Call for Participation in Credentials Community Group

The Credentials Community Group has been launched:

A “credential” is a qualification, achievement, quality, or piece of information about an entity’s background such as a name, government ID, payment provider, home address, or university degree.

The purpose of the Credentials Community Group is to discuss, research, document, prototype and test credential storage and exchange systems for the Web. This work is done in order to make progress toward possible future standardization and interoperability of both low and high-stakes credentials. The goal of this Group is to forge a path for a secure, decentralized system of credentials that would empower both individual people and organizations on the Web to store, transmit, and receive digitally verifiable proof of qualifications and achievements. In addition to documentation, this Group collaborates on and shares various proof-of-concept solutions and components through open source methods, unencumbered by patents or royalties.

In general, this Community Group provides an inclusive venue where credentialing solutions, regardless of their origin, can be incubated, evaluated, refined, and tested. The focus of the group is to promote credentialing innovations based primarily on their technical merit. This approach invites competing technical designs to be submitted and incubated in the same group. The hope is that this strategy will lead to either the merging of the best aspects of each technical design, or a clear differentiation emerging between alternative designs.

In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account.

This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2014-08-06 by Manu Sporny. The following people supported its creation: Manu Sporny, Dave Longley, David Lehn, Melvin Carvalho, timothy holborn. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.

The group must now choose a chair. Read more about how to get started in a new group and good practice for running a group.

We invite you to share news of this new group in social media and other channels.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email us at site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team