Co-operative Credentials

Co-ops
1

Hey ya’ll :slight_smile:

FairBnB.coop, Resonate and Pavilion are starting a joint initiative to develop verifiable credentials for co-operatives. The why and how are explained on the project’s website:

I won’t restate everything that’s on the website, but briefly, online co-operatives face some common challenges associated with identity management and KYC. Also, technological mechanisms for co-operation between co-operatives still has a lot of unrealised potential.

FairBnB, Resonate and Pavilion are exploring the use of verifiable credentials to establish a lightweight decentralised vehicle for co-operative identity. This means we’re looking to:

  1. Establish an initial credential definition
  2. Establish an initial ecosystem model
  3. Enrol participants in a trial of the technology

On that last point, Pavilion and Resonate built a POC Discourse plugin which supports the recognition of verifiable presentations to gain access to Discourse groups. We’re going to improve it as part of this current project. This means any co-operative (or group of co-operatives :slight_smile: ) with a Discourse forum can participate in the trial. You can participate without using Discourse if you have your own way of recognising verifiable presentations.

@nmeyne (Resonate’s lead on the project) has been working with the W3C Credentials Community Group to establish a W3C sub-group focused on a co-operative credentials. That’s on the verge of being created. See Co-operative Credentials - Sub-group and Topical Call - DRAFT · Issue #215 · w3c-ccg/community · GitHub.

Jonathan Reyes from Fairbnb.coop will be at the Platform.coop conference in Berlin this week, talking about the initiative at these two events:

If you’re there, in person or online, please feel free to ask him any questions about it (tell him I sent you :slight_smile: )

Want to get involved?

If you want to get involved the first step is to digest the material on the project website and get your head around verifiable credentials. I’m happy to answer any additional questions you have, not covered on the website or other online materials on verifiable credentials.

When you’re ready sign up to our forum and participate in technical or product / ecosystem discussion on the project. We’re going to be running our W3C co-op creds sub-group work through that community too.

If you want your co-operative to participate in the trial and become official supporters of the project

  • Reach out to me or @nmeyne here or on our forum
  • We’ll add your co-op’s branding to the website and community
  • We’ll make sure you’re kept in the loop about the trial
4 Likes
2

Interesting, yes Crystalisr would definitely like to be involved.

Are you thinking about Web 3.0/ dApp - enabled credentialing here?

David

1 Like
3

Fantastic, please come over and sign up to the forum and I’ll set you up as a supporter of the project.

Verifiable Credentials can involve the use of a blockchain as a “Verifiable Data Registry”, however this is optional (other mechanisms can serve that role). We may use a blockchain for that piece depending on the model we adopt and our partners.

Credentials themselves are inherently decentralised and independent. People carry them around in “wallets”. We’re going for simplicity with everything on the technical side. We don’t want to obscure this inside a Web3 alphabet soup. We love Web3 but it’s not known for accessibility. We’re aiming for ease of comprehension and adoption, and explaining verifiable credentials is a challenge in-of-itself.

1 Like
4

Hi all,

Not sure how I missed this, but WAO are all over badges and digital credentials! I was on the original Mozilla Open Badges team, and we’ve worked on them individually and together for the last decade. I go to the VC-EDU group whenever I can.

Signing up to the forum now and looking forward to finding out more about the trial!

4 Likes