Renaming the Verifiable Issuers/Verifiers spec

Hi all,

The group that is working on the specification currently known as
"Verifiable Issuers and Verifiers" has made significant progress over
the past several months to the point where the specification feels
like it has a fairly stable shape. Stable enough to rename the
specification, anyway.

The specification has progressed to be able to allow an individual,
organization, collective, or nation state to:

1. Publish a set of recognized entities (identifiers, legal name,
logo, website, description, etc.)
2. For each recognized entity, also include a list of recognized
actions that the entity is known to perform (such as "issue a college
degree that matches this JSON Schema").
3. For each recognized entity, specify that the entity is also
recognized in an external "trust list" format such as EU ETSI Trust
Lists, X509 Certificate Authority lists, or another
RecognizedEntityCredential.

You can view some examples of what a recognized entity credential
looks like here:

https://w3c-ccg.github.io/verifiable-issuers-verifiers/#example-a-set-of-known-universities-in-a-particular-nation

We want to rename the specification as it has outgrown the current
title. We want the new title to quickly convey that the specification
provides the capabilities to achieve the three things above. We don't
want to use words like "trust", "authorized", "list", or anything that
conveys centralization or an uneven power dynamic of any kind. The
current proposed titles are:

Recognized Actions
Verifiable Recognition

We're going to collect suggestions through the CCG mailing list, and
then send a ranked choice poll out to the mailing list so that we can
get some good data before we pick a new name. We want the name to be
accurate enough, but also resonate with people that are not familiar
with all of the minutiae of this community.

With all that said: What other titles do you think we should consider?

-- manu

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

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2026 01:47:55 UTC