2022-2-23 Steering Committee Discussion Meeting Notes

Agenda 

• Agenda Review (2 min)
• Steering Committee Members Review (1 min)
• Minutes Approval (3 min)
• New Member Review (2 min)
• Open Discussion

Attendance

• John Jordan
• Drummond Reed (Evernym/Avast)
• Chris Buchanan (MITRE)
• Bryn Robinson-Morgan (Mastercard)
• Michael Nettles (ETS)
• Wenjing Chu (Futurewei Technologies)
• Marie Wallace (IBM)
• Steve McCown (Anonyome Labs)
• RJ Reiser (Liquid Avatar)
• Judith Fleenor (ToIP - Director of Strategic Engagement)
• Elisa Trevino (LF)

• Recording

Link

• Presentation (Google Slides)
  
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Notes

Agenda Review 

Judith Fleenor announced the LF AntiTrust policy and asked all members to adhere to the policy. Judith Fleenor explained that today we'll be continuing the discussion regarding our strategic priorities for 2022. Wenjing Chuexplained that this is an effort to organize our previous discussion regarding priorities for 2002 into tangible efforts that are actionable as we move forward. Our ToIP Value Proposition is that there is a real unmet need in the marker for a trust architecture that can solve the critical trust related challenges effectively. Implementers can practically deploy in the real work over Internet. We believe that ToIP is the right organization to fill this need. Wenjing Chu believes the format here is for engagement so that we can have a dynamic discussion that's engaging and interactive to define our mission and goals in 2022. Drummond Reed provided a story about a banking and decentralized finance; he shared that they shifted their focus entirely to digital wallets.  He explained how ToIP is enabling digital identity networks that was well received and followed by an open forum where the open question was what do they consider to be the biggest problem that needs to be solved and they believe the stack is the best way to solve this interoperability challenge. Independent groups recognize that interoperability is what we're addressing here and is driving our efforts. John Jordanmentioned that he believes we're missing the design principles here because he believes there are three key questions that we should be addressing: I want to connect and interact with and I need to know how to do this without technical complexity. How do we define interoperability? This is the set of decisions that we don't have to make because they're already identified and implemented to protect my intellectual rights. How do I do this? We need governance rules to define how we do this within our network and community. These are our value propositions that we should be articulating within the community. Wenjing Chuexplains and is agreement that this is our perspective and believes that the role we play here is what is important element here within the ecosystem. This includes interoperability and under the assumptions that the principles we have within the ecosystem. Talking about principles are the first step. Michael Nettles believes we need to articulate what the unmet need is here and he believes from an education perspective that's data and credentials; he suggests we better define what that need truly is so that it's clear. Bryn Robinson-Morgan  mentioned that he also believes we need to be a blessing to explain this in a more simplistic way so that's it's better understood in the community. Wenjing Chustated that we want to come back to these as the value we can deliver on as we move forward. 

Wenjing Chu posed the question, what are we doing to advance our value propositions? We may summarize them to develp specifications for the stack and community building and educations/events, market development to help the industry adopt our stack in their perspective products and services and lastly advocate in policy to help explain why this is the right solution. If we're doing this, then we can better evaluate if our efforts are driving our value proposition. He proposed the question, do you see things we should add or or subtract from the list? Marie Wallace asked if we're the right organization to drive this effort? Do we have the right network and skills and resources to address all four buckets. Bryn Robinson-Morgan  agrees that the four items are the right topics, but believes that advocacy should be in the forefront (#1) to help drive standardization within the industry, beyond just policy makers, and for all key stakeholders. Bryn Robinson-Morgan also believes we're missing scalability here and driving that we are the gold standard when it comes to contribution. Wenjing Chu explains that we can advocate directly here or we can provide folks with the stack and our recommendation on how to implement. Bryn Robinson-Morgan agrees that we're providing the framework for organizations to go and do this work. Wenjing Chu agrees that we need documentation that speaks to a wider audience and proposed moving #4 (advocacy) to #2, behind community specifications of the ToIP Stack, with a roadmap to standardization and implementation, interoperability and adoption. John Jordan said that as he looks at the list, he believes that we're good at writing specifications but we have an opportunity to improve our advocacy efforts. He mentioned that #3 (market development) is critical to help promote inter-membership collaboration. John Jordanmentioned that when it comes to advocacy, this helps encourage the market to engage and have confidence in our effort. Judith Fleenormentioned that Chris Ingrao mentioned we should be partnering with the folks who excel in this area, collaboration is key and critical for policy makers to advance with their expertise. Drummond Reedmentioned that he agrees with Marie Wallaceand that all of these elements are important and relevant. He believes the market recognizes that this will accelerate as we progress to drive all of these efforts concurrently. John Jordanmentioned that EU is critical in these efforts too. We need to leverage the relationships we currently have to drive policy and influence in Europe.  Michael Nettles asked is sustainability is represented in the four. Bryn Robinson-Morgan shared that having an organization of ToIP is critical to the efforts of driving policy. Marie Wallace mentioned have the principles and concrete terms is extremely important for accountability and implementation. Wenjing Chumentioned that receiving feedback from members on what type of content is needed for advocacy adoption, that's key. 

Wenjing Chu proposed, how do we organize effectively? We organize in Was where most of the work is done. Steering Committee and Sub-Committee, LF staff and support. We need to be thinking about how do we make sure the WGs are healthy and have the needed resources and aligned with the ToIp objectives and priorities over the longer term? & How do we support tasks that do not neatly fall into a WG? (i.e. GitHub, wiki, event driven asks, graphics, social media, etc). Drummond Reed believes that GHP is dormant at this stage since most of the work has moved over to the CCI and LFPH. He believes that the rest of the WGs are actively engaged and delivering tangible work. Concepts and Terminology could use additional resources, but overall they are healthy and operational in a meaningful way. John Jordan mentioned that Hyperledger has a quarterly reporting template that provides more oversight to the governance committee, but there might be an opportunity to deliver more of this information. He stated, we might consider asking these various WGs to provide an output that is standardized to polish and circulate (i.e. blogs, etc.) potentially a quarterly content to share and promote. He said we could guide them by asking to provide info that aligns with our principles or stack. Marie Wallace inquired how do we engage with these various working group members, what's the path to collect or engage with these various groups. John Jordan mentioned utilizing our social media platforms to gain feedback outside of our immediate community. Steve McCown mentioned that we may need to consider as we look at the community, where are the things that we're building are being adopted and how are they being implemented and adopted? He provided an example of Square publishing a white paper (https://tbdex.io/whitepaper.pdf) debts about exchanging assets in the digital work. It talks about DIDs and trust and reputation and he asked how can we rope this in and use standards that are within our domain; this has a technical stack implementation and a communication implementation too. How can we iterate on the organizations that are already doing this in the marker today. Drummond Reed mentioned Accenture just put out a great paper about “SSI + IAM” that Christine Leong gave a great talk on at the DID Conference Korea 2022 on Monday. https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-173/Accenture-Decentralize-Digital-Identity.pdf

Drummond Reed suggested that we have the groups, once a quarter, the All-Member Meeting devoted to our WGs/TFs could focus on “asks”, i.e., what are the resources/inputs they need that can most help them. We could also turn that into a blog post so the larger public community could see those needs. Bryn Robinson-Morgan suggested that we ensure we have alignment and direction within our WGs. Judith Fleenor agreed that we need to establish this alignment to ensure we're working in a cohesive effort. Marie Wallacewent on to say that we need to better communicate our needs because there are a lot of folks who are passionate and want to contribute, but need to better understand how they can engage. 

Wenjing Chu proposed how do we grow ToIP and mentioned that it is recognized that we need to grow ToIP as an organization to better fulfill our value proposition. It means more specifically to recruit additional organizations who can join as funding members and provide expertise and employees time to work on projects and WGs and significant stakeholders in the market/ecosystem. The Steering Committee should provide some guidance and target to our organizational growth. Judith Fleenor mentioned that she likes the idea of SC members putting together a list of companies that align with our efforts to adopt and further implement the ToIP stack and principles. John Jordan asked if it makes sense for the Steering Committee to identify resource within their respective market space to engage and join our efforts at ToIP. Marie Wallace agrees that we need to be targeted in these efforts, specific identity players and key areas and then key consumers. She went on to state that we need to sell them on ToIP by highlighting the risk of not joining. We need to identify the risk if they don't change to drive engagement and participation. We need to have a strong message and presentation that truly articulates the relevance and value. This messaging needs to be very targeted so that we gain support and messaging that helps tell the story of risk that could be a future obstacle. John Jordan coined the term Ethical Interoperability to illustrate why it's important to join ToIP.  Wenjing Chu asked Judith Fleenor to come up with a list to start our efforts to engage organizations. Who do we want to target and why do we need to target them with tangible information that entices these organizations to join ToIP. Marie Wallace mentioned we should be leveraging the other organizations that might help drive adoptions because their competitors or peers within the industry. Bryn Robinson-Morgan mentioned that we should be reviewing our current membership base that are individuals that we want to drive to the Steering Committee. We need to know who's attending the conferences we're sponsoring to help drive and grow membership. John Jordan mentioned that Prove Net Zero products and responsible sourcing is to illustrate their responsible to gain investments from large organizations because they are ethical investors. 

Wenjing Chu highlighted our focus for 2022, our top priorities:

1. The ToIP Stack Development
2. Improve Health (SC & WG chairs)
3. Outreach (SC's Comms Committee + a number of WG/TF together)
4. Organizational growth (Judith, SC, ED)

We would like a cadence and review to ensure we have alignment within our own WGs and TFs to ensure we are focused on the priorities for ToIP Foundation. Judith Fleenorsuggested that we continue this topic in our next discussion meeting. 

ACTIONS:

• Elisa Trevino to create a private slack channel for Steering Committee
• Steering Committee members to provide lists of resources that align with our stack and principles to help engage for membership.