2020: July

Owned by Colin Wallis (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Aug 05, 2020 by Former user (Deleted)
5 min read

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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July 2020 may go on record for the highest number of virtual conferences and webinars in a single month in our community. I don't know how it was for you, but together with Identiverse, One World Identity's KNOW, other industry associations and company webinars, I found my calendar often triple booked on some popular hours. It was great to see so many Kantarians presenting and on panels - from Healthcare to mDL to consent to the state of digital identity in the US to the sate of digital identity in the UK.

Last Wednesday I was privileged to be able to offer Kantara's insights to the UK's Liberal Democrat party which were well received, on 3 questions posed to a representative group of industry entities: Standards - we'll never have "one standard" so what is the goal?; Current UK challenges & threats - where does the UK fall behind and what might happen if we keep that way?; Wishlist - if you could demand anything of the UK government what would it be? Our responses go to assist Lib Dem parliamentarians in understanding the challenges around digital identity and to inform future policy. Meanwhile the UK continues to await the government's response to the Call for evidence on the matter nearly a year ago, into which Kantara contributed.

Kantara kicked off its own Summer webinar series in July too with the Assurance Program's 'what does it take to be approved as NIST 800-63-3 conformant?' and the UMA Working Group's 21st Century Health Information Interoperability + user Control'. Both of these were well presented and well attended. A special thanks to speakers ID.me's Blake Hall, KUMA's Ray Kimble, NIST's David Temoshok, HIE of One's Adrian Gropper and Identos's Alec Laws, wonderfully supported by Staff and in particular Ruth Puente, who helped with both sessions.  Summer's not over yet so stand by for other announcements!

With many vacation plans reset to staycations, the working groups were more active and more well attended than is usual for this time of the year. Kantara's three Information Sharing Interoperability Working Group project streams made good progress, with the externally drafted Personal Data Receipt Framework being given its first showing, before it is formally contributed for peer review, study and comment. It was a similar story with the AdvCIS (Advanced Consent & Info Sharing) developing a draft Consent Receipt v1.2 and the Intentcasting project getting into a steady rhythm of meetings. 

July was also the month that most comments on draft standards being developed in ISO SC27 WG5 were due.  Kantara's Board SDO Liaison sub committee were hard at work, in particular, on ISO TS 27560 - Consent record information structure, where there are opportunities at both a high level and detailed level, to contribute to the direction of this work. If members would like to contribute to ISO SC27 standards in Digital Identity and Privacy technologies, you can do that via Kantara's formal liaison with ISO.   

UMA also had well attended meetings as it continues new work on the profile with the interim working title of 'Wallet/Relationship Manager'. UMA's last meeting of the month did a pulse check on implementations and was pleasing to see news of an additional one.  The FIRE WG always has early drafts seeking informal comment and this month s no exception with the Mobile Assurance Specification. 

As always the Identity Assurance work group had a full plate of work this month.  It just narrowly missed its target to have the Service Assessment Criteria for NIST 800-63-3 IAL3, AAL3 and FAL3 working group approved. In addition, the Assurance Program itself continues its internal development project to make it even more globally reputable than it already is. Given the criticality of digital identity in the current world crisis, it's perhaps not surprising that we have seen none of the traditional summer vacation slow-down and we look forward to making announcements about more CSPs attaining the coveted Kantara Trust Mark later in the year.     

Kantara Europe was busy as usual with coaching of existing projects and settling in new projects selected in the final call and working with a large consortium on a new funding bid for 2021.  Kantara’s Educational Foundation made further progress on its policy framework.   

July saw us welcome a new liaison - Digital Identity New Zealand, the industry association for digital identity in that part of the world.  For me personally it's great to be able to share Kantara's experiences and to learn from DINZ in return, since a lot has changed in the 5+ years I have been away. With agencies from both the Australian and New Zealand governments as members, Kantara is increasingly well represented downunder.  Individual Contributors renewing in July were Dr Tom Sullivan and Wesley Dunnington. Thank you for your continued support!  

While on a more personal note, July is a month where the northern and southern hemispheres are at their extremes. As I sat in my back garden on a hot and sunny summer's day I was reminded by this as a friend posted a picture of Mount Ruapehu in the center of New Zealand's North Island fully laden with snow, ready for the ski season which this person knew I would be envious.  I had planned a few days off to ski in Austria in early April, but of course it was cancelled by COVID as were so many of our business or personal plans, wherever we were in the world. I partially made up for it last week however when I took a few days off in Munich to be with extended family. It's a beautiful city in a beautiful part of Germany so it was well worth the hassle of the travel that even on this short distance seemed as tiring as a long-haul.  Maybe it's due to breathing your own air for so long! ;-( .  Masks were mandatory all through the airport, on the plane for the flight, in the arrival airport, on public transport, in shops and anywhere crowded, but the level of compliance was high. And we came equipped with anti-bacterial gel and wipes, not that we needed them since the airline, all shops, restaurants etc made them readily available so in terms of personal risk, although heightened, it felt manageable.  

Onwards as we traverse another month in these challenging and constantly changing times! 

Kind regards

Colin

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