Re: Restarting work on the zCap (Authorization Capabilities) work item

Filip,

Er wait, what do you mean by AI-synthesized content? I don't think any of
that was mentioned in this thread. Or did I miss something?

On Thu, Apr 2, 2026 at 2:39 PM Filip Kolarik <filip26@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Dmitri,
> zcaps is quite an intriguing concept, enabling features that are hard to
> achieve with traditional ACLs in a scalable and manageable way, offering a
> different set of trade-offs and fitting well within a decentralized
> ecosystem. I’m definitely interested and happy to help if the goal is to
> formalize this approach in order to support future adoption and
> interoperability.
>
> However, given the current state of software engineering, I’m not
> interested in reviewing AI-synthesized content generated in seconds and
> shared by someone else. That would be a waste of time; deliberate consensus
> engineering.
>
> Best regards,
> Filip
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipkolarik/
>
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2026 at 2:07 AM Dmitri Zagidulin <dzagidulin@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Oh, one other piece of reading that might be helpful to people, to
>> refresh their memory on zCaps etc. I've been working on a zCap Developer
>> Guide over at https://github.com/interop-alliance/zcap-developer-guide
>> (which I'd be happy to donate to the CCG, if there's any interest).
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 1, 2026 at 8:04 PM Dmitri Zagidulin <dzagidulin@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> A few weeks ago on the CCG call discussing the various work items, I
>>> brought up the subject of zCaps (Authorization Capabilities), which is an
>>> existing (if somewhat dormant) CCG work item, at
>>> https://github.com/w3c-ccg/zcap-spec. And several people have expressed
>>> interest in working on that spec again.
>>>
>>> In parallel, the Delegated Authorization Task Force of the Trusted AI
>>> Agent WG at DIF has been evaluating various delegated authorization
>>> specifications (including zCaps, various OAuth-based specs, UCANs, GNAP,
>>> and many others), and has determined that there's not many authorization
>>> options out there with chained delegation ability (basically, zCaps
>>> (JSON-based) and UCANs (DAG-CBOR-based) are the only ones). This is
>>> especially relevant and timely due to all the momentum and activity behind
>>> agent-based development, and the lack of authorization and guardrails in
>>> that area.
>>>
>>> To that end, I'd like to restart work on the zCap spec here at the CCG.
>>> The current spec version is v0.3, but it's been out of sync with the way
>>> zcaps have been deployed to production by the TruAge project, Digital
>>> Bazaar, DCC, and others.
>>> So our first goal would be to just update the spec to v0.4, to match the
>>> existing implementations.
>>>
>>> It would be also great to start work on version v0.5, as several new use
>>> cases and feature requests have come up in the meantime.
>>>
>>> So, couple of questions of the group:
>>>
>>> 1. Would anyone like to help edit the spec?
>>>
>>> 2. Would folks be interested in a zCap task force call, either monthly
>>> or bi-weekly, to work on the spec?
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>