Hello everyone
This is the running update from the Executive Director. Have questions or comments? Suggest some added information or edits? Contact Colin at kantarainitiative dot org.
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Summer has arrived in the northern hemisphere and fortuitously (or not if extra care is not taken) lockdown measures have eased, to enable some respite from being indoors for so long.
But that newfound freedom comes at a risk, right?
Risk assessment is something that we in the digital economy and specifically in the domains of digital identity and personal data agency, apply to these matters external to us.
And new to many in our families and wider network of friends and contacts, if not to folks reading this, is how risk was consciously or subconsciously evaluated for each outing as lockdown restrictions have eased. Personally I've been fascinated to observe how different people react, faced with making such evaluations. We have all seen the spectrum - from complete denial that there is even a problem or 'since I don't know anyone who has COVID, social distancing doesn't apply to me' right through the continuum to not venturing out at all as seniors in particular, understandably needing to be risk averse. Of course there is the constant percentage who say the government's to blame in whatever circumstance - that we can go out, that we can't go out, that we can't do what we want when we want to do it.
There's certainly no shortage of industry related online content to overfill our days with - cabin fever progressively replaced by Zoom fever 
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As anticipated last month, Kantara's Information Sharing Interoperability Working Group did indeed release the Blinding Identity Taxonomy Report joining the Report on the Design Goals for a Healthcare Identity Environment Architecture as the second of the two published Reports so far this year. During June I've been privileged to be invited onto ONC's FAST Identity Solutions SME panel to help assess the potential future digital identity architecture approaches for citizen-facing US Healthcare. The combination of Kantara's cohort of SMEs together with standards and best practice highly applicable to Healthcare sees the organization's engagement in the Healthcare sector increase by the month. It's not just uni-directional either. It was great to see an ONC rep attend a Kantara Healthcare Identity Assurance work group call this month. This reflects a trend of increased US federal agency interest in Kantara's activities of late. Meanwhile the larger Identity Assurance work group that is the steward for Kantara's Identity Assurance program, has completed the Service Assessment Criteria for NIST 800-63 C Federation and Assertions and is now embarking on all level 3 criteria - 800-63-3 IAL3, AAL3 and FAL3 - with grateful thanks to ID.me for its sponsorship of the unenviable editing task. That it has completed this work, while also submitting comments to the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework Credentials (Relationships and Attributes) component bears testament to just how hard these volunteers work, to selflessly support the development and maturing of the global ecosystem.
Kantara Europe, together with its H2020 NGI-Trust partners, completed its short list selection of new proposals seeking grant funding in the third and final call of NGI_Trust. At this time of year, consortia form for grants in 2021 and Kantara is blessed with multiple offers to join a consortium bidding. Unfortunately we could not resource all requests coming to us, but we remain hopeful that all the proposals we were invited to consider, find success.
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Program, Work Group and Discussion Group Updates:
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