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Eve is taking notes and is happy to take notes in future.
Attendees and introductions
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Please send introductions to the list if Eve got anything wrong!):
- Jim Hazard - Lawyer frustrated with word processing
- Eve Maler - ForgeRock - interesting UMA/smart contract connections
- Thomas Hardjono - interest in getting a high-level language specified for contracts
- Andrew Hughes - runs the Leadership Council
- Jeff Stallman - blockchain developer
- Tilson Knudson ?
- Scott Shorter - Kimble & Associates - doing some ONC work, auditing, and governance
- Don Quigley - director of services leader for GE
- Mark Aronson - Penn council of notaries
- Kathleen Connor - consultant involved in UMA, UMA legal, and ONC
- Ivan Nikolai ?
- Ann Vroom - private individual interested in blockchain
- Clare Nelson - AllClearID
- Thorsten Niebuhr
- John Wunderlich
- Javier Moreno
- David Ray?
- Colin Wallis
What is a DG about?
A DG has more informal deliverables. It might, for example, recommend formation of a WG.
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Smart contracts, broadly defined as executable code to represent legal agreements, are one way to approach agreements.
Participant goals
Jim briefly described his work on digitizing legal agreements. Eve briefly described some discussion from the Digital Contracts event/workshop of six weeks ago. The worlds of smart contracts and digital contracts that use natural language are distinct. There’s a gap between them. It seems to be narrowing, but there seems to be urgency about closing the gap and connecting them.
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Scott brings up a long-ago goal of technically verifiable agreements that have been parameterized. It now seems a lot more possible.
Logistics and deliverables
How often to meet? Andrew recommends five months of intensive meeting and discussion, one month of intensive writing, and the reporting out. Several people speak up in favor of frequent short/intensive meetings.
Deliverables? Thomas suggests a use case document, ranked by priority. John summarizes the discussion by suggesting a final deliverable that would be a briefing note that contains “what is a BC, what is CmA, what are the kinds of contracts that have ‘smarts’, use cases, issue identification and analysis”, etc. We could take a look at some of the outputs of the Digital Contracts event held May 23-24, which Kantara helped to sponsor as part of our work.
Don’t forget that we can use our mailing list for discussion.
AI: Eve: Share out links to notes and artifacts from the Digital Contracts event.
Jim met with Bart Suiches of the Philips Blockchain Lab subsequently to the Digital Contracts event and discussed patient consents as a use case. John cautions about using health as our first or primary use case for discussion. Jim agrees that it’s the hardest case, which makes it attractive to him. But we can start simple. Bart told him they’re absorbed figuring out the GDPR.
Don’t forget that we can use our mailing list for discussion.
Next steps
AI: Eve: Share out links to notes and artifacts from the Digital Contracts event.
Let’s meet twice a week for 30 minutes each, at different times to spread out for US and Europe, and to avoid the UMA call. They will be (we think) at Tue 11am ET and Thu 2pm ET.
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