Sovrin Community Aids in Global Initiative to Tackle COVID-19 Challenges

April 22, 2020

On April 17th, the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative (CCI) was launched bringing public awareness to a call for action from the self-sovereign identity (SSI) community to fast-track an “immunity passport” solution to help curb the current coronavirus pandemic.

The mission statement for CCI states that the initiative is a “global, cross-sector community of organizations using digital identity as a way to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and reboot public trust”. The initiative’s supporters are working to deploy verifiable credential solutions based on the WC3 Verifiable Credentials Data Model 1.0, which the Sovrin community helped establish.

In an effort to galvanize business, legal, and technical resources from across the identity community and beyond, a kick-off meeting took place on April 2nd involving 141 people from 57 organizations in one of the world’s largest COVID-19 collaboration projects on record.

Since then, the CCI’s efforts have been focused into four workstreams:

• Use cases: Defines and prioritizes the set of verifiable credentials that are most useful to the COVID-19 response
• Rules and governance: Defines the rules of how this technology is to be used, as well as the algorithmic and human trust mechanisms to ensure that data remains secure, private, and tamper-proof
• Tools and technology: Determines how to best architect and deploy the technology needed for COVID-19 credentials
• Coordination, communication, and inclusion: Manages the internal and external communications to align participants and communicate the vision and output to all stakeholders, including issuers, verifiers, journalists, and the public

The workstreams are further divided into subgroups. Members of the Sovrin community are helping to lead portions of CCI including use case prioritization, legal governance, technology implementation, and external outreach.

Paul Knowles, co-lead of the Sovrin Foundation Comms task force, is one of the community leaders that is helping to drive the project internally. He states, …

“It is a privilege and an honour to co-lead the CCI Tools and technology workstream to help align synergistic technologies to create global emergency response solutions to help combat the pandemic. The urgency of the situation has brought experts in SSI, semantics, and consent together to create scalable solutions to a number of unique use cases. At the time of writing, there are 137 participants in the workstream alone. We have put together six focus groups in the Tools workstream to deal with verifiable credential structures, decentralized semantics, data portability, zero-knowledge proof constructs, consent and assurance registries. It has been a truly Herculean effort by a number of key stakeholders to drive this program forward and I am proud to be a part of it.”

The Sovin Foundation is proud to see the Sovrin community joining so many others in this initiative and invites more to do the same. For more information on the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative, visit www.covidcreds.com. To learn more about self-sovereign identity and the Sovrin Foundation, reach out to us at info@sovrin.org.