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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There seems to be a chink of light at the end of the Covid tunnel - or at least there seems to be..
The easing of the lockdown restrictions together with better spring-like weather, spirits have been lifted even if the reality of our global situation is still months, if not years, away from something resembling normal.
Even the new normal starts to seem appealing!
And as the blame game heats up as the citizenry take stock of how well or how badly its government handled the early phase and peak of the pandemic, we can be collectively proud of the Kantara members that reworked their solutions to contribute to the construction of the road to lead us out of this crisis. Thank you again digi.me at Director level and Folio.ID, Identos and MIT Trust::Data Consortium with its Safepaths program, along with members Transmute, Meeco and individuals Mark Lizar and supporters Adrian Gropper all still working on various aspects of the COVID crisis in our community and others. Another timely and considered piece of work came from Meeco, with its review of the European Strategy for Data. I strongly encourage those within and outside of Europe, to read this report and see Kantara alongside MyData there in Use case #5, Data Interoperability and Reusability. 'Nurture, Develop, Operate - that's what we do'.
May has been another busy month in all main activity areas of Kantara. Kantara Europe is neck deep in marking the new proposals seeking grant funding in the 3rd and final call of NGI_Trust. Kantara has 38 proposals to work through out of the 100+ received. It's been busy also for the Kantara Foundation as its Grants.gov application for US federal funding opportunities was approved, the culmination of months of effort by staff together with Director, Kay Chopard Cohen.
Kantara's Information Sharing Interoperability Working Group's 3 project streams are now fully in flight and already producing outputs. One to watch for in coming weeks is the formalization of the Blinding Identity Taxonomy into a report drawing on the original contribution by the Human Colossus Foundation. It is expected to be consumed by Hyperledger Indy Aries and others as well as Kantara. There is a some seminal thinking being championed by Tom Jones on self issued high assurance identifiers, self generated on the user's portable device, with particular interest to the Healthcare community, so keep a watch on how that develops. Meanwhile UMA WG is reviewing parts of Identos's implementation with a view to potentially profiling them as additions to UMA's stable of standardized extensions and profiles. There's growing interest in developing a test harness for UMA Basics, so if you are reading this and implementing and and would be interested to know more, please Contact Us.
We are giving some thought to running our Summer Webinar series again this year. It was very popular when we last last held it in the summer of 2018. It is an ideal opportunity to showcase the work being undertaken in the working groups and Kantara members' implementations of them in their solutions. Interested to be involved? Please Contact Us. Talking of Webinars, we help others out with theirs too. I am moderating a session this coming Thursday in the Festival of Identity, and on June 25th, Kantara will present the shape and form of the privacy related challenges in mDL implementations in a Webinar hosted by the Secure Technology Alliance (STA). Remember we are circling the wagons for a workshop as a part of Kuppinger Cole's Custech online conference in October. Again, Members please Contact Us if you are interested in being involved regarding any of the topics above.
During May we welcomed new Individual Contributor members Zenia Vasquez and Tom Jones and renewing Organization member Hindle Consulting along with Individual Contributor members Christine Abruzzi, Catherine Schulten, Jon Lehtinen, Mark Lizar and Martin Smith. Thank you all for stepping up to support Kantara!
Onwards!
Kind regards
Colin
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