2020-05-20 to 2020-09-16 All Members Meeting Notes

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Last updated: Mar 20, 2022 by Drummond Reed
7 min read

All members meeting are held on monthly basis. If you are interested in joining the Trust over IP Foundation, please request a membership agreement at https://trustoverip.org/members/join/.

2020-09-16 All Members Meeting Notes (WG Update Edition)


Agenda & Notes

Remarks from John Jordan

  • John signalled that now is the time to shift our energy as a community toward operations, engaging all embers in the work to be done and focusing on the deliverables ToIP needs to produce.
  • This is how we communicate ToIP to the world - through the work we get done together.
  • Welcome to new steering members, LG CNS and KABN.


Working Group Updates (WG Chairs) 

  • Current-state updates provided on deliverables, work items, focus and challenges for all WGs (see slides in presentation).
  • Common themes that emerged from these presentations include:
    • Need for formal workflow structure and guidance on when/how to use GitHub for deliverables.
    • Strong desire for broader member participation and engagement in developing products.
    • Need for more collaboration and coordination between Working Groups.


Workflow and Horizontal/Operations team 

  • Work underway to formalize a workflow across all WGs.
  • Need to achieve a balance between flexibility for ideation and the certainty that only members are contributing to the concepts and deliverables of the Foundation.
  • Horizontal/Operations team will be established to maintain awareness on work plans and deliverables endorsed by WGs.


Communications Committee Update

  • The Communications Committee is a sub-committee that operates under the Syeering Committee.
  • First meeting has taken place, focusing on key messages for the market, possibility of creating webinar series to explain how TOIP applies in different contexts, need for infographics and easily-consumable products.
  • Members invited to reach out to David Luchuk to get involved.


Research Agenda and Survey 

  • G Laatikainen (Univ of Jyväskylä) has developed an all-member survey and draft paper to identify a research agenda for ToIP based o questions that researchers and practitioners can help the community answer.
  • Call-out to members for volunteers to review these products.


Human Experience Working Group Update

  • Planning meetings for this WG continue to proceed. Official charter has not yet been finalized. 
  • Strong consideration being given to holding facilitated workshops in order to clarify scope of work and opportunities to engage broad viewpoints and voices.


SpecUp walkthrough event 

  • Lightweight and simple editing tool for specs.
  • Demonstration event for ToIP members - Sept 23 at 1pm EST.

2020-08-19 All Members Meeting Notes (Open Conversation Edition)

  • John Jordan gave an update on his medical situation
    • Background and updates are available on this CaringBridge page
    • John expressed that he is very honored to be able to continue as Executive Director
    • It has massively increased his awareness of the requirements for accessibility and usability of ToIP
    • He is particularly excited about the launch of the Human Experience Working Group next month
    • He has not been able to join many WG meetings since his accident, but is hoping to be able to start attending more
    • He introduced Dave Luchuk, our new full-time Program Manager, who John has known for 20+ years
  • Dave, who just started this week, gave an introduction
    • He pointed out that his onboarding to the Linux Foundation
    • Based in Ottawa, he has been a manager for a number of large projects for the Government of Canada
    • His strongest interest, across all the projects he has been a manager for, is how to help
    • His goal is to help all of the members, Working Groups, and Task Forces to achieve their objectives
    • Dave is available to all members for help with anything you need to accomplish your objectives—you can reach him at:
  • Wenjing Chu, Futurewei
    • Gave an overview of why Futurewei is interested in trusted communications
    • Wants to facilitate greater security and privacy in Futurewei's software and services
    • Wants to enable customers to have greater confidence in Futurewei products
    • Is very excited to be part of this community and to drive to establishing trust widely on the Internet
  • Gabriella Laatikainen
    • Very interested in horizontal interoperability of different ToIP network interactions
    • Would like to find other ToIP members who are are interested in cross-network transactions
    • Currently collaborating with the Findy consortium in Finland
    • Anyone interested in this topic is invited to contact Gabriella via Slack or email
    • Would also like to identify other ToIP topics for the research community to focus on
    • For this, Gabriella would like to send a survey link to the members
  • Scott Perry, Scott Perry CPA
    • Co-chair of the Governance Stack Working Group
    • Established a Trust Assurance Task Force within that WG
    • Feels very strongly about the role of trust assurance frameworks
    • Mentioned the role of the Governance Architecture TF as well
  • Kevin Griffin and Philip Feairheller, Scior
    • Focused on issuing verifiable credentials to high schools on their platform to help with the credentialing for college and employment
    • Took their experience and started an open source project called Canis
    • The goal is to allow people to easy spin up a ToIP stack implementation
    • The model is a platform like Kong that helps bring together and coordinate a number of other open source projects to make it easy to deploy
  • Kalyan Kulkarni, Ayanworks
    • Joined ToIP with the goal of getting involved with SSI
    • Has become a co-chair of the Governance Stack WG
    • In India, there is a proposed standard stack (the India Stack) that has been established for citizen and healthcare services - https://www.nhp.gov.in/NHPfiles/National_Digital_Health_Blueprint_Report_comments_invited.pdf
    • Ayanworks is very interested in how that can be integrated with the ToIP stack
    • He believes that they can influence the government policy there to try 
    • Dave pointed out that as an example of the global reach
    • Drummond asked about specific contact points
    • Kalyan said the NHA (the National Health Authority) is the agency that would be the contact for that
  • Juan Caballero, Decentralized Identity Foundation
    • Does communications and outreach for the Decentralized Identity Foundation
    • Co-chairs the Interop Working Group at DIF
    • Joined ToIP because he's doing research throughout the SSI space
    • Is particularly interested in governance frameworks and the role governance will play
    • Invites questions about collaboration with DIF, the repos, interop projects, etc.
    • http://identity.foundation/ 
  • We closed the meeting with a reminder that next month's meeting will be in the Report-Out format


2020-07-15 All Members Meeting Notes (Report-Out Edition)

  • Presentation (Google Slides format—includes a summary of all our Working Group and Task Force activity)
  • Zoom recording
  • PDF version of the presentation

2020-06-17 All Members Meeting Notes (Open Conversation Edition)

  • Presentation (Google Slides format—includes introductions to our first four Working Groups and instructions for joining)
  • Zoom recording
  • PDF version of the presentation

  • John Jordan, as the newly appointed Executive Director, explained his proposed overall approach to monthly All-Member meetings.
    • Alternate between two formats
    • One month will be an informal meeting devoted to dialog with the overall membership
    • The next month will be a more structured meeting with report outs from the Steering Committee, Working Groups and Task Forces
  • We have now passed 100 total members
    • 18 Steering
    • 1 Associate
    • 69 Contributors (Organizations)
    • 12 Contributors (Individuals)
  • John announced that the Steering Committee has approved hiring of a full-time Program Manager, Dave Luchuk, under a secondment program with the Government of Canada
    • Dave will start as soon as the paperwork can be completed—hopefully by the end of June
    • That will supplement the great work Todd Benzies has been doing for the Foundation
  • Todd then talked about the collaboration tools that have been set up for Foundation
  • Dan Gisolfi next summarized how we'll be using Github
    • Each WG will determine who the maintainers will be for their repos
    • We are still in the phase of determining the governance rules and processes
    • In the meantime, he asks that all new members learn about using Github — he recommends Github Learning Labs
  • John then shared some thoughts about the overall culture and community within the Foundation
    • Trust is inherently a human experience and a community experience
    • It is very much subject to cultural and local conditions
    • He gave as an example a pharmaceutical safety system in the Province of British Columbia, public identifiers are used in order to build trust, however citizen IDs are not publicly published or shared because that would be a privacy issue. So context is supremely important in trusted interactions.
    • These considerations about the cultural and jurisdictional differences in trust and regulation must be something we deal with across our WGs and TFs
    • He also felt it was important that we have a "responsible sense of urgency" about our mission here. In other words, we shouldn't go too fast, yet we should feel the urgency of solving vital trust issues on the Internet today, as there are many.
    • John then invited questions from the membership via the chat facility in Zoom
  • A question was asked about the TIP (ToIP Interoperability Profile) process
    • Dan Gisolfi explained that ToIP Foundation deliverables include specifications, white papers, best practices, etc.
    • A TIP is not intended to be a full ToIP specification but an interoperability profile that brings together different standards into a full interop
    • He pointed to this page in the Technical Stack WG branch of the wiki to explain the basic idea of a TIP
  • Drummond then explained that he is taking input and putting together a proposal for defining a specific set of artifact types and processes for producing them:
    • TSS (ToIP Standard Specification) — apply to both 
    • TIP (ToIP Interoperability Profile)
    • TST (ToIP Standard Template)
    • TBP (ToIP Best Practices)
  • Jim St. Clair pointed out that in the work he's done in the healthcare industry, you need to be able to point to full SDO-approved standards, so having that long-term focus is a good goal
  • The question was asked about the differences between Working Groups (WGs) and Task Force (TFs)
    • Drummond pointed to this page on the wiki
    • A WG is a formal JDF construct that needs a formal charter and approval by the Steering Committee
    • A TF is a much lighter weight mechanism that can be spun up much more quickly — all that is required at a minimum is a wiki page defining the objective of the TF and how to participate
    • A TF can be larger and deeper if needed, but that should be coordinated with the parent WG or the Steering Committee
  • John answered a question about the longer-term business and sustainability model of the Foundation
  • John answered a question about privacy considerations in our different specs and deliverables
    • The Foundation's role is not to dictate privacy requirements, but to highlight privacy considerations that governance authorities using our specifications and tools should focus on in their governance frameworks
  • Drummond clarified that the ToIP Foundation's role is to define specifications, templates, models, and tools for governance authorities (GAs) to use to develop and implement governance frameworks and developers to create interoperable implementations of the technical components specified by those GFs. 
    • So GAs can and should set their own privacy requirements, not the ToIP Foundation.
  • John closed by thanking the over 50 members who joined the All-Member meeting and inviting them to the next one in July.

2020-05-20 All Members Meeting Notes

  • Presentation (Google Slides format—includes introductions to our first four Working Groups and instructions for joining)
  • Zoom recording
  • PDF version of the presentation