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SSI Assurance Community (SSI-AC)

Short Description​

An Assurance Community is a community that supports its members as they seek to increase their confidence in the SSI infrastructure and/or (specific) qualifications of the data exchanged through that infrastructure." The nature of a community being that its members share some common ground ensures that this objective may be realized by exploring that existing common ground.

Here are some functions that an assurance community may contemplate of performing:

  • act as a governing party for a set of credential types.
  • run a credential catalogue in which its members (and perhaps others) can advertise the credential types they issue and specify the assurances and other data that parties may need in order to decide whether or not to take that member up on that offering.
  • run a yellow pages service which parties can use to find out which members (or other parties) issue credentials of a certain type.
  • govern and document accreditation schemes, including schemes for accrediting parties that may certify others against such schemes.
  • act as a governing party for decision trees (to be elaborated on)
  • act as a KeySmith (also to be elaborated on)

The initial ideas for SSI Assurance Communities can be read in the paper "Decentralized SSI Governance, the missing link in automating business decisions".