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.
It has been an intense month for Kantara on the international standards front, with the ISO SC27 meetings held virtually instead of in St Petersburg. Kantara has a formal liaison, attends meetings and last year, proposed the new work item which was recently approved by national bodies and goes by the descriptor ISO/IEC TS 27560 Consent record information structure. In approving the project, there were comments from China, Italy and the Philippines. However the disruption impacted the appointment of editors so, as the proposer of the work, it fell to me to draft a successful disposition of comments so that a working draft #1 could be produced in advance of the next meeting in Warsaw in September. The consent-related project work in the ISI-WG has relevance to the ISO effort going forward, so please participate and contribute to the ISI-WG.
The Identity Assurance WG continues preparing additional Assessment Criteria for accredited Assessors to assess service providers seeking the Kantara Trust Mark for NIST 800-63-3 to encompass NIST 800-63-3C (Federation Assurance Level 2) and following that, all of Level 3 - IAL3, AAL3 and FAL3. While on the topic of the Classes of Approval available under Kantara's Identity Assurance Program, the ARB and Staff are in the midst of refreshing the look and feel of the Trust Status List to both add more detail and make it easier to follow for the steadily increasing volume of interested parties to the page. Talking of testing, the UMA-WG is soliciting interest in recrafting some existing work to test some AS basics. We also continue to 'circle the wagons' on exactly what work we might undertake in a future mDL Work Group to accelerate the adoption of its use in mobile identification. And we are about to start start re-circling the wagons around conferences in the latter part of the year. Kuppinger Cole's Custech in October is a case in point, where much of the work that members had put into the pre-conference Workshop as a curtain-raiser to the European Identity Conference that was due to be held this month, can be re-tuned for Custech, and without the stipulation of in-person presentations and associated travel. But before that, expect to see members and Kantara staff online in the Festival of Identity and the OWI's Digital forum. Please Contact Us if you have an interest in any of the topics above.
Adding to our steadily increasing cohort of Individual contributors, this month we welcome Cigdem Sengul and Manvendra Kumar. Thank you!
Onwards!
Kind regards
Colin
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