Sovrin Community Newsletter September 2021

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September 2021

An Overview of the Annual Meeting of the Sovrin Foundation

The Annual Meeting of the Sovrin Foundation was held online on September 16, 2021. The Sovrin Community was invited, and a good crowd of 40 members attended and provided great feedback and suggestions to the Board of Trustees.

Annual Reports were approved

Technical Report by Stephen Curran (Vice-chair)
Financial Report by Philippe Page (Treasurer)

Budgets were approved

2021/22 objectives and economic policy highlighted by André Kudra (Trustee)
Budget Proposals 2021/22 by Stephen Curran (Vice-chair)

Appointments

André Kudra and Stephen Curran were appointed to serve for another term of 1 year in the Financial Committee, chaired by Treasurer Philippe Page.

Elections

No Trustees were up for election.

Proposals

The Sovrin Governance Framework Working Group proposed an update to the Principles of SSI: The Human-centric Principles of SSI. The proposal was approved by the Board of Trustees.

Read the Annual Report 2020 here soon.

Governance Framework

We have great news from the Sovrin Governance Framework Working Group! The Human-centric Principles of SSI have been approved by the Board of Trustees.

We started work on this update while preparing the Sovrin Utility and Ecosystem Governance Frameworks V3 (SUGF V3 and SEGF V3, respectively). The 12 Principles of SSI were published in November 2020 and have already achieved great adaptation worldwide. We found an opportunity to group and order the principles from a perspective of human agency, control and protection. This helps in Sovrin's mission for Identity for All to educate about and advocate SSI. First presented outside our Working Group at IIW in April 2021, the Human-centric Principles have now been officially adopted in the Sovrin Governance Framework.

We are currently working on the completion of:

SUGF V3
SEGF V3
Trust Matrix V3

Monday, September 20, we had a great call with a discussion around decentralized governance with the chairs from the Steward Council joining. Please join us!

Technical Governance Board

The Technical Governance Board has been discussing the next build to be deployed on the Sovrin MainNet. This build improves our compatibility with the latest Ubuntu LTS version and eliminates some complexity in our release process. We are also discussing how developers could be certified as competent with Sovrin technology.

Identity for All

The I4A Council has begun a discussion about the dangers of digital identity and SSI for marginalized communities. You can contribute to the discussion here. October's meeting will be on Monday 11th at 14.00 UTC, and the Community Spotlight will be on iRespond, who have been supporting vaccines roll-out in refugee camps.

Compliance & Inclusive Finance

The CIFWG continues its work on the Digital Identity Whitepaper whose focus is sovereign identity principles that work to strengthen and support financial inclusion initiatives and required Know Your Customer (KYC) and FCC controls and operations. The group continues to promote the adoption of the Rulebook in the context of increased decentralization in financial services and crypto and fintech sectors growing; the Rulebook helps guide network participants to fulfill their anti-money laundering (AML) and financial crimes compliance (FCC) obligations in order to protect the integrity of this new financial ecosystem. Finally, to ensure the Rulebook continues to be a dynamic document, the CIFWG is strengthening its risk assessment content amidst virtual asset providers’ need for risk assessments as well as banks’ need for assessing VASP partners.

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

Lisa Talia Moretti

Co-Chair of Guardianship Working Group
Learn more about Lisa here.

Upcoming changes to StagingNet

As a result of the new economic model, the following changes will soon be applied to StagingNet. The current self-service screen for getting an Endorser DID will only offer DIDs for BuilderNet. Those interested in a StagingNet Endorser DID will be directed to a new form to enter the necessary information to acquire a new StagingNet Endorser DID. This new page will include information about the new Endorser DID fees and prompt for the necessary information to both pay those fees and activate the DID on StagingNet. Find the price plans here.

APAC Briefing: Board of Trustees of the Sovrin Foundation

Wednesday, September 22nd | 6am UTC

This is a monthly catch up with the Board of Trustees for Sovrin community members based in the APAC region. Register for the event here.

Community Call with Board of Trustees

Thursday, October 6th | 4pm UTC

This is a monthly catch up with the Board of Trustees open to the community. Register for the event here.

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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