our choices of
technology and why we chose this particular flavor rather than another and
be ready as I say to change again because things are coming in all the time
suggesting that we should do things differently.

Phil Archer: we're acutely aware that because of the position we hold the
decisions we make need to be done with care because other people will look
at us in the way that we look at them everyone looks at each other right
everybody wants to be second everybody wants to be yes I'm going to jump on
that bandwagon and so we're kind of interested and we're conscious of how
careful we need to be so if we do make those technical choices is which of
course we have to do. We will justify them. I think that's probably the
best I can promise you right now.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you talked a little bit about the fragmentation
in the ecosystem, You've been in the standard space for quite a while.

Phil Archer: Yeah. I wish I'm an old man now.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Do you have any thoughts on how we as a community can
help tackle that fragmentation? Any ways we can fix the problem, so to

Phil Archer: When I was younger and started down this line, I kind of
thought, you publish a standard and everyone's going to do it and then you
realize that that's just not how it works, The people who work on the
standard will implement it and they'll use it and they really couldn't care
less what you've done in your standard because they're going to do theirs.
I guess the obvious answer is interrupt an interrupt between I guess the
universal did resolver helps a lot because what's sent back the did do
itself is common to whatever the method may be. the greater the convergence
the better. it would remove one of the big hesitations that we've had and
I'm sure other people have as well.

Phil Archer: but I'm conscious that convergence is happening. this
community is converging on fewer variances than there used to be. That's
good for all of us. It's difficult. It's hard to let go of something that
you put your life into, that you put your heart and soul into. I think
increasingly what I try and do in our work is to accept openly and happily
that other people are going to do things their own way and look for ways to
make connections. So, can I take u an SD jot and press a button and out
comes the equivalent integrity proofs version of the same thing? That's not
easy. I'm aware that they don't actually interoperate that way.
00:45:00

Phil Archer: But a thing that did that universal translation system, that
would be great. But I don't know if it's possible.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you so much. did anybody else have any other
questions for Pel knowing that we don't really have a queue right now?

Phil Archer: I'll tell you one little anecdote. when I was on the W3C team,
there was a bloke in Virginia jumping up and down saying, "We got to do
this thing called verifiable claims." And it passed from one member of the
W3C to another. I think I was the fourth one. I was certainly the third
member of the team at the time to handle the request from Manu and the
people who were closest to him at the time. And I remember that
conversation saying to Manu, as I said to many people before and since,
it's what every standards body will say to you, I know you want this. Who
else wants it? It's you and who else? Right?

Phil Archer: That's always the question with the standard when you go to an
STO and say we'd like to turn this into a standard. You and who else? And I
was delighted. I mean, I wanted to be convinced and Manu, of course, did
convince me. So, one of my proudest things is to say, I'm the guy that
pushed W3C to say yes to this community. And I'm so glad that happened
because boy, have you done some fantastic work and it's really important.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you so much.

Phil Archer: You got your hand up.

Manu Sporny: And absolutely for that we are forever thankful to you. I
don't think a lot of people knew that Phil which so I'm really glad that
you brought that up.

Manu Sporny: Yes Phil was absolutely the staff contact at W3C that made
verifiable credentials live at the organization. I did have a question
around the WebVH stuff that you mentioned.

Phil Archer: Yeah. Yeah.

Manu Sporny: So there are 200 plus DID methods that some people think
that's wonderful others think it's the worst thing ever. but it looks like
you've really kind of focused in on a did method two but related did web
and did webvh and I think you'll be happy to know that webvh is one of the
did methods that we are proposing to standardize. It's got quite a bit of
support so it feels like a very solid choice.

Phil Archer: I hurt. Yeah. Yeah.

Manu Sporny: what about and…

Phil Archer: Yep.

Manu Sporny: and I think we've seen other people in the ecosystem picking
did web as the starting mechanism. the downside there of course is that
it's not necessarily a fully decentralized method but it kind of bridges
the gap. It's sort of decentralized enough. It depends on DNS which some
people don't like but the modifications with did webv make it much more
decentralized and trustworthy where you do not have to just anchor to the
DNS you can anchor to other things like you said there's this nice who is
thing so what set of features in did webvh were specifically of interest to
GS1 why did webh instead of just did web did, JWK why didn't you pick a
Bitcoin or Ethereum based method?

Manu Sporny: What was the…

Phil Archer: It comes down to simplicity and…

Manu Sporny: if you could kind of go through some of the thinking in that
decision that would be helpful.

Phil Archer: ease of implementation. I can think of all the people across
GS1 globally that I know, I can think of one who thinks blockchain isn't a
waste of time and and it's not so it's very unlikely we would choose a
blockchainbased method. of course, all things, we can be convinced, we can
be told we're wrong, we can be told we're stupid. We're again very open to
that. So we're sort of instinctively not going to do that. The simplicity
of the web and then good, it's got features now. That means that all those
weaknesses which have been addressed.

Phil Archer: At least they appear to be addressed to the point where it's
probably good enough. it's clearly better than just did web. but by the
way, it's backwards compatible or you can do them both. That's helpful.
It's just the simplicity thing really comes down to that. Now, are there
other simple methods that we could use? We're open to it. Say that the door
is absolutely not shut. It's not a definite decision. we're too early in
the stage in the development for this. Maybe it' be years before we did
that and the whole point is you can do different ones. So maybe we could
change in the future as well. But I think the short answer to your question
manu is simplicity and ease of implementation.
00:50:00

Phil Archer: And I apologize for all the people I just offended by being
rude about blockchain. Sorry.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you.

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you so much, Phil. does anyone have any other
questions for Phil?

Mahmoud Alkhraishi: Thank you so much for your presentation. Have a
wonderful rest of your day, everybody, and talk to you soon. Bye.

Phil Archer: Thank you.

Phil Archer: Thanks again. Bye everyone.
Meeting ended after 00:51:31 👋

*This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors.
People can also change the text after it was created.*