Verifiable Credentials Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2024-02-07

Attendees

Present: Brent Zundel, Greg Bernstein, Ivan Herman, Ted Thibodeau Jr., Manu Sporny, David Chadwick, Gabe Cohen, Wesley Smith, Paul Dietrich, Dave Longley, Will Abramson, Dmitri Zagidulin, Phillip Long, Steve McCown

Regrets:

Guests:

Chair: Brent Zundel

Scribe(s): Paul Dietrich

Brent Zundel: Welcome and introductions.
… agenda is to have a conversation about schedule moving forward. Another conversation about the meeting times. Finally work item updates, PRs and issue processing. Anyone proposing changes?

Manu Sporny: Please put aside 5 minutes for the VC API maintainers.

Brent Zundel: will do.
… VC data mode is officially a candidate recommendation.

1. schedule moving forward.

Brent Zundel: schedule moving forward … with the core data model in CR a period of review begins. Once that completes, we will have feedback from implementations. Already have a set of issues that are being triaged.
… These will go into a second CR snapshot. With the charter ending in June, its highly likely we will need to seek an extension.
… there are two ways to do this. One is asking for an extension to complete ongoing work. The other is a re-chartering which is harder. We will likely seek an administrative extension.
… We expect around May to go into a second CR and ask for an extension to address any additional changes and the administrative work to get this to proposed recommendation.
… In order to qualify for this extension, we need to be in CR with everything else and a 2nd CR on the core data mode.
… What that mean specifically, is Bitstring Status List, which is ready after horizontal review, VC Jose Cose, which needs more love, but in a 3 months window I believe we are capable of getting in into CR in 3 months.
… Icing on the cake would be BBS which I understand is almost ready for CR.
… questions?

Ivan Herman: There will probably be a second CR for the data integrity Document as well. The automatic extension is typically granted, but only once. After this we will have to re-charter.

David Chadwick: on Data Integrity. There is a 4th spec JSON web signatures. I thought this was different than VC Jose Cose. There are 5 mentioned in the folder.

Brent Zundel: Data Integrity, DI EDDSA, DI ECDSA, DI BBS, and VC Jose Cose.

2. consistent meeting time?

Brent Zundel: Last week were there fewer people than this week. Goal of the afternoon slot is to make it less painful for asia pacific timezone. For the most part they have not been attending. Should we change the meeting time to be the same every week? The proposal is to stick with this time moving forward.
… this time was alternating with the XX working group. Should we keep the same time or alternate?

Manu Sporny: +1 to stop alternating and keep the current morning time slot.
… The other option would be to make it 9 am eastern to capture europe and asia pacific.

Brent Zundel: any opposition… I will discuss with Ivan and notify the group by email with calendar updates.

3. Work Item Status Updates/PRs.

Brent Zundel: Please jump on the queue and give us a status update.

3.1. maintenance volunteer reminder.

Manu Sporny: maintenance volunteer reminder for VC specs dir.
… Requested volunteers to maintain the VC specs directory. Required 2 of 3 review and only getting one review. Lucking lots of volunteers (17). Just held a meeting to run people through what it looks like.

Manu Sporny: See Video recording of the meeting:.

Manu Sporny: we have a list of linkedin profile and all are highly qualified. Brent and Gabe were in attendance. Next step is a question to the chair. What do we want to do. We can send out a message to CCG VCWG and working group to ask if there are any objections. If there are no objections after a few weeks.
… we could assign them as reviewers. What is the next step.

Ivan Herman: not good practice with GDPR to send linked in profiles to the mailing list. Not a GDPR expert, just worried about it.

Gabe Cohen: it is all public info.

Brent Zundel: This is public info on the internet.

Manu Sporny: we are not sending email addresses. We are just sending the linked in profile.
… we are not going to send email addresses. GDPR doesn’t talk about info that is available publicly. All of these profiles are viewable by anyone. Volunteers provide that information.
… The other option is that staff and chairs do the vetting and make a statement on whether they agree that the individuals are adequate (like invited experts) if we are concerned about the profiles.

Ivan Herman: I don’t know what I would base it on. What you propose works. No reason for brent and I to be a bottleneck.

Brent Zundel: I agree and please contact chairs in the event of concerns.

Manu Sporny: I will take the action to do this.

Ivan Herman: I will put this conversation on a subtopic.

Phillip Long: pdl-asu has joined #vcwg.

Brent Zundel: back to work items.

3.2. VC-JOSE-COSE.

Gabe Cohen: There are 14 pre-CR issues with 6 PRs. Mostly blocked by Mike who has been travelling last week and this week. Anticipate more progress next week, but requesting that folks review the PRs.

Gabe Cohen: open PRs needing review: https://github.com/w3c/vc-jose-close/pull/227, https://github.com/w3c/vc-jose-close/pull/226, https://github.com/w3c/vc-jose-close/pull/225, https://github.com/w3c/vc-jose-close/pull/220, https://github.com/w3c/vc-jose-close/pull/219.

3.3. BBS.

Greg Bernstein: 2 open PRs, 21 Issues. Recently just merged a bunch of PRs. Would like to get more reviews on PRs. BBS is a subtle thing that helps with privacy and we are getting more interest from IETF, governments and countries. Trying to get more review. Progress is good. Feedback from all horizontal review. Addressed internationalization.

Manu Sporny: We’re still missing security WG review, right?

Greg Bernstein: scrubbing down and getting implementations together. Would have liked to have more review on PRs, but we are moving forwards. Anyone interested, I can bring you up to speed and encourage reviews.

Brent Zundel: feel free to use editorial powers to add people as reviewers at your discretion.

Greg Bernstein: Thanks to Ted for reviewing and revising the text.

Brent Zundel: Any other questions before we move to PRs. Onward.

3.4. Updated section on semantic interoperability (issues #1217 and #1210) (pr vc-data-model#1420)

See github pull request vc-data-model#1420.

Manu Sporny: A number of PRs for VCDM. Huge thanks to ivan for raising a number of them. One we should talk about today (1420). Ivan raised.
… a question remains. We just entered CR. I think this PR is normative. It does not impact software implementations but does impact vocabulary. Wonder if this triggers a second CR.

Ivan Herman: AFAIK, a new draft with normative changes are OK provided that at some point in time we publish a snapshot with these changes. I don’t think there is any problem with these few normative changes here. We know we will republish a snapshot sometime in May. I think we are fine.

Brent Zundel: +1 to Ivan.

Manu Sporny: That is my read as well. I’ve started tracking this with a normative label so we know we have done a second CR triggering thing and that we can summarize these changes. If you raise a PR, please try to classify as Editorial or Normative.
… also keep in mind that any normative change needs to be communicated with the test suite workers.

Ivan Herman: If a change is normative in a serious way, then the editor of the PR should add an item to the list of changes at the end of the document or we will forget them.

Manu Sporny: yes, +1 to that.

Brent Zundel: this is something reviews should remind when examining PRs.
… Any other core data model status?

Manu Sporny: A number of editorial changes are out there and folks should pay attention.

4. VCDM Issue Processing.

Brent Zundel: https://github.com/w3c/vc-data-model/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-asc.

4.1. (Editorial) Use a three level deep TOC in the VCDM spec (issue vc-data-model#1306)

See github issue vc-data-model#1306.

Brent Zundel: Right now we have 2 levels in the TOC and ivan is recommending 3. How do folks feel?

Manu Sporny: I dont like the three levels. It makes the TOC messy.

Ivan Herman: I have major difficulties finding stuff in this spec.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: If we have a 2 level TOC we should make the document two levels deep. unless we add an index.

Brent Zundel: is anyone willing to do this work?

Manu Sporny: I can do the work. I am trying to see how sad it makes me. You can assign it to me.

Brent Zundel: with your statement we don’t have consensus.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: pretty sure the work require is changing a line in the HTML source.

Brent Zundel: Ted are you volunteering.

Manu Sporny: Already done this. They have updated respec to make the TOC items smaller. I’m ok with this change.

4.2. add explicit notes where terminology in the spec diverges from things elsewhere (issue vc-data-model#1301)

See github issue vc-data-model#1301.

Brent Zundel: This is related to the other terminology issues. We had other discussions about evidence and NIST, and it seemed the consensus of the group is that we have defined terminology in the specifications and folks that are concerned with the differences can do their own comparison.
… it feels like this is an unending task; what is the scope of everywhere else.

Dave Longley: +1 to Brent.

Manu Sporny: agrees that feels like unending work. The places where we have don’t this does not seem to improve the spec. Even within NIST documents they are not consistent with their terminology.
… sometimes we can all this out, but picking NIST is arbitrary; this is a global standard. I would like to stop doing this type of work unless its unclear.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: There are two flavors of this. They way this is written, its about other organizations using other terms with the same meaning as a term we are using. Such as verifier and Relying party. That is never ending.
… in the case where we use a term in common use elsewhere and the definitions diverge, I think it does make sense to say what we mean.
… I don’t think that is common, nor that we need to search them out. just where we run into it.

Brent Zundel: my read is that there is not appetite to do this and we should mark this pending close. Any object?
… hearing no objections, marked as pending close.

4.3. address normative statements in non-normative sections (issue vc-data-model#1299)

See github issue vc-data-model#1299.

Brent Zundel: maybe this is unnecessary since we have a PR to delete this section (use cases and requirements).

Manu Sporny: I think removing the section addresses the issue. If this affects any other sections, we should open another PR and be more specific. +1 to close.

Brent Zundel: 1429 is the other PR that deletes this section.
… marking as pending close.

4.4. Make Section 4.1 non-normative (issue vc-data-model#1310)

See github issue vc-data-model#1310.

Brent Zundel: making getting started section non normative. It is already marked as such, so I think this is done. Suggests moving it to the introduction. or deleted. Comments? We could close as its marked non normative.

Manu Sporny: getting started is in a section called basic concepts. Moving it to introduction doesn’t make sense as its conceptually high level. Getting started is about syntax and a first example.

Ivan Herman: I think its fine as it is. There is no question about normative-ness.

Brent Zundel: proposal is to close the issue because the section is marked non-normative. If folks object, speak up.
… no objections, closing this after the call.

4.5. Section 3 “Core Data Model” clean up (issue vc-data-model#1311)

See github issue vc-data-model#1311.

Brent Zundel: its not entirely clear to me what the action is. This was taken from one of the first review from Jeff.

Ivan Herman: This was from October. Since then, this subsection has been re-written with new diagrams and new explanations. I think that the issue is now moot.

Manu Sporny: underscore what ivan said. This has been addressed by previous PRs.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: I think this is largely addressed but we should go back for a re-review.

Brent Zundel: seems like he is asking for more detail in the introduction.

Manu Sporny: He didn’t realize we had solve the graph quoting problem. We have solved it in dataset canonicalization. He was not aware that it was now possible. We should not expose readers to that in the beginning.

Phillip Long: Like talking when to lawyers should be careful what we ask for… since it’s been rewritten anyway (largely) it’s addressed.

Brent Zundel: proposal is that we think it has been addressed.

Ted Thibodeau Jr.: But this needs to bounce back to Jeffrey.

Brent Zundel: we are going to close as addressed but I don’t know if Jeffrey wants us to reach out on each issue. Maybe when we close all of them we can ask for a re-review.

Ivan Herman: Definitely do the latter. So many things have changed as a result of his PRs. Going back individually to each issue doesn’t make sense. Best to ask for a new review from scratch if he wants.

Brent Zundel: This will close after call.

4.6. Add validation to lifecycle details image (issue vc-data-model#1331)

See github issue vc-data-model#1331.

Brent Zundel: it was closed as completed but Joe re-opened it. I don’t know what is going on with this PR.

Manu Sporny: we don’t have this in the image now. We have verify but we don;t have validate. This is not done.

Manu Sporny: See the diagram’s location.

Brent Zundel: It would be a loop from verifier to verifier that says validate?

Manu Sporny: I don’t know but I would expect something like that.

Brent Zundel: Suggest we add a loop from verifiers to verifier that says validate. Anyone want to volunteer?

Ivan Herman: I am not volunteering. but it may be a good opportunity to look at all the figures. We have problems if the document is seen in dark mode.

Brent Zundel: I suggest opening an issue to track image dark-mode compatibility and raised separately.

Ivan Herman: agreed.

Brent Zundel: did not hear anyone volunteer. If no one volunteers, its not going to happen.
… We are on track with a small extension. Pay atttention as meeting times may change. Closing the meeting.