Jolocom Digest | October 2018
🎉A position paper, a hackathon, and a cornucopia of events
This past month, conferences and meetups have taken us around the world from Prague, to California, to Cairo, and back to Germany. Check out where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and what we’ve been reading along the way. And as always, if you have any questions or want to reach out to us about your next event, drop us a line on Telegram or email us at hello@jolocom.com.
October highlight: 🎉 #SSIpaper released 🎉
This month the Bundesblock released its newly minted #SSIpaper — “Self-Sovereign Digital Identity: A position paper on blockchain enabled identity and the road ahead.” By putting a focus on the concept, the problems that motivate it, its potential use cases and questions evolving around implementation — standards, architecture, security, privacy, and regulation — this paper will guide further development and discussion in the field of self-sovereign identity.
Ultimately, it is a call to action for individuals, regulators, and business to contribute to a global universal identity framework for all types of entities, built on open and interoperable standards.
✅ Download the paper ✅
📰 Read what people are saying 📰
💬 Contribute your ideas on social media using #SSIpaper 💬
Jolocom was a contributor to the #SSIPaper, which is the result of a collaboration between leading organisations and thought leaders active in the decentralized identity space that were brought together by the German Blockchain Association’s (Bundesblock) Identity Working Group.
👩🏻💻👩🏽💻Engineering Update👨🏻💻👩🏻💻
This month our engineering team was hard at work updating the Jolocom library and pushing new changes to the SmartWallet app. This month, we…
- Introduced a new flow of receiving credentials via the SmartWallet
- Made some optimizations to the QR code generation to enable encoding even large amounts of data (for example large, complex claims)
- Added support for more complex claims (multiline or nested)
- Created two new demo sites showcasing the usage of the Jolocom Identity (Avalon and Aelondo)
👩🏽💻 Contribute to our code on Github 👨🏻💻
💬 Talk to us about it on Gitter 💬
Curious Hyperlinks 📸🎥📰🎵👨🏼🏫📝
📰 Brewster Kahle on What’s Next for the Decentralized Web Movement
…gives us an idea of what it might be like to have a DWeb camp to weave all of the isolated actors and ideas floating around the decentralization community together. “It’s a good time to push forward because we have a great deal of sensitivity to some of the failings of the current Web…at the same time there is a lot of money running around; times are good, so people can work on trying to fix this thing.”
📸 Mark Williams’s Secure Messaging Apps Comparison
…provides a complete overview of all of the secure messaging applications out there and answers questions from jurisdiction to encryption to give you an overview of which apps offer stronger user data protection.
📰 Identity in the decentralized web by Jim Nelson
…dives into the implication of being able to access, own and produce when required a verifiable identity, as illustrated through a high SciFi example. Picture this: American sailor Gerard Gales finds himself stranded in post-World War I Antwerp without ID. Unable to process him, he is escorted from one border to another by authorities who do not know what to do with a man lacking an identity.
📸 Statista’s Annual number of data breaches in the US
…shows us just how vulnerable our personal data is online. Between 2005 and 2018, there were 668 breaches with over 22 million records exposed. The largest breach to date was uncovered in 2016, when hackers stole user information associated with at least 1 billion Yahoo accounts in 2013.
🎵 Blockchain and Privacy at #PrivacyWeekBerlin
…answers the question: How will decentralized identity infrastructure work with and compete with current centralized and federated identity models, and what key challenges might it solve that those models can’t? Moderated by Jolocom’s Ellie Stephens, the experts on the panel include Greg McMullan from Bundesblock, Natalie Eichler of DWF Law, Dimitri Jonghe from Taqanu and Jolocom’s own Kai Wagner.
🎥 Replace the System by Peter Czaban at Web3 Summit 2018
…shows Peter Czaban, Executive Director of Web3 Foundation explaining to a large audience the current status of the decentralized web and how the teams present at Web3 Summit fit into the larger Web3 vision.
📰 When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself by Nicholas Thompson
…dives into the dirty of just how much companies know about us — “soon companies will know when you need light bulbs before they burn out, how to keep you staring at screens after it’s in your interest to stop, or your sexual preferences before they are clear to you.”
👨🏼🏫 Stephen J. Engberg on Linking Security with Economics
…provides an important take on security and economics through active citizen control of their own identity data and how citizen empowerment to own and control identity data directly contributes to a stronger security market.
📝 The New Organ’s Does the Internet Know More About You Than It Should
…is documenting all creepy experiences you’ve had where your user privacy was invaded through advertising. You can contribute your story, or at the very least, have a chance to visit the creepiest website ever.
Where we’ve been
22–24.10 → Web3 Summit Self-Sovereign Identity Workshop
Berlin • View from the ground
Jolocom had four team members present during Web3 Summit providing workshops and leading discussions on self-sovereign identity and Jolocom’s decentralized approach. In this video Eugeniu Rusu and Natascha Wittenberg discuss self-sovereign identity and how it will look in practice.
23.10 → Disrupt Meetup: Challenging Digital Identity with Biometrics and Blockchain
Frankfurt • View from the ground
Ellie Stephens presented Jolocom’s decentralized identity solution during a meetup hosted by the Disrupt Network during German Blockchain Week in Frankfurt alongside another disruptor in the identity space presenting on iampass’s palm vein scanner. In this blog piece, she reflects on the differences between these two approaches even though both attempt to respond to the same challenge because it’s clear that regardless the solution, the current way that digital identities are managed isn’t working.
19–21.10 → AltShift Festival: Blockchain Track
Cairo • View from the ground
Jolocom’s Founder + CEO Joachim Lohkamp joined over 100 young entrepreneurs & professionals in Egypt along with a handful of experts from Asia, Europe and the Americas to discuss critical questions on a wide range of topics from the future of work to open source and blockchain technologies at AltShift Festival 2018 in Cairo.
01.10 → Blockchain & Identity Meetup #2
Berlin • View from the ground
As part of Privacy Week Berlin, Jolocom hosted a panel and follow-up Q&A to explore what happens to privacy when we decentralize digital identity. Our newest team member Ellie Stephens moderated the discussion which featured a diverse array of voices, perspectives, and opinions from our panelists Balázs Némethi (Taqanu), Natalie Eichler (DWF), Greg McMullen (Blockchain Bundesverband), and Kai Wagner (Jolocom).
Where we’re going
07.11 → e-Identity Workshop
Brussels
Kai will present as part of a panel on e-identity standardisation during an all-day workshop hosted by the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum which will cover topics such as eIDAS regulation, identity standards and identity in the context of a European blockchain infrastructure.
T-Labs is organizing the world’s first blockchain related science slam during Berlin Science Week 2018: the Blockslam! A science slam is a short and very lively 10-minutes-presentation explaining scientific insight to a general audience. No algorithms, technical language or complicated processes, simply blockchain science explained for everyone.
19.11 → IPDB Hackathon #1: Code for Purpose — Decentralize the Web
Berlin
As a part of Revision Summit 2018, Jolocom, IPDB, Riddle&Code, and Ocean Protocol will be hosting a one-day hackathon with over 50 developers, UX/UI designers, hackers and makers from the Web3 to build an answer to the question: How do we reach a more human-centric and purpose-driven society in the digital age?
19–20.11 → Revision Summit 2018
Berlin
At Revision, Jolocom founder Joachim Lohkamp will be presenting on Identity in a Digital Age — between data, distributed consensus and validation. Here, he will help audiences answer the questions: how are identities currently formed and understood? And how does this change with the possibility of multiple digital identities?
24–25.11 → path.finder Festival
Berlin
During path.finder Festival, Jolocom’s Kai Wagner will provide a lightening talk as part of a keynote address on the future of identity, particularly in the context of the Web3 movement, and what steps we can already take today.
