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2016-07 (July 2016) Meetings

This page records the Discussion Group's meeting notes for July 2016. See the DG calendar for our meeting schedule.

Tuesday July 5

Eve is taking notes and is happy to take notes in future.

Attendees and introductions

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
  • Scott Shorter - Kimble & Associates - doing some ONC work, auditing, and governance
  • Don Quigley - director of services leader for GE
  • Marc L. Aronson - president and CEO of Pennsylvania Association of Notaries
  • Kathleen Connor - consultant involved in UMA, UMA legal, and ONC
  • Ann Vroom - private individual interested in blockchain
  • Clare Nelson - AllClearID
  • Thorsten Niebuhr
  • John Wunderlich
  • Javier Moreno
  • Colin Wallis

What is a DG about?

A DG has more informal deliverables. It might, for example, recommend formation of a WG.

There are several Kantara WGs and efforts that have a legal flavor to them:

  • UMA, with its UMA legal subgroup
  • Consent and Information Sharing
  • The Identity Assurance effort, with its trust framework components

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.

Mark says that notary had been used previously as a synonym for timestamping. Now blockchain is coming to the fore in the same way.

John would like to clarify what goes, and what should go, on a blockchain.

Jim believes that smart contracts would be good to focus on independently of how they themselves are recorded. Blockchain is often the wrong way to store information.

Jeff concurs with that. Blockchain is a suite of technologies, and you don’t always need all of them.

Kathleen is working for the DHA security architect. The overhead for establishing trust frameworks is incredible. Adding agility would be great. Also, helping privacy, security, and administrative parts of healthcare to scale — HL7 V2, V3, and FHIR — is important.

Clare is a fan of Steve Wilson of Constellation. UBS is spending a lot of money in financial services. She’s interested in pursuing a conversation along that path.

John also notes that “contracts of adhesion” that often force individuals to accept terms and conditions are another use case where scalability of forming agreements would help — in this case, help individuals directly.

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.

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.

The group reached consensus on having Thomas and Eve as co-chairs.

Scott kindly agreed to serve as use case collector on the DG wiki. John created a use case template for CIS WG usage we might consider using.

AI: Thomas: Send out a note confirming the call times and set up the call dial-ins with Shannon.

We’ll start the repeating call series next week.

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