2024-07-24 Steering Committee Plenary Meeting Notes

Attendance

Steering Committee Members Attending and Participating 

• Daniel Bachenheimer (Accenture Global Solutions Limited)
• Steve McCown (Anonyome Labs)
• Andre Kudra (esatus)
• Wenjing Chu (Futurewei Technologies, Inc.)
• Drummond Reed (Gen Digital)
• Karla McKenna (GLEIF)
• Caryn VanExel (GS1)
• Nicholas Racz (Key State Capital)
• John Jordan (Province of British Columbia)

Also Participating

• Judith Fleenor (ToIP Executive Director)
• Michelle Janata (LF PM)

Agenda 

• Recording
  • Link
• Presentation (Google Slides)

Call to Order
Judith Fleenor called the meeting to order at approx. 12:05 pm PT and announced the meeting would be recorded. There were no objections.

Agenda

• Agenda Review (1 min)
• Minutes Approval (1 min)
• New Member Review (1 min)
• DID Method Standardization LOI signatory Consensus (5 min)
• Keri Suite of Specs Discussion (5 min)
• LF Decentralized Trust Discussion (30 min)
• Communications (5 min)
• Upcoming Meetings Reminders (2 min)
• Open Discussion

Approval of Minutes 

Judith Fleenor presented a resolution to approve the minutes from the previous Steering Committee meeting (Exhibit A) May 8, 2024 and June 26, 2024, and solicited questions from the group. There were no questions or objections. 

Judith Fleenor indicated that consensus had been reached and the following resolution was approved: 

RESOLVED:  That the minutes of the May 8th 2024 and June 26th 2024 meeting of the Steering Committee, in the form attached hereto as Exhibit A and B, are hereby confirmed, approved, and adopted.

New Member Review 

 Contributor Organizations

IAMX AG

HealthKERI

DIDTech

Identinet GmbH

Rubidex

 Individual Contributors

Erwin Overstegen

Anil Helvac

 DID Method Standardization

 The Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), W3C Credentials Community Group, and the W3C DID Working Group are joining forces to come to alignment on some DID Method Standardization. The are planning on publishing a letter of intent to for a new collaborative work. We have been invited to be a signatory to the letter of intent and/or be listed in the body as a collaborating organization.

Letter of Intent regarding DID Method Standardization. Link can be found here.
Call for consensus that we should be included in both the body of the statement and for our Executive Director to be a signator.

Judith indicated that most people did reply already and that they like the option number 3 for this. Number 3 was to put our name in the body of the email as well as being a signatory on it. Judith did not hear back from Nicholas of Key State Capital on this. Judith has also not heard from Chris from Mitre. Judith makes it clear that there does seem to be consensus and that we want to move forward with being included in this. Nicholas Racz indicates that he will give his formal response once he looks it over. The final agreement will be due on Friday July 26, to give the full 7 day review period.

Keri Suite of Spec - movement forward

Recap of spring meetings

Update on Spec Approval Process

 At the last meeting we discussed what ToIP Specification Standards should be and what is our roadmap to ISO.
In speaking with Seth from LF, he agrees that using RFC2119 for ToIP Approved Specification as our standard make sense because it is most widely used and understood. 
Then changing it to ISO editing format when ready for ISO is an easy switch. 
He sees no problem with the ToIP version available on our website being in RFC 2119 format, while the ISO version being available in their format.

The important thing is that the normative statements be written in such a way that conformance unit testing or a conformance specification can clearly be written from the specification. 
While a specific conformation sections are not required in an ISO specification, it is best from an adoption standpoint that by the time it goes to ISO, that there be unit testing tools available, so the burden of writing them is not left to the implementers.
To reiterate, before a ToIP Approved specification would be moved on using the ISO PAS process, there would need to be susantial adoption of the specification in real world applications to point to.

Keri Suite of Spec - movement forward
The Keri Team has now re-written the specifications into RFC 2119 format as requested.
Darrell and Drummond have reviewed just the CESR spec and provided feedback.  Sam at the ACDC meeting yesterday says he as made the changes requested by Drummond, but hasn’t heard back to see if that was sufficient.
The other two specs (Keri/ACDC) still need review. These have not been reviewed yet.
In order to move forward the TSWG would need to approve the specs for them to be moved forward to SC and then on to ISO.

Judith asks of the group what is the path forward? Judith wants to be very clear with this. Judith’s desire is to get these specs to an approval status so that we can start working on a path forward to using the PAS process before ToIP moves under the LFDT umbrella

(if that is the direction SC chooses). We need to insure that there is not a disconnect between what the ACDC Working Group and the Technical Stack Working group is comfortable with as well as the desire of the Steering Committee. We need to have a clear direction.  

 LF Decentralized Trust

 After Judith’s presentation about LFDT in May and our meeting with Daniella and Hart last month, it is time to decide on ToIP’s future regarding saying our own organization, or moving our project under LFDT.
Considerations:

Current Funding organizations - will you plan to continue funding ToIP in 2025?

What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of moving into LFDT?

Etc.
Judith opens the discussion for the SC to give their thoughts. Consensus among the the SC is that it is very unlikely their companies would fund both ToIP membership and LFDT membership.

Communication Plan

ToIP Technology Architecture Specification- BLOG expected post IIW

What is the status of the Tech Architecture Specification?

The group is not there yet. Drummond has indicated that to have all the the fully integrated glossary is a pretty big job the 1st time we don't have automated tooling to do that part. It will take until the end of August at this point to complete the task.

HXWG/IPTF - Wallet Survey Results - BLOG expected May – Ongoing

GLEIF Welcome BLOG – Karla did work on the blog and will send the email to Judith.

Key State Capital BLOG – Looking at mid October for the blog. 

TSP comparison to Other Protocols series – We will need to try and line up more detail on the two TSP blogs that will come out and in what order the Tsp blogs are going come out of.

Self-Certifying Identifier (SCID) Specification and Security Guide – This will be on hold.  

Communication Plan  - Website Updates

 The Model Page - Link
This page sas been updated

Our Work

Technology Arch Specification page - Link

Evolution of the Stack page - Link
Evolutions of the Stack.pdf - Link

 What are we going to do to promote our specs that have come out and get implementers using out implementers drafts? Judith indicates that we will be discussing this more in August.

Pipeline:

Issuer Requirements Guide for Governance Frameworks of Verifiable Credentials

Keri Suite (KERI, CESR, ACDC)

ToIP Technology Architecture Specification

ToIP Trust Spanning Protocol Specification

ToIP Trust Registry Protocol Specification

ToIP did:webs Method Specification

ToIP X.509 Verifiable Identifier Specification

ToIP Profile Discovery Specification

Next Meeting:

All Members Meeting - WG Updates - Wednesday  August 21st

10 am PDT / 1 pm EST / 17:00 UTC / 19:00 CEST

Steering Committee - Plenary Meeting - Wednesday August 14th

noon PDT / 3pm EST / 19:00 UTC / 21:00 CEST

Steering Committee - Discussion Meeting - August 28th

noon PDT / 3pm EST / 19:00 UTC / 21:00 CEST

Adjournment

At approximately 1:23pm PT, Judith Fleenor adjourned the meeting.