 Hi, thank you for making time today to join this conversation. My name is Shankarshan and I'm a volunteer at the COVID credentials initiative, which is also called CCI. So what I'm going to do today is share our experience in creating what we call a template governance framework around digital and technology interventions to the COVID pandemic. Now, if you were attending the blockchain panel that happened last Monday, you would have heard Brian Bellentof remark on how governance framework is an important part of deployments. And here through our conversations, we might actually see why they indeed are very important as we deploy these technologies to real life situations. So CCI came together as a loose coalition of interested and enthusiastic individuals, organizations around 300 or individuals, 100 organizations way back in April 2020. So the early days of the pandemic. Since then, very recently in December 2020 CCI has become part of the Linux Foundation Public Health and continues its advocacy for privacy preserving very valuable credentials and with focus on mitigating the spread of the pandemic and incidentally through evolving conversations, we're also looking at beyond this current pandemic as well. It's a quick run-down of things we're going to discuss today. So the COVID pandemic, if you remember, COVID-19 was declared as a pandemic sometime around mid-March. And pretty much immediately there was a number of conversations in various forums about how to blend technology interventions, bring technology solutions, create an impact. Designing technology interventions around health status, COVID test results was around enabling individuals to have access to services, businesses, basically trying to get back to what we then used to call the normal. But it also soon included topics of digital passwords, vaccination status, and even there's a whole good body of work around electronic health records, including data sharing. What the CCI effort did was it brought together people in domains of identity, self-serving identity, technology, public health services to be able to figure out how there is element of notice, concept, and choice in how data is shared, data is used, and data is verified. So the use cases and the CCI was organized around various work streams. The use cases and tooling work stream was among the few work streams which started having phenomenally engaging content presentation from start-ups, businesses, individuals who just brought a fresh round of perspectives on various aspects of a citizen's journey through this system. You would recall that in a lot of ways those early days there was a whole lot of conversation around what the journey looks like, what workflows look like, what are the user experience design patterns and all of that. So in our case in CCI concepts like trust registries verifying the verifier or to be able to understand the security around verification process, local assurance communities all brought out the need for what we call a templates governance framework. So what we did was we inherited a governance framework from the sovereign foundation. We started off with that because this was already used by the sovereign foundation to run the sovereign mainnet and it provides the identifier services. So this was a reference frame for topics and principles. We needed to do this quick. So we set up an aggressive target, a timeline of 60 days in which to produce the first version of the CCI governance framework. We created specific roles like editors, primaries, secondary reviewers, expert reviewers and then went through cycles of week to week meetings including sidebar conversations to be able to get us to an early first release in June. So we started off somewhat around April by the time it's June we already had version 1.0 release. Now the other thing that we did was that we also produced traditional language versions besides the English version that we had. And the interesting thing that happened is the translation activity helped clarify some of the technical concepts and actually ended up making a language version in English much better simplified. So this release of the version one got us to a feedback cycle and one of the key feedback received from early adopters was that they would prefer to remove ambiguity in the principles in order to create better policies. And this allowed us to create a way we can actually improve on the next version. Now I think all this activity that happened then and continues has allowed us to present a good set of things that we can share. The key is about the human experience. Keeping technology is something that enables the social situation rather than allowing it to dominate over the social situation. But more importantly to be able to engage with adopters and sponsors with a clear expectation that the first version is not the final version. It's not etched in stone. It would go through refactoring. It would go through refinement. It would go through changes and modifications. Primarily because as we were doing all of this, the science and policies around all the pieces around the pandemic like the immunities status, vaccination, all of this was evolving. So this means that domain experts engaged in frontline activities like we had a good amount of participation from folks who were involved, engaged with the NHS. And this was critical because it kept us on the straight path and we didn't quite get sidetracked by the geekery and the nerd fascination that often happens in such cases. But the most important thing that we think is that gets us going and got us going to be able to deliver what we did is that we focused on getting the purpose and the scope correct. Now, the thing about getting that correct is to be able to evaluate all further progress in terms of whether it can be in scope or outscope. Does it serve the purpose or does it not? Does it help the direction that we chose to walk down or does it not? I think that's one of the key things that to keep in mind if you are trying to do a similar exercise. So the other thing that we ended up focusing on through all the activities is putting a spotlight on inclusion, equity and accessibility. The principles that are included in these governance framework ensure that we are able to provide guidance that make these topics are fundamental when considering digital interventions. So we see that and we read opinions that with digital passwords which highlight various drawbacks around this topic including surveillance, coercion. And so we wanted to address topics of these topics as well by bringing in ideas around data sovereignty, data governance, data rights as they are applicable to the local jurisdictions. And what we now see happening extensively is that digital credentials and situations that involve large ecosystems like for instance you might have heard about the Gural Pass and the IATA and others coming together to form consortiums. Now this is essentially a large digital trust ecosystems that cross boundaries. So essentially it requires a variety of organizations to trust the issues of these verifiable credentials and verifiable presentations and have a way of transit of trust put in. This slide is essentially a quick update on what's happening as well as call to action. We really, really would like to have more specific participation from policymakers, individuals who are involved in standard development organizations to be able to join us and contribute to this template governance framework. If you are engaged in or are planning to design governance frameworks for such efforts, I think we have a number of ways to collaborate and CCA can be of help. So I do encourage you to join us. You can find us on the Linux Foundation Public Health Slack. The link is here or on Twitter. You can see the Twitter handle or if you want to reach out to me for a conversation, I have an email address on the slide as well. And yeah, that's that's what I wanted to share it as a quick update on this COVID credentials governance framework. So I like to thank you because you you obviously had a lot of things you could do and you chose to participate in this conversation. I do appreciate your generosity and I wish that you stay safe. And if you have questions now, I'd be happy to answer them as best as I can. So what I'm going to do is minimize this session and sort things out quickly. Let's do that.