Proving Verified Attributes Work

Over the past few months Mydex CIC has been working for the Scottish Government on a project to test whether an ‘attribute led’ approach to public service provision can work. The good news is: it can indeed work, and that opens up a whole new world of opportunity for citizens, Government and service providers.

Under the approach we tested, public sector organisations provide individuals with verified attributes (details about them which have been checked using rigorous processes). Individuals store these attributes in their own Attribute (or personal data) Store, and can then share these attributes with other public sector service providers as and when needed.

We need this sort of approach because. when applying for and using public services, the personal data citizens need to provide can range over many different aspects of their lives, to some depth (in some cases). Creating the infrastructure for sharing verified attributes means that the right bundles of data can be put together quickly, efficiently and safely — in ways that protect the citizen’s data and privacy. (Verified attributes are bits of information about individuals that have been generated or checked by responsible organisations using robust, widely accepted processes.)

By equipping citizens with the means to accumulate and share this information in a safe, easy and secure manner it is possible to achieve significant reductions in friction, effort, risk and cost for both citizens themselves and service providers.

In the prototype work we tested all the independent components that need to work together to deliver a resilient, scalable system. This system is designed to place citizens at the centre of data sharing about themselves, empowering them with their own attribute store, with the ability to reuse verified data about themselves on an ongoing basis. Key areas of work included testing different ways of authenticating the identity of participants, ensuring the robustness of all necessary technical underpinnings (such as APIs), working with citizens to design user-journeys that are easy and intuitive, and addressing related communications issues.

For those interested in the details, the full report is available here.

Taking the next steps

Thanks to the success of this prototyping work the Scottish Government is now able to move on to the next stage: a ‘beta phase’ that will test the operation of this approach in practice. If this beta phase is successful, it could bring far ranging benefits to citizens, service providers and Government, making it much easier and cheaper for public services to be provided and used whilst improving outcomes and the speeding up of access to services citizens need.

But it also has bigger implications. The provision of Attribute Stores by which citizens can receive and share these Verified Attributes changes the architecture of personal data collection and use — moving it from a situation where service providers are the only ones gathering and storing the information they need, with citizens holding none of this information, to a situation where some of the data service providers need is stored separately from them (in the citizen’s Attribute Store) and accessed when needed. For a press article on this, see here.

In the longer term, the creation of this new, independent layer of data sharing infrastructure could radically change how exactly how our digital economy works. What’s needed for this however, is an effective implementation strategy. We’ll discuss this in our next blog.