VC <> mDL Project Community Input Session

Full summary report downloadable here

Following the announcement of the “Where the W3C VCs meets the ISO 18013–5 mDL” project, we hosted the first community session on September 27, aiming to answer questions about the project, understand relevant existing efforts and gather initial input for the project deliverables. The same community session took place in two different time zones, with the same agenda starting with “Introduction and Plan Sharing’’, followed by “Understanding Existing Efforts” and “Hearing Your Thoughts”. Nearly 50 people attended the session.

We wrote a summary report that includes the details from the session slides as well as the essence of our discussion. Below are some highlights:

• Clarifications about the Project

We are not intending to create a new working group for any specification or technology development. The primary goal is to gather input from both communities to help facilitate alignment as well as provide public communications needed to help key stakeholders, such as policy makers, understand how they can play a role in creating alignment and a fairer vendor ecosystem.

Even though this project is not anchored at any community organization, we are operating it as openly and transparently as our tools allow us to do. Spruce provides sponsorship to cover our time to conduct the project and doesn’t play a special role in organizing the project.

• Understanding Existing Efforts

We created spreadsheet Understanding Existing Efforts Relevant to the VC <> mDL Project, which includes all the ones we have found and shared by the community, and we will keep adding to it as we find more and invite you to do the same.

• Recognizing the Differences

It is well recognized that the two standards started out with very different goals, and were developed by two very different communities within different standards development organizations that had completely different processes. Now that they are meeting in the market and have overlapping use-cases and constituencies, it is important for us to recognize the differences first.

• Ideas for Alignment

Implementers are keen to see greater alignment between these two standards so that they can meet real-world implementation needs and provide a seamless experience for end users.

Regarding how to get greater alignment, a strong consensus was that while it is theoretically possible to encapsulate one standard within the other, this was not a reasonable path forward.

There are three main streams of thoughts on what is possible: 1) Adding a VC representation in the next generation of the mDL standard; 2) Leverage mDL data for derived credentials in the form of VCs; 3) and more harmonized exchange capabilities that are inclusive of VC and mDL attributes.

• Importance of Regulatory Support

It is undeniably clear from the community session that alignment of these two standards is much needed. What we further validated was the need to communicate with a broader stakeholder group beyond the two standard communities. One comment that stood out to us was the role regulatory requirements can play towards a unified approach. That needs to start with “digestible and understandable” communications for policymakers, which is one of the outputs this project is aiming for.

For full details, we encourage you to read the report.

We want to thank all of the participants for asking questions that helped us articulate the project better, sharing information that shed light on the current status of the standards and market, and proposing ideas that shaped our thinking around the final outputs.

If you have any questions about the project and/or this report, please feel free to reach out to us at kaliya@identitywoman.net and lucy@identitywoman.net. We look forward to working further with you and sharing more findings/thoughts soon as we proceed with the project.