June 22, 2020
The Annual Meeting of the Sovrin Foundation on June 17 marked the end of a three-month transition into a sharply focused organization that will leverage more of the contributions from community volunteers. The meeting saw a graceful hand-off from the original Trustees, most of whom have served since the launch of the Foundation in 2016, to five new Trustees elected to represent the growing global Sovrin community. These new Trustees then formed a Nominating Committee to begin the process of identifying additional candidates to further extend the depth and breadth of Sovrin community representation on the Board of Trustees.
The new Trustees elected to officer positions were Samuel Smith, Chairperson; Stephen Curran, Vice-Chair; Nicky Hickman, Secretary, and Philippe Page, Treasurer. The fifth new Trustee, André Kudra, was appointed to convene the Nominating Committee. The second-generation Board aims to ensure broad representation of the Sovrin community, i.e. Sovrin Committees, Councils, and Working Groups and others in the larger SSI and Identity for All communities, to ensure diverse representation in fulfillment of the mission. Lastly, the new chair of the Sovrin Steward Council, Lohan Spies, will be appointed as an ex-officio Trustee at the next BoT meeting as specified by the Sovrin Bylaws.
Chairs of three other Sovrin Governing Bodies will also be seated as ex-officio Trustees at the next board meeting:
The new Trustees sent a strong message about the primacy of the mission-driven vision that includes the stability and sustainability of Sovrin MainNet, while pursuing the larger Identity for All mission. Currently operational, MainNet, along with BuilderNet and StagingNet, is the canonical global example of a ToIP Layer One utility network governed by the Sovrin Utility Governance Framework.
The other foundational commitment is to fully pursue Identity for All by extending the current Sovrin Governance Framework to encompass a network of networks. This will effectively become the first version of a ToIP Layer Four governance framework—the Sovrin Ecosystem Governance Framework.
The new Trustees passed several key resolutions reinforcing those priorities, including continued exploration of a future Sovrin token in the context of interoperability within a ToIP network of networks.
On behalf of the new board, transition team, and the community, Sam Smith, the newly elected Chair of the Foundation, stated, “We wish to thank the outgoing board members, all of whom were founding trustees, for their vision and significant contribution to establishing self-sovereign identity as a foundational technology for digital trust standards.”
Phil Windley, Founding Chair of the Foundation, said, “I’m grateful for the hard work of the founding board in establishing the mission and vision for the Sovrin Foundation. They and countless other volunteers have worked tirelessly to make the Sovrin Network into an SSI metasystem that can truly provide Identity for All. The new members of the Board of Trustees are individuals who have proven themselves over the years and especially in this recent period of transition to have ‘Sovrin spirit’. I’m confident that the Foundation is in good hands.”
Some of the more recent achievements overseen by the outgoing board were highlighted in the previous blog post with more granular details written up in the Sovrin Foundation 2019 Annual Report.
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