Hello everyone
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Amongst the global scale, severity and suffering of the COVID-19 outbreak, have been some truly remarkable stories of courage, duty or calling and selfless dedication. The people who do often largely thankless tasks to maintain our everyday living and to keep us safe and well, have rightfully been called out for our adulation. The contribution of those in healthcare, in law enforcement, in transport and logistics, city refuse and so on are nearly always overlooked in the cut and thrust of issues of the day that we have the luxury of engaging in because our others needs further down Maslov's hierarchy are taken care of - largely by these unsung heroes. Times like we have today are an opportunity to reflect and reset - not just our economies and our ecologies, but also ourselves as human beings. Perhaps our industry even learns a thing or two along the way - that fragmentation and competition give way to coherence and collaboration. The future will not be the same as the past. Things will return to the way they were. Valiant attempts there will be, I'm sure, but the reset to 'the new normal' may in fact bring some good. Let's hope so.
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What can we all do? In my email to members several weeks ago, I talked about how fortunate we are in this industry, that remote working and virtualization is second nature to us. We are confident in working with the tools and with the semi-isolation that comes with home-working - its upsides and downsides. Please share your knowledge and experience with colleagues, friends, family, neighbors, everyone you know who you think might struggle with this new normal. IDPro, the digital identity professionals organization that was incubated by Kantara, has a great newsletter this month. Included in it is '10 TIPS FOR WORKING FROM HOME FROM IDPRO' authored by Marla Hay, Sr. Director, Product Management - Privacy & Data Governance at Salesforce. It is members access only but if you haven't got around to joining IDPro, do it now and access the March newsletter.For me, it has been interesting to observe how different organizations in our industry have approached this period. For years now, we have raised awareness of just how critical appropriately applied digital identity is to much of our digital lives - strong and secure when the identity-related risk in the use case calls for it, less so when it is not. Same with privacy - having agency over our personal data volunteered by us or collected by others. Different uses cases call for different approaches, brought into sharp focus right now when trust in one's government authorities, in one's digital platforms, in the developer community is pivotal to our adoption of apps for contact tracing, for test validation and so on. The role that industry organizations play is important, but it is not all about them, tempting as it is, to draw in attention by binding to the issue of the day. You'll note that Kantara has not played that game. The reason it exists is because its members want it to exist. Kantara has called out the great work its members are doing in various aspects of the COVID crisis, just as it calls out the great work its members are doing in other aspects of the digital economy at any other time. Kantara is blessed with some of the most thought-leading and innovative organizations and individuals in our space on the planet. Kantara amplifies and showcases those great works, because it really is all about them.
It's all about 'playing it forward, and Kantara itself is doing just that. These are difficult times, not only for people but also for organizations of all sizes - especially new and small ones. While too early to announce here, Kantara is helping out another non-profit with a project it was looking for the right type of sponsorship for, to undertake a project with very humanistic values at its heart, the sponsorship in part paying for the use of Kantara's platform to bring it to life. Things being as they are, Kantara is playing it forward because important as the money is to Kantara, more important is the project. 'Nurture, Develop, Operate - that's what we do' is Kantara's strapline. We are holding true to our ethics and ethos of low barriers to community participation for the common good of the digital ecosystem. This project exemplifies that and more broadly beyond the digital ecosystem.
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Talking of R&D, Tallinn Estonia-based Kantara Europe is gearing up promotion of the NGI TRUST 3rd and Final call https://wiki.geant.org/display/NGITrust/3rd+Open+Call+NGI_TRUST which is now open and closes barely a month away on May 4th. Please consider the following; if you have a great idea but not located in the EU, ensure you have an EU based partner to front it for you, even if you are based in the UK); be aware that we expect more focus to be placed on Type 2 and Type 3 proposals that really are capable of mass consumer adoption; and perhaps not surprisingly, current circumstances may engender greater attraction to proposals including use cases applicable to epidemiology.
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