In its mission defining an architecture for internet-scale digital trust, the Trust over IP Foundation rightly acknowledges the critical importance of human trust at the business, legal and social layers. However, trust isn’t a tangible thing like code or cryptography. It’s not something we can directly control and doesn’t follow an instruction set. Trust is essentially a social and psychological construct, a feeling – one that can be defined as 'a confident relationship with the unknown.'
Human Trust is more complex than technical trust because it is entirely contextual and relies on offline relationships that cannot be captured as proofs or claims. Human Trust can not be "built" in the same sense as hardware or software. It is up to others – the public, users, citizens – to give, and needs to be earned through continuously delivering repeatable, reliable experience. Looking through this lens of it being earned, given and received, we can see trust as a currency of social interaction, informed directly by our human experiences.
The scope of the Human Experience Working Group (HXWG) is naturally that of the Human Trust layers of the ToIP stack (Layers 3 and 4) as opposed to Technical Trust (which is the main focus of Layers 1 and 2).
The HXWG will be action-orientated and aim to develop insights & practical resources to enable stakeholders in the ToIP community to improve outcomes for those using the products and services they are building. This includes exploring human behaviors; trust rituals across social and cultural contexts; mapping the objects, actors, mental models and actions at play; developing trust-centric best practices of user experience design; and assembling strategic resources that put people at the center of the design and engineering process. By helping the TolP community build ecosystems, governance frameworks, and products and services using inclusive and respectful design practices, the HXWG can act as the glue between the pillars of technology and governance under the Trust over IP stack.
The HXWG aims to actively engage with as diverse an audience as possible, hosting community discussion around the human experience of digital trust and fostering an inclusive environment for the research and curation of human-level trust mechanics as a shared resource for use across domain boundaries.
The HXWG also has latitude to, with express approval from the Steering Committee, establish an in-residence position to offer guidance and recommendations, as well as directly support the implementations of measures, to address inclusion and diversity issues related to the work being done at Trust over IP.
The purpose of the HXWG is to examine the design features of digital systems, their governance and the business processes that support them, which make interactions or actors trustable, in the contextual and subjective experience of those using them. Specifically our purpose is to:
Improve accessibility and user experience of products and services being made within the ToIP community (and the wider decentralized identity and digital trust community).
Promote inclusion and diversity by ensuring decentralised identity and digital trust technologies are being designed, built and deployed inclusively, with awareness of wider social contexts & human subjectivity.
Challenge the status quo that is predominately white, male, western, centralised and tech-centric models of identity, trust, risk, privacy and security.
Following are the general categories of deliverables that fall under the HXWG charter. Specific deliverables will be identified as the HXWG moves forward.
The HXWG inherits its IPR terms from the JDF Charter. These include: