Sovrin Community Newsletter August 2021

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August 2021

Dear Community!

It is exciting to write the August letter to the Sovrin Community! We have been working on changes and improvements to the Sovrin MainNet, and you’ll find all details in the newsletter.

Our focus has been to continuously improve the experience for our Steward community and organizations who rely on Sovrin to provide identity based services aligned with our mission of Identity for All.

Our newsletter also includes updates from the governing bodies in the Sovrin Ecosystem. Line and Anna have been instrumental in putting together a set of highlights. We hope that this provides you with an at a glance update on the various efforts within Sovrin to further our mission.

The Sovrin Foundation is celebrating "5 years of Sovrin". We will be highlighting the groundbreaking work of our Community in the annual report to be presented at the Annual General Meeting of the Board of Trustees on September 16. On this topic: We do hope to see you and hear you all on that day, so please sign up on our Eventbrite-link! It is only with a great community that Sovrin can achieve its mission of Identity for All.

See you soon!

Marta Piekarska-Geater
Chair
Sovrin Foundation

Announcement of procedural changes and a revised price plan as per September 16, 2021

The Board of Trustees has passed two resolutions as part of an annual review of the technical, economic and legal policies in order to secure the sustainability and availability of the Sovrin Utility. Please find the announcement, motivation, timelines and resolutions here.

Governance Framework

The Governance Framework Working Group has been involved in preparing the documents for the new version for phased reviews. We are first seeking inputs from the stakeholders and thereafter will be opening up to public feedback and comments. There is ongoing activity around switching over the Sovrin Glossary to a 'living document' form that is managed as a versioned repository. The Principles of SSI has been updated to include a more human centric approach and will soon be published to the website.

Technical Governance Board

The TGB has been reviewing excellent work by Wade Barnes that will finish our transition to a new CI/CD system. This will allow us to publish software updates more easily and get all our nodes onto Ubuntu 20.04. Stay tuned for updates.

Steward Council

The Steward Council had a summer break and will be continuing our meetings on August 19th as per the usual bi-weekly schedule. Wade Barnes and team again did some stellar work regarding an easy to install and configure health and monitoring solution for Indy-based networks. This will be officially released once they complete their work. Additionally, with one year behind us, it is time for the second Steward Council Elections. The Steward Council will consist of no more than 15 members, nominated and elected by the body of Stewards. Each Steward organisation may cast one vote. The ballot link will be sent by email to the Steward Business contact. The voting starts on Monday, September 6th at 12 PM UTC and closes 72 hours later on Thursday, September 9th at 12 PM UTC. Five current members of the Steward Council, namely Riley Hughes, Lohan Spies, Richard Esplin, Alexander Blom and Xavier Vila were elected for 2 years and will therefore become part of the new Council automatically. We look forward to your participation.

Identity for All

The I4A Council has been developing a Theory of Change to enable delivery of the Identity for All mission, currently under discussion by the Board. We have also been having I4A Community Spotlight sessions in each of our Council meetings from community members who are developing SSI application ecosystems for peripheral communities or humanitarian use cases. So far we have heard from Kiva, Tykn, and Yoma. Next month (Tuesday, September 14th) we will hear from Dr. Karen Elliot, Senior Lecturer in Enterprise/Innovation (FinTech), from Newcastle University, UK. She will talk about how to aggregate, consolidate and evolve verified credentials for vulnerable or marginalised groups to drive inclusion toward an equitable digital society.

SSI in Internet of Things

The SSI in IoT WG is working on framing a proposal on moving a version of an Aries Agent into a resource constrained IoT device. The WG is working through what the base level requirements are and what elements of the default Aries Agent are optional. The ultimate objective is to make available an open source version of the Agent that can be built into a ‘bare metal’ or near 'bare metal' IoT ecosystem to reduce friction to adoption of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials in the IoT sector.

Compliance & Inclusive Finance

CIFWG’s recent focus is advancing a whitepaper on an identity management framework that promotes financial inclusion and strong anti-money laundering controls. The whitepaper will contain personas to represent the vulnerabilities and challenges for a modernized digital identity framework—for both individuals and entities—and the paper will ultimately offer best practices and recommendations for helping address these challenges. These recommendations relate and will strengthen the Rulebook’s overarching best practices framework for inclusion-oriented AML/FCC practices in the areas of strengthened know your customer / know your business (KYC/KYB) controls in a manner that further reinforces and strengthens personal and entity-driven privacy controls.

Guardianship

The Guardianship Working Group has been collaborating with the Trust over IP Foundation and Good Health Pass Collaborative on adding a Guardianship addendum to the Good Health Pass Interoperability Blueprint, enabling the Blueprint to consider how to enable carers and their dependents to travel with digital travel and health passes. In addition, we have continued a series of published articles (on LinkedIn) describing how the work of the group can be applied to our working and social lives.

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Interested in joining any of the Sovrin Working Groups above? Email us at info@sovrin.org.

Community Call with Board of Trustees

Wednesday, September 1st | 4pm UTC

The Board of Trustees invites everyone interested in Sovrin to join our conversation about SSI and Sovrin's development. We want to hear your ideas on what the Board should focus on in the coming period. Make sure to register for the event here.

Annual General Meeting of the Board of Trustees

Thursday, September 16th | 4pm UTC

Register now for this upcoming event here! More details about this event will be sent out to the community soon.

Behind the Sovrin Foundation is an infrastructure designed to enable true digital self-sovereign identity (SSI). In accordance with the decentralized nature of blockchain technology, Sovrin infrastructure is open source and receives contributions from people around the world. A first step to working with the Sovrin community is to become a member by visiting our website.

Sovrin calendar

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