EFWG 2021-10-21 Meeting

Meeting Schedule

• Bi Weekly at 11am est.

Attendees

• Judith Fleenor 
• Drummond Reed
• Kimberly Linson 
• Eric Drury
• Karen Hand
• P Subrahmanyam
• Darrell O'Donnell
• Trinh Nguyen

Agenda Items

Presentation Files

none

Recording

Link 

Note: Meeting really begins at 8:16 minutes into the recording.

Meeting:

Agenda & Notes -  

Judith Fleenor acknowledges Karl Kneisfor the excellent job his has done in the past year and half as Co-Chair of the Working group with RJ Reiser.  Karl Kneishas announced that he needs to step down due to commercial concerns.  We at ToIP celebrate the success of our volunteer leaders and Thank Karl Kneisfor the excellent foundation he has brought to the EFWG.

Judith Fleenorstarts the Round Robin with the following questions:

• What has been of greatest interest to your involvement in EFWG?
• What would you like to see continued?
• What vision do you have for EFWG going forward?

Kimberly Linson

I have been an off and on member of this group, and every time I've come Karl puts a great agenda together it's really an interesting discussion. I enjoy coming to this meeting and one of my primary priorities at Randa is to be building this ecosystem around the lifelong learner project, and so one of the things Karl and I had talked about actually was in July.

There was a deliverable that this group had been working on to kind of create The SolutionPack Task Force.  It was one of those Task Force that kind of like fell off because I think it was it had a really big scope, and we might try to redefine that scope.

Perhaps really have this group put out a tool to help other people who are building ecosystems know how to do it and which would be a very helpful tool for me, I like that tool so that's why I'm here there you go.

Trinh Nguyen

Very nice to meet you all my first year PhD student my Supervisor is ???  in the University of British Columbia and my research interest is in information governance empowered by blockchain, especially the healthcare sector so I think I got introduced to this meeting by Dr Vickie.   Actually i'm very new so I need to swim and follow some talk and I try to learn more about Trust Over IP because of this framework is actually. I come from Vietnam I just came to Canada, four years ago, so actually the whole area is fascinating to me, but everything is very new including healthcare information governance.

P Subrahmanyam

I've been participating sporadically but reasonably often in the last several months. What I was looking for is essentially exposure or knowledge and as a reminder of sort of the different kinds of applications- commercial applications to know generally people working and around the topics we're discussing here right so so this I thought was a very good working group from that perspective and that's what excited me about it. Right,   It was educational in the sense of you know who are trying to apply this technology.  As opposed to the sort of a single minded dedication to the technology, which a number of people doing as well.  Help the YOMA task force in the early days and was in ISWG at times.

Karen Hand

I always find that you know these meetings with trust over IP is at the high point of the day and very hectic schedule soIt always feels good to feel connected to a community, so I would say that one strong point for Trust Over IP is that sense of community I think is very important.   So i've been involved over a year now, I came in because I participated in Ecosystem Foundry Working Group when Karl was chairing.  At that time and just really, really enjoyed the discussion and the people and the activities which led me into other areas of Trust Over IP.

So that's what brought me in.   I've been interested in probably everything, but I can only do so much.  So it's having to pick and choose what you can participate in and sometimes that goes up and down.  So I think that's important for members to understand that sometimes you can do it, and sometimes you can't, but it doesn't mean that you know you shouldn't still engage in whatever you can, even if it's just touching into a task force meeting or looking at a presentation that might be of interest to you.

I find that the Ecosystem Foundry Working Group is the touch point, or like as Karl would say "the service provider to all other layers."  I know that Trust over IP is new I see some wonderful evolution of the different Task Force and groups, for example, the Communications Committee that's now up and running and seem to have gotten their feet under them.

So it's more of how do we determine (and I think it's going to be really important the role) how do we utilize this group, as the touch point for all other activities?  How do we collaborate and communicate what's going on in ecosystems? 

A point was made earlier when I was saying "ecosystems is important because, for those who are technology minded it really brings the context to all the other work" So it's so key in that way for anybody who wants to or is working in creating an ecosystem.  How to reach out to the different resources or understand even what the ecosystem is?  So this this working group is crucial.  It's just crucial to everything that's going on all across Trust Over IP.

So I think one of the important roles of the income leader, will be to decide and look at what is the mandate and what needs to be accomplished for Trust Over IP to be more communicative and collaborative?  How do we get that going?   I think that will be really important!   

And one of the challenges that Karl and I talked about, and I think that we still need to talk about is, how to encourage the startups and the smaller groups, including my own work that I am hesitant to bring into the Community because you're always afraid, with good reasons.  I've had this happen, when of what you're doing being taken over or run with it in a different direction or by someone who has more resources.  So how do we get over that?  How do we create more of that kind of collaboration?  Maybe it's in more private groups, I don't even know if that can that can happen.

So that's what I see is the challenges right now. 

Personally speaking about the White Paper Task Forces.  What will be the mandate of that task force?  Given now that the Communications Committee is now running and taking over a lot of that really big work that needs to be done.  Doing really good work that needs to be done concerning, public publications, and communications such as podcasts, media, and so forth.  So that would be my my two cents.

Judith Fleenor stated that Communications Committee is not taking over White Papers.

Judith Fleenor recapped two touch points she heard from Karen.

1. That the EFWG is the Glue that links the other working groups together.  The touch point for how to engage with the other working groups for both new people and ecosystems. The touch point that somebody and ecosystem comes to and then like, how do you engage with the other working groups. Keeping the other working groups aware of the business touch points and that applications.  Keeping in the forefront that complete ecosystems are about business process and trust relationships and not just about the technology.

Karen Hand

I would add that EFWG also serves as that translation between a business requirements and the business needs and the technology that would enable it because, well, I always say technology is a tool it's not the objective. So the ecosystem foundry working group helps work on the business objectives and requirements and then translating those business requirements into the technology that can that can serve those those objects of the business.

Judith FleenorAnd I think that's a really important role and kind of one of the directions, I would love to see the ecosystem foundry working group go  As Kimberly Linson also said...to perhaps create some of the artifacts of "how you set up an ecosystem" and what are the things that you need to be thinking about.  Linking those to the artifacts that are being created, and the other working groups.  This is the direction we started to go with PDCSi - having all of the working group chairs talk to that new ecosystem early on in the process.  So EFWG is that this is kind of the entry point for new people coming into Trust Over IP and creates the glue and the understanding of what Trust Over IP is and how they can get involved.  That's partly because of what P Subrahmanyam said, which was there are so many interesting things that the presentations and things that that Karl put together that let you see kind of how an ecosystem sets up and what are the business processes needed in various ecosystems.

Eric Drury

The EFWG is probably the best, most logical place for me, but I do lurk on a lot of the technology calls, just so I can familiarize myself with the terminology and the concepts and all that kind of stuff.

Judith Fleenor it is alway ok to just Lurk and Learn during ToIP meetings.

Eric Drury I'm interested in the ecosystem foundry in the working group because, as you know, others have said, this is sort of the the the outward facing Working Group.  That takes information and goes off and and uses it.  I take that information to talk to business partners for use cases and things like that.  So I'm very interested whenever we have different organizations or use cases come in, so that I can see the similarities to the challenges and the approaches and the commonalities to the with those use cases to what i'm working on and so I really do enjoy hearing from others, and I guess the one thing that I've learned building an ecosystem is a long process, building an entire ecosystem, you know, rather than just starting with a single component and sort of allowing that ecosystem, to develop organically you're putting in place the different components, so that the ecosystem can can exist. I'm not sure that you actually build an ecosystem rather perhaps you and enable it by putting these different components in place. And for me, the challenge has been trying to figure out which components to put in place first so that we can then turn around and say I look now everything's ready for us to say you know for the connections to happen. So i'm I i'm engaged,  depending on my availability and depending on my geography and I split time between Cambridge England and Bangkok Thailand.  In the early days I did work on that task force that Kimberly Linsonmentioned. but I think Kimberly mentioned that scope was huge and we perhaps didn't start with small enough steps, or start with you know bite sized pieces. I'm here i'm happy I enjoy the discussions and conversations and learning.

Kimberly Linson shared the link from the original  EFWG Solution Pack Task Force and Drummond Reedadded that Steve Magennishad done alot of work on that.  Kimberly Linsonsaid it would be great to like take all that work and try to actually like make it a thing. Judith Fleenorsaid one of the things she discussed with possible future co-chairs is wanting to make that solution pack, wanting to make kind of like here's the guide too the things you need to think about when setting up an ecosystem and now we have enough artifacts from other working groups that have created things.  Where it's not creating the whole thing, but we can point artifact that are made by other woking groups and ask them to work on pieces that are still missing.  Perhaps create a map to how to use Trust Over IP artifacts that are being created and other groups.

Judith Fleenorcalled on the two Working Group Chairs from other working groups (TSWG and GSWG/CTWG) present.  Asking, what you feel about the ecosystem foundry working group going forth and how you have interacted with EFWG in the past and what you think are the high points of what it has been doing and what it should be doing?

Drummond Reed 

When we stated ToIP, EFWG it was it was the best attended working group and I realized, it was because it was the most accessible and, and so I started calling it the front door of the Trust Over IP Foundation.   There was a huge amount of interest.  There's so much need for this new infrastructure and to support and it's still my single favorite phrase The single concept that I think we've been most effective at communicating and that people get excited about is Digital Trust Ecosystems and everybody's enthusiastic about that, as I was at the very outset.

I did start to develop a fear, of pretty much what I anticipated would happen, which is the enthusiasm over Digital Trust Ecosystem and what you could build on top of the stack was getting out ahead of the stack and because I'm involved in the trenches of what needs to be delivered to have governance, infrastructure and what needs to be have delivered on technical infrastructure.   It great that there is buy into the picture, but there's a lot of work that has to be done in the trenches before we will be able to deliver.

As Judith Fleenor just pointed out, we're in a sort of brick by brick putting those things in place, but we still have quite a bit of work to do. Ironically, as Darrell will tell you, that we're close to sort of finishing a lot of the initial brickwork on the on the governance stack side ... now it's shifting over to the technical stack side, where there is a lot of work going on, but putting it together into into actual top to bottom, solutions that will support these ecosystems, for that the trenches are still being dug.

Anyone is familiar with the Gartner hype curve, for emerging technology you go up in peak of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment and then you hit the, I think it's called, the plateau of productivity.

That's what we're going through.  I just think since ultimately what we're delivering and what we're supporting is digital trust ecosystems, as they start to come online, as we start to really be able to support what people are after, and more popular more, and more interested ...

I'm mostly  just trying to figure out how do we go through that transition and we still need to fit in those other pieces.

Karen Handasked a question and Drummond Reed responded (notes to be added -until then listen to recording 35:00 min to 37:30 if interested.)

Darrell O'Donnell

The interaction between the various different working groups, especially these three the the ecosystem foundry, governance Stack in the tech stack are starting to reach it stride.  We're only a year a half into this Trust Over IP venture. We had some stumbling blocks, you know, good health has came in, like a ton of bricks and then left or are you still there, but it's largely the effort has Petered down. But like I do like that example of that product circularity one (PCDS) where the group who was thinking ecosystem came in and immediately now it's a self made, a self awareness,  and the EFWG is a good starting place. We're not an orphanage, we're not here to do your work. We're a place to help you facilitate your work.  We're also seeing, in the tech side at least,  more not outsiders, but new people coming in.  Into the tech side first, that need to move into the Ecosystem side at some point, and some other groups just even external.  Like I'm working on some projects with some governments. That are tech forward, but at some point they're going to need ecosystem, because they may have policy cover for their government job. But how they interact with industry is not the same as when the issue of physical identity card. It is going to be different in industries already saying hey what are you doing well, logical home, for that is the Ecosystem side. Because it's not a tech problem at that point it's really ecosystem, as well as, how does it dovetail into the governance side, so I think we're just understanding that those three kind of pieces depending on what's going on, take the lead in one just steps back and take some someone else takes the lead and it just really matters really depends on which one is the logical lead on that one right now, which I really like.

This was followed by an excellent back and forth conversation  (listen to recording 39:26 min to 49:30 if interested.) Topics Included - The need for someone looking at the Business requirements before mapping to technology and being the translator, Web3, Applications vs EcoSystem, when going to market what a is on selling and ecosystem or a piece of the ecosystem, but in that sale process you have to explain and ecosystem to the customer buying the piece, etc.

Karen Handsuggested we could write a White Paper, what is an ecosystem like what's the real deal, what is it mean, what are the key words that you would find in any model or design.  This is directly applicable to the approach of how we're building an ecosystem here, regardless of the technology, so maybe we need to think about how to translate that into a White Paper is what is an ecosystem like what's the real deal what what do we mean by ecosystem.

Judith Fleenormoved the conversation into what's next for the EFWG.  Action times decided included:

• Getting the people who said they would be interested in co-chairing, but not taking the entire Chair on themselves together. Using the next EFWG meeting to have the discussion of how to work together moving forward.  P Subrahmanyam Carly Steve Magennis RJ Reiser etc.
• After that meeting a cadence of meeting for Nov. Dec. to the end of the year will be established.
• With a New Year relaunch of the EFWG... and it's proposed purpose, deliverables, etc.
• Karen Handis willing to chair the "what is an ecosystem" White Paper, as a part of the White Paper Task Force.  Time frame New Year start (listen to 52:00-54:02)
• Possible Glif presentation in January.
• Eric Druryis willing to organize presetation for the EFWG in the New Year.

Action Items -

Judith Fleenor to coordinate with interested co chairs for the next meeting.

Karen Handto reach out to Drummond Reedand Darrell O'Donnell when ready to start the "What is and Ecosystem?" White Paper

Eric Druryto coordinate speakers in the new year.

Kimberly Linsonand Eric Druryinterested in reviving with the Solutions Pack Task Force.