Today, January 11, is the International Day of Gratitude. What better time then, to tell partners that you cherish their work and thank them for the inspiration they have given you? We at Jolocom reflect on amazing projects that became possible by joining forces with partners such as T-Labs, Bundesdruckerei, Stacks, and TIB – the Technical Information Library Hanover.
It’s been a privilege to work with you and we hope to continue our work together.
About Us
Jolocom is a leading steward of self-sovereign identity (SSI) in Europe with a long-term commitment to open source and open standards. We bring a full SSI tech stack, including library, software development kit (SDK), SSI protocol and the Jolocom SmartWallet application, as well as our technical expertise, to the community. Our aim is to accelerate the deployment of DIDs and verifiable credentials, ensuring interoperability between available solutions and increasing the self-sovereignty of users.
We’ve had the chance to engage with multiple partners in the past year, allowing us to broaden and deepen our SSI knowledge and, what’s more, partnering up in projects that mark a significant turn in the SSI world and increase engagement from both users and developers.
Thank You to..
T-Labs/T-Systems (Deutsche Telekom)
T-Labs is the Research & Development Department of Deutsche Telekom, focusing on bringing new technology trends to the market and delivering tangible results into Deutsche Telekom’s innovation portfolio.
Starting in November 2017, Jolocom has partnered with T-Labs to launch the development, bringing together a group of blockchain startups to build the prototype operating stack: the idea being that enterprises can build a decentralized back-end in a matter of minutes. Jolocom is developing a modular solution that enables individuals, organizations and companies to get a self-sovereign digital identity. In the T-Labs prototype, Jolocom provides the tool to create and securely verify claims about identity. This allows for the modeling of a trustworthy and complex relationships between entities (e.g. ownership structures of IoT devices with organizations/individuals). Modeling these relationships with a self-sovereign solution enables a frictionless bridge between different ecosystems and network environments. What we have begun with T-Labs in 2018, we are happy to continue from early 2021 into the middle of 2022 with T-Systems and others as part of our current project portfolios.
Bundesdruckerei
Bundesdruckerei (BDR) is home to the digital experts supplying Germany’s ID cards and passports. They are working with different ID management solutions and technologies at the federal government security company. One of these approaches made use of Jolocom’s identity library and wallet. In 2019, the BDR demonstrated the potential of decentralized self-sovereign identity solutions in NAME OF PILOT, where identity information remains under the complete control of the citizen via the Jolocom SmartWallet downloaded onto their mobile device.
More precisely, researchers at BDR merged the Jolocom software for decentralized identity and access management with the existing government IT infrastructure for verification and identification. The goal: creating one of the earliest proof-of-concepts (POCs) for a decentralized digital ID in Germany.
This particular POC was an early example of an issuing and verification authority merging its existing technology with self-sovereign identity software. Jolocom’s software is fully open source. The part we played was adjusting our app interface to support BDR’s work.
With more governments exploring the advantages of blockchain and, more specifically, self-sovereign identity solutions for common identity and access management challenges, we look forward to offering our open source library more widely.
Furthermore, we have engaged with the BDR in another main project of which you might have heard: ONCE.
Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft: ‘Showcase Secure Digital Identities’ projects ONCE, ID-Ideal and SDIKA
The project is part of the competitive innovation program “Showcase Secure Digital Identities” (SDI) funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), where a dozen consortia were invited to present their concepts in an innovation competition and four projects that qualified for a fully-funded three year implementation phase.
Jolocom is a partner in three of these four SDI implementation projects, to which we will lend our expertise in self-sovereign identity, years of experience in developing digital identity wallets and the open-source Jolocom stack.
ONCE is the first of these projects to launch, followed by ID-Ideal and SDIKA. A few words about each:
ONCE aims to harmonize eID with SSI in user-controlled wallets. ID-Ideal has the goal of harmonizing trust providers and consumers from multiple networks and legal setups under one coherent trust framework. Finally, SDIKA pursues the realization of cross-use case identities in open ecosystems with widespread adoption. We thank our new and old partners for joining us on this path.
All of these projects are funded and supported by the BMWi, and we are grateful for using this huge opportunity to bring SSI to the individual citizen.
Technical Information Library Hanover
The Technical Information Library in Hanover is the German specialist library for technology as well as architecture, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and physics. TIB is the world’s largest specialist library for technology and natural sciences. What’s more, TIB and Jolocom have both been early adopters and pioneers of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) and the Web 3.0 approach in Germany. Multiple encounters within the DLT community have led to a growing desire to join forces so we can further develop interoperability, open standards and open access. Together, we created the Conference Digital Identifier Integration (conDIDi) project. The idea was to implement the SSI approach in the academic sector, while also increasing global collaboration and interoperability due to the gradual integration of different solutions (i.e. ORCID, ConfIDent and conDIDi) into one single system.
Simply put, conDIDi seeks to reduce the management burden for both participants and organizers: Automating the process of verifying that participants fulfilled requisite criteria, such as having paid fees, met requirements for paper submission, agreed to chair a panel, checked into the venue, etc, would reduce a large part of the bureaucratic, time-consuming and costly overhead of conference management. At the same time, automated exchange of verifiable participation credentials reduces the waiting time for academics to build their CVs and paper portfolios, and – more recently – for medical professionals to collect proofs of training and education requirements. ConDIDi is now an ongoing pilot project within TIB and we are excited to see what it will grow into and to support its continuous development in future collaborations with our partners at TIB.
Stacks
Jolocom also partnered with Stacks, integrating the Stacks into Jolocom SSI solution.
The integration will enable any developer to easily add support for Stacks-based identities to their SSI service, and to build new SSI services (e.g. issuers, verifiers, mediators) with identities secured by the Stacks blockchain. Furthermore, the developed tools will also allow any user who owns a BNS name to easily derive a valid, globally resolvable DID and use it with various SSI services. Finally, the Jolocom SmartWallet will allow regular users to easily interact with SSI services secured by DIDs anchored on the Stacks network.
For instance, real-world activities providing any verifiable information for renting a bike or hotel room would happen in a much more seamless, secure, and privacy-preserving way. While the benefits of this technology will be globally available and relevant, we are applying to the Stacks Foundation with a time-sensitive opportunity to reach the European market with pilot projects that can really scale.
We at Jolocom are looking forward to continuing our great partnerships in current and upcoming projects, as well as building many more partnerships in 2022.
Wish to read more? Find more information on the projects here:
Bundesdruckerei:https://jolocom.io/de/blog/jolocom-self-sovereign-identities-at-work-in-bundesdruckerei-proof-of-concept-for-e-government/
