DID Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2019-10-01

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Manu Sporny, Brent Zundel, Daniel Burnett, Amy Guy, Dave Longley, Dudley Collinson, David Trang, Michael Jones, Joe Andrieu, Christopher Allen, Grant Noble, christopher allen, Adrian Gropper, Matthew Collier, Troy Ronda, Kenneth Ebert, Oliver Terbu, Ganesh Annan, Yancy Ribbens

Regrets: Phil Archer, David Ezell, Kim Duffy

Guests:

Chair: Daniel Burnett

Scribe(s): Manu Sporny, Amy Guy

Content:

1. Agenda Review, Introductions, Re-introductions

Daniel Burnett: The agenda for today is pretty simple… agenda review, introductions, then reintros
… The Agenda today is fairly short, we are going to be introducing ourselves, might take a bit of time…
… Hi, my name is Dan Burnett (one of the Chairs)… Brent (co-chair) will cover working mode… with any time that we have left, we’ll be looking at assigned issues.

Manu Sporny: before we go into assigning issues, I’d like to go into the organizational work that has already been done. Brent and I got to gather last week to do some things we’d like to let the group know about

Daniel Burnett: Why don’t we add that right after intros…
… any other changes to Agenda?
… Intros next, might ask you to do some stuff on IRC queueing…

2. Introductions

Daniel Burnett: I’d like to go down the WebEx list, when I call your name, say your name slowly, say who you are representing, and what your interest in the work is.
… Hi my name is Dan Burnett, I am in the standards team at ConsenSys, and I have been involved in Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifier work for a number of years… I was inspired by some early presentation by Manu, on the type of world we want to be able to see w/ VCs and DIDs… lets us control information about our identity.

Ivan Herman: Hi, my name is Ivan Herman, I am the W3C Staff Contact for this WG, I was for several years, the head of the Semantic Web activity at W3C, involved with many different things, RDFa, JSON-LD, also staff contact for JSON-LD WG, and of course, the problem of having a clear identity for just about anything is important, primarily I’m here to make your life easier for W3C work.
… On a procedural thing, if you have not yet come into IRC, please do, I can then see your IRC handle, which I can use to improve my scribe tool dataset. :)

Daniel Burnett: Link to IRC is always in the Agenda email.

Adrian Gropper: Hi I am Andrian Gropper, I am CTO of a small non-profit called Patient Privacy Rights, I am a privacy engineer, and have been participating in VC and DID work for many years. My project is a reference implementation of the various standards in the context of health records in healthcare, also a physician but have not practiced.

Amy Guy: Hi, I am Amy Guy, with Digital Bazaar, with a background in social web stuff, worked in W3C, primary interest is in avoiding a surveillance capitalist dystopian future. :)

Brent Zundel: Hi, Brent Zundel, I get to co-Chair this group w/ Dan, grateful for opportunity to do so, work for Evernym, focused on Self Sovereign Identity, share Amy’s ideals on avoiding dystopian futures.

Christopher Allen: My name is Christopher Allen, I’ve been in the field of Internet Security and digital currency since the late 1980s, I am co-author of SSL/TLS standard, representing Blockchain Commons as Executive Director. Blockchain Commons is a social benefit corporation for focusing on Blockchain and Internet infrastructure needs. We coordinate resources from a variety of companies to support blockchain and Internet security. One of my particular focuses are area of privacy and anonymity… want to avoid dystopian state… want to facilitate better collaboration.
… If you can’t trust the people you’re with, you can’t collaborate with them.

Dave Longley: Hi my name is Dave Longley, I am the CTO of Digital Bazaar and co-inventor of DIDs. Been working in this space for over a decade now, very interested in making sure that people can express their own independent existence on the Web and elsewhere, be able to prove things about themselves and others.

David Trang: Hi, David Trang, I work for University Admission Center in Australia, work with credentials on a daily basis, still new to DID and SSI concepts, but done a few PoCs with Hyperledger Indy, I’m hooked, want to look into this more, work with Dudley Collinson.

Dudley Collinson: Like David, I’m at University Admission Centre, non-profit but work on behalf of many Universities… in early talks w/ sector as a whole wrt. How we can change credentialling systems, credit management, very interested in same concepts around other, minimal disclosure where needed, getting adoption of this type of tech. We can roll this out on national level, very much interested in this tech.
… would like our internal systems to offer better services.

Daniel Burnett: Thank you for joining us, and especially so in the middle of your night… we appreciate it.

Ganesh Annan: Hi my name is Ganesh Annan, I’m from Digital Bazaar, my focus is on integrating VCs into our products at Digital Bazaar, following this space for many years now, also involved in VC group as well.

Grant Noble: Hi I’m Grant Noble, I work in the standards team at Pegasys, ConsenSys company, I blame Dan Burnett entirely for getting me interested in this work and the benefits they can bring to society as a whole. :)

Joe Andrieu: Hi Joe Andrieu, with Legendary Requirements, co-Chair of Credentials Community Group, was inspired at ID2020, shifted focus to identity requirements, focused on rubrics, words matter, identity matters, and I feel as society moves online, we need to protect human rights and dignity at scale.

Kenneth Ebert: Hi Ken Ebert, with Sovrin Foundation, non-profit working in identity space working on privacy and security, also work with standards groups, worked in Verifiable Credentials group, also participate in Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Aries, worked in medical fields before medical records analysis.

Manu Sporny: I’m Manu Sporny, CEO of Digital Bazaar. A number of folks from Digital Bazaar have mentioned we’re interested in building products and tools on top of VCs and DIDs that preserve human dignity, not only in nations such as those in Europe and the US but emerging nations as well, we see this technology as broadly applicable to all humankind as they come online and we want to make sure that people continue to have sovreignty and control over their identity as we build the next generation web and internet

Matthew Collier: Hi, Matt Collier with Digital Bazaar, I am a software engineer that works on Veres One DID Ledger stack.

Michael Jones: Hi I’m Mike Jones, Standards Architect at Microsoft, author of a number of things in the Identity space such as OAuth, OpenID Connect, JWT, WebAuthn. I believe some of the stuff I’ve worked on has been adopted because we made simple things simple, so developers gravitate towards the results. I and Microsoft want to see people have control of their identity, a lot of my contributions are going to be around making things as simple as possible, one way to do things, increase interop, increase adoption.

Yancy Ribbens: Hi Yancy Ribbens, I’m currently representing myself, and individual, I recently was with Credly but since the end of the Verifiable Credentials work have moved on to pursue other issues. Through Verifiable Credentials work, became very interested in SSI tech that enables individuals own their own identity data.

Oliver Terbu: Hello Oliver Terbu, based in Berlin Germany, represent uPort and ConsenSys, worked in digital identity for over a decade, government and financial sector. Involved in ISO WGs, such as drivers licenses, also co-Chairing Authentication WG in DIF. As I represent uPort, decentralized identity platform on Ethereum, do products based on VCs, want standard for DIDs.

Ted Thibodeau: Hi Ted Thibodeau, with OpenLink Software, been involved with DIDs in a lot of different ways before it had that label on it, WebId, still active in Credentials Community Group… you know me, or you will! :-)

Troy Ronda: Hi, Troy Ronda, Chief Scientist with SecureKey Technologies, I’m interested in implementations, involved in Hyperledger Aries, with Go implementation.

Daniel Burnett: Did we miss anyone?

Ivan Herman: Nope, we got everyone.

Daniel Burnett: Each week we’ll ask if there is anyone new on the call, after a month or two, we’ll be asking about reintroductions, just to help recent joiners to get to know the rest of us.

3. IRC usage

Daniel Burnett: The next item on the agenda, one of the inserted items.

Manu Sporny: for those of you who are new, we do a lot of work during the call in IRC
… IRC is Internet Relay Chat, it’s a text chat channel, W3C uses it extensively, and we take transcriptions of the calls <– like this
… There’s some other commands that are helpful for participants to know
… Mostly around queuing. Whenever you want to talk, you have to make a point or you want to respond to someone, the standard way to do that is:
… q+ puts you on the queue, and youw ait until the chairs ack you
… and then it’s your time to talk
… if you want to - sometimes there are long delays between putting yourself on the queue and when it’s time to talk - so it’s useful to put a little note when you q to remind yourself what you were going to talk about
… then when the chairs ack me it will remind me what I wanted to talk about
… that sounds funny now but as the group goes on it’s one of those useful things
… That’s really the only command you need to know
… Be sure to respect the queue. Don’t jump in front of other people who ar eon the queue. Put yourself on and wait your turn. If you start doing that or people go back and forth a lot the chairs will jump in and remind you to use the queue

Christopher Allen: The important keyword in “q+ to ask” is the TO, aka “q+ TO ask…”

Manu Sporny: The other thing to note is that everything that we say during these calls is scribed
… People type out what everyone is saying. You can ask the scribe ‘please don’t scribe this’ or ‘this is off record’ and they will not write what you say. Please use it sparingly, we try to work as openly and transparently as possible
… So make sure things that aren’t scribed are sensitive
… While the meetings go on over the next couple of months you’ll see other commands people use to do fancy things

Christopher Allen: The /me command results will also not be transcribed

Ivan Herman: You can also use the “/me” command to put something off record.

Daniel Burnett: If you make comments relevant to the conversation, the Chairs might ask you to put it on record… /me is reserved for things that are not relevant.
… “q+ to …” is how you do a reminder.
… There is no magic… just “q+ to” …
… Anything else on this before we move on to next topic.

4. What has already occurred

Ivan Herman: See Github Repository for the spec

Manu Sporny: For those of you who were at the f2f in japan, the group decided to adopt the DID spec that the Credentials CG had been working on. over the last week or two brent has largely moved all the issues over, the spec text has been moved over, new pull requests have been raised on the working group version of the DID spec
… the credentials cg version of that spec we still need to coordinate with the CCG chairs to archive the old version of the spec
… The spec has been moved over and it’s now ready to have PRs raised on it
… During the editors call last week brent and I quickly touched base and brent and dan felt it would be good to mark some of these issues that had been raised with markers like ‘discuss’ or ‘editorial’. those are the only two tags we have in the repo, we’ll create new tags as necessary, ivan has noted there are some useful for w3c to have in there. For right now we were very leniant in the tags we created. I added high priority which means if we can schedule discussion time for it we should because people are waiting on a decision or it’s a quick discussion we can get a resolution on
… there are 3 items right now tagged as high priority. The rest are editorial or discuss. Discuss means we’re going to have to talk about it as a WG to come to some kind of resolution so the editors can put a fix in the spec
… That’s it for now but what this means is that more than likely starting next week we’ll be able to start having discussion and processing issues and things like that. Since we’re going to go into work mode next I won’t go into that. Any questions on the stuff that’s been done?

5. Working Mode

Brent Zundel: Chairs and Editors have discussed Working Mode for the group.
… Everyone will scribe - some can’t always do it, but for the most part, scribing is an important way to contribute, and we expect everyone to step up and do it.
… We have a scribe list, we will be going down that list and will be asking people to scribe… if you haven’t done this before, don’t worry, we’ll help you.
… We all pitch in where we can, scribing is an important way to contribute.
… If we try to get everything done during our 1 hour call, and don’t get anything done during the rest of the week, we need to raise issues, process issues, have conversations outside of call time. Everything that needs a change needs a PR.
… Some PRs/issues will be given labels, goal is to move forward, arrive on consensus, very minimal time on calls to process issues… we need to spend time we have to triage issues, solve issues asynchronously, we will have to use time outside calls to make progress.
… it’s up to editors to merge right away or discuss, wait for 48 hours, it’s up to them since they pay for making the wrong decision (mostly)
… We don’t need to be process heavy until we need to be process heavy. Normative changes in spec, we have a test suite, we should have it as a policy to include PRs for test suite that mirror changes to spec. As we change spec, we should change suite that tests the spec.

Daniel Burnett: I think that’s good, just know that we’re trying to restrict the call time to triage and schedule in advance discussions as needed.

Michael Jones: I’d like to understand the 48 hour review period?

Brent Zundel: If we make a decision on the call, merge a PR or close an issue, we allow 48 hours so that those that weren’t on call can voice objections if they have them.

Daniel Burnett: Once there is agreement in an issue, as editors feel there is consensus, they feel it’s ready to merge, if they merge it right away, there is 48 hours for people to disagree.
… Part of process that Editors need to work out, if someone says “I didn’t agree”, then Editors have to do work of backing it out again… really, everyone is expected to monitor issues that are relevant to them.
… If there is new information, we can discuss topic again… this is mainly to help avoid “oops, we didn’t have consensus” on issues.

Michael Jones: ok, thanks.

Ivan Herman: A very practical addition to that, for this to work smoothly, I need to have your IRC nickname / handle and Github username. I have to add it to repository in Github, please send me by email or IRC so I have it so I can add it to scripts.

Daniel Burnett: We’re just trying to avoid merges when someone doesn’t agree… we want work to proceed quickly, but reduce instances of such merges to near zero.

Michael Jones: That makes sense.

Daniel Burnett: Any other questions/comments on working mode?

Ted Thibodeau: Less about Working Mode and more about merges that looked like they went through.

Manu Sporny: These were force pushes, not merges, no merges have happened yet.

Brent Zundel: I had to force push to get stuff into repo…

6. GitHub (p)review

Daniel Burnett: See not assigned and not deferred issues

Manu Sporny: there are some high priority issues that folks from transmute and oliver I think.. they’ve been hanging out there waiting for the WG to start
… so I think we should start those first
… I assigned oliver to high priority ones if you don’t mind
… also thinks that mike would have some opinions on that as well

Brent Zundel: See high priority issues

Manu Sporny: oliver would you object to being assigned the key expression stuff with mike also being tagged?

Oliver Terbu: happy to

Michael Jones: please tag me

Manu Sporny: we can start going down the list

Christopher Allen: I’ll take #58

Manu Sporny: in reverse order
… starting with issue 1 fragment identifier semantics

Manu Sporny:

Manu Sporny: I’d say this is largely a discussion around mime types
… daniel and graham klyne are mostly the people to talk about this. Brent, would daniel be okay being assigned to this issue? him and dave longely can continue the discussion there or can we assign it to you?

Brent Zundel: assign it to me

Manu Sporny: I know dave longely had a number of opinions on that as well
… joe would you be fine with talking about controller and authentication section and language around the three different terms we identified but haven’t really named one of them?

Joe Andrieu: yes

Manu Sporny: I will assign those class of issues to you, there are a couple of them
… And then… where do the DID contexts live.. I think that’s going to be a discussion between the chairs and ivan as well
… any objections to that?
… so myself, ivan and the chairs.
… Then there are a whole bunch of rfc7517 discussions, I think those are mike jones and oliver as well
… I can do that assigment later if you don’t have any objections to that

Christopher Allen: No CCG call today due to IIW. There will be one next week.

Manu Sporny: That’s all we can process for today

Christopher Allen: I’ll accept #58

Daniel Burnett: when we assign something to you it’s your job to progress the issue, not necessarily to decide what happens

Brent Zundel: Thank you everyone for a great meeting!

Joe Andrieu: Cheers1