Portability and Interoperability across Ecosystems

[davidejalexander]

By definition the desire of the Open Wallet Foundation is open and interoperable code that allows the different elements to work together seamlessly. This discussion thread is more about Portability and Interoperability across working ecosystems and services.

Individuals are fundamentally at the core of this simply because the vast majority of operational services and transactions are between People and Organisations or collections of organisations (including state Actors orgs) across the Public, Private and Third Sector.

The rise of trust frameworks and schemes across the globe is growing in pace and the subject of people being able to interact with multiple trust frameworks and schemes that may have adopted different protocols and standards is a pressing issue to maximise portability of trust and drive up the reuse through portable, understandable verified data which could be a single verified credential or a wider set of verified data to support operational interactions not single events, but regular processes with multiple related events and exchange of data.

Therefore People will need a means of working as effortlessly with these diverse ecosystems which means they need the means of moving, synching and configuring delivery of different payloads in different formats within different ecosystems.

The safe planning assumption is that for the foreseeable future we will be living in a mixed economy of protocols, data standards and different legislation so simply saying everyone needs to agree on one for each area which we know will either never happen or take many decades to materialise we have to see this as a problem set that needs a solution architecturally for ecosystems to work with each other and ensure the people at the centre have the best, safest experience which is as effortless as it can be whilst ensuring they are in control of where, and when their identity and data is being used and able to manage that effectively.

Question

1. What work already exists on the subject of portability between identity and attribute ecosystems is already underway and what has it identified and who is leading the discussions on this aspect trust and reuse.
2. What are the legal, technical , commercial and cultural issues that could at play in this area that might inform the OWF architecture