Eleven high-caliber consortia composed of SMEs, research institutes, tech providers, international corporations, and municipalities have commenced extensive discussion and planning around their entries for the Schaufenster Sichere Digitale Identitäten (SDI) innovation competition, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economics Affairs and Energy...

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We have moved this article to Jolocom Logbook,
our official new blog since 1st July 2020.

For the full story, visit
jolocom.io/press-release-jolocom-participates-in-sdi-competition

German Ministry launches national competition seeking Secure Digital Identities was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The TIB — Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and Jolocom have jointly applied for an EU grant under the Next Generation Internet initiative for Human Centric Solutions. The project is named ConDIDi — Conference Digital Identifier Integration — and the aim…

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We have moved this article to Jolocom Logbook,
our official new blog since 1st July 2020.

For the full story, visit
jolocom.io/blog/condidi-ssi

New ConDIDi project extends SSI to academic conferences was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Want to dig into the meat of the technology? → Read the complete Integration Report, by Eugeniu Rusu; otherwise, keep reading for the highlights…

Decentralized digital identities provide many advantages with regards to data privacy, comfort and efficiency. Returning control of identity information to the people that information pertains to and enabling them to reuse this information often makes…

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We have moved this article to Jolocom Logbook,
our official new blog since 1st July 2020.

For the full story, visit
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Coopetition rather than competition for digital identity wallets was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a demonstration of the potential for decentralized digital identity solutions to enhance IT infrastructure, researchers at Bundesdruckerei — a federal government security company who supplies, for example, German national ID cards, passports, and driver’s licenses — have tested a Blockchain based self-sovereign identity solution...

Dear Reader,

We have moved this article to Jolocom Logbook,
our official new blog since 1st July 2020.

For the full story, visit
jolocom.io/blog/jolocom-self-sovereign-identities-at-work-in-bundesdruckerei-proof-of-concept-for-e-government

Jolocom self sovereign identities at work in Bundesdruckerei proof of concept for e-government was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re weeks away from the close of an exciting year for the Jolocom team — and for the SSI community! More and more companies, government agencies, and organizations are turning toward self-sovereign identity for their identification & access management needs to address systemic challenges in usability, data protection, and privacy rights.

Being part of an early cohort of SSI practitioners, Jolocom has enjoyed the opportunity to provide open source software enabling SSI in a variety of use cases: from e-government to mobility to online security and interoperable access management, 2019 has been a great year, full of trial and error and growth. And now it’s time to ring in celebrations and raise a toast — twelve 🥂 toasts! — to milestones & memories from this past year.

Our tech at work

Let’s get toasting!

🥂A toast to

Xride pilot project ― decentralized ecosystem for ridesharing

Xride #blockchainscooter is a fully operational, fully decentralized ridesharing ecosystem pioneered by Telekom’s Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs) and piloted at Deutsche Telekom Bonn and Berlin campuses. With Bundesdruckerei and RIDDLE&CODE, we at Jolocom provided the identity and verification layer of this ecosystem enabling decentralized communication between rider, scooter and Swappable Battery Station, provided by Simple Mobility.
| >> Read up on the Xride pilot <<

🥂A toast to

Proof of concept: SSI for e-government

Developed by our partners at Bundesdruckerei (a German manufacturer of secure identity documents), this proof of concept uses Jolocom software to demonstrate how Germany’s municipal service infrastructure can be extended and augmented using decentralized approaches to identity management.

🥂A toast to

Proof of concept: online security ecosystem based on decentralized digital identity

The federal state government of North Rhine-Westphalia concluded work on a multi-year project with Accenture, cosinex, Spherity, and Jolocom to showcase how decentralized approaches and vendor solutions to digital identity can integrate with current IT infrastructure for online security & background checks across Germany. For the PoC Jolocom delivered major upgrades to our identity wallet — the SmartWallet — and built out tooling to support seamless interoperability with other identity wallets, like Spherity’s.
| >> Additional OSiP and Bundesdruckerei updates will be provided in the first community updates of 2020. <<

🥂A toast to

BotM pilot project ― SSI for Flemish citizens and municipal employees

The Blockchain on the Move project seeks to enable citizens to digitize their government ID card credentials, and share those credentials in different use cases. The project is supported by the Flemish Government within the Programme for Innovation Procurement (PIP) and is a consortium with the City of Antwerp, Digipolis, the Flemish Government, Informatie Vlaanderen, and V-ICT-OR (the Flemish ICT organisation) with Jolocom as the technical partner for the duration of the first phase of the project, which ran until the end of February.
| >> Overview, videos and tech docs <<

Our growing team

While we said goodbye to some colleagues who we thank immensely for their contributions to making Jolocom what it is today, we also had five awesome new team members join us this year, bringing our total up to 13!

🥂A toast to

Mina Nagy Zaki ― our full stack dev

Mina is a hacker and open source enthusiast obsessed with decentralization, personal knowledge bases, and identity. He works with code and systems at Jolocom, wherever his skills are applicable. His favorite rants are about infrastructural dreams and architectural concerns.

🥂A toast to

Elizabeth Slucky ― our product designer

Liz works alongside Jolocom’s engineering team to help lead the Jolocom SmartWallet to new heights by pushing product & use case research, features ideation, UX/UI design, and design prototyping.

🥂A toast to

Cristian Lungu ― our full stack dev

Cristian is a software developer currently focused on updating the user interface of the Jolocom SmartWallet. He is enthusiastic about creating a smooth and intuitive user experience.

🥂A toast to

Matilda Horppu ― our UX researcher

Matilda conducts research into Jolocom use cases and builds usability testing infrastructure, working closely with the product design and engineering teams to ensure Jolocom implements well-informed product decisions.

🥂A toast to

Volker Schiewe ― our full stack dev & graduate researcher

Volker joined the team earlier this year to explore the topic of key recovery as part of his master’s studies (under the Internet Technologies and Systems chair) at the Hasso-Plattner Institute. His research into possible methods for backing up and recovering digital identity information coalesced into an integral component of our SmartWallet.

…And a big welcome to Jolocom’s newest team member — Irene Adamski! — who joined just last week.

>> We love our #startuplife! <<

A booming community

Lots to celebrate in the wake of the outstanding work and collaboration we’ve seen this year from our amazing partners and the SSI ecosystem as a whole! Community engagement was certainly a focus for the Jolocom team in 2019 with a number of new partnerships and memberships:

Memberships

🥂Two toasts to future fruitful collaboration with:

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ― official member

Our membership to the W3C — the principal international standards body for the Web — became official this past October. Among the W3C’s range of activities, we’ll be focusing our contributions to the Decentralized Identifier Working Group.

International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) ― founding member organization

In March we joined INATBA to help promote interaction between regulatory bodies and the startups building with blockchain technology. Kai Wagner was elected to INATBA’s board of directors while Joachim Lohkamp took on co-leading the interoperability working group alongside Kunfud’s Ismael Arribas.

Events

🥂And the final toast always goes to the host (and we *did* go bold this year):

4 #DWebBerlin events

• Apr → Your Decentralized Identity: use cases + demo hour
• May → Identity Stammtisch with Heather Vescent
• May → Our 5th Birthday Party!
• Jul → Future of Online Privacy with TechGDPR, Mozilla, and Tactical Tech

3 #DWebDesign events

• Feb → DWebDesign #1: Embrace variety
• May → DWebDesign #2: Typonight
• Nov → DWebDesign #3: Open source design & Design for open source

& for being involved in…

50 external events in 20 different cities around the world! To name a few, we joined for… IIW 28 & 29 • Mountain View | DWeb Camp • San Francisco | Devcon 5 • Osaka | Convergence • Málaga

Online

We also grew our social media connections by just shy of 1,000 followers (🥂) in 2019 across…

• Twitter (1,134)
• Medium (538)
• LinkedIn (372)

And strived to engage with any and all activity coming in via our open support channels:

• Telegram
• Gitter

Our holiday reading recs

…on engineering

• blog post
  Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
  by Adrian Colyer | The Morning Paper, 2019

…on the Web

• article
  From a people-centered web to Mesh networks: A Plan To Rescue the Web From the Internet
  by Andre Staltz | Staltz.com, 2017
• book
  The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It
  by Jonathan L. Zittrain | Yale University Press & Penguin UK, 2008

…on privacy

• feature article
  I Tried Hiding From Silicon Valley in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets
  by Joel Stein | Bloomberg, 2019
• essay
  Privacy is Power
  by Carissa Véliz | Aeon, 2019
• 10m video
  Does the Internet Know More About You Than You Think It Should?
  by New Organs | 2019

…on history of art&design

• book
  Indigo: from Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans
  by Jenny Balfour-Paul | Firefly Books, 2011

…and beyond

• interracial post apocalyptic scifi romance novel
  Population
  by Elizabeth Stephens* | 2019
  *(that’s Ellie Stephens from Jolocom’s comms team!)
• a pair of SciFi fiction novels
  Rough Draft (Draft World Book #1)
  Final Draft (Draft World Book #2)
  by Sergey Lukyanenko | 2005 & 2007

+A year-end video message from Kai and Ellie:

Learn more about Jolocom’s vision for self-sovereign identity:

​​​​​​​www.jolocom.io | Monthly Digest

Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | GitHub
Medium | Meetup | YouTube | Gitter

Jolocom’s 12 toasts to 2019 was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since humbly launching in February this year, #DWebDesign became an important part of #DWebBLN meetups and is on a mission to bring back variety in design and rescue emerging Web 3.0 industries from visual sameness…

Dear Reader,

We have moved this article to Jolocom Logbook,
our official new blog since 1st July 2020.

For the full story, visit
jolocom.io/blog/open-source-design-resources

Designing for the open source? DWebDesign #3 highlights + list of resources was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Onward! New memberships, partnerships and projects for SSI

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This October, we made our way around the world from Osaka to Mountain View, Hamburg to San Francisco, and Amsterdam to Berlin. Meanwhile, a number of major projects implementing our identity solutions completed their final phases. Plus, we had the opportunity to advance some of our most exciting partnerships to date — all with the aim of bringing SSI to the real world. Read more on what we did and who we worked with, below.

Jolocom is now a W3C member org

We are excited to officially announce our membership to the World Wide Web Consortium, the principal international standards body for the Web. The team is eager to get involved in the W3C’s wide range of activities & groups — in particular, Jolocom will be contributing to standardization efforts around DIDs carried out by the Decentralized Identifier Working Group. Minutes from the first DID-WG meeting held in September during TPAC 2019 in Fukuoka, Japan are available here & here.

>> Read more on our Partnerships <<

Meet Matilda — our new UX researcher🕵🏼‍♀

Earlier this month Matilda joined the team as our newest UX researcher! With both front-end development and UX skills, she’ll be conducting research into Jolocom use cases, building out our usability testing infrastructure and working closely with the product design and engineering teams to ensure Jolocom implements well-informed product decisions.

>> Meet the team <<

Engineering Update

Our software development team has been busy! October saw the conclusion of three major projects involving extensive implementation of our libraries and tooling:

SSI for e-government

Proof of concept
Developed by our partners at Bundesdruckerei (a German manufacturer of secure identity documents), a recently finalized PoC demonstrates how Germany’s municipal service infrastructure can be improved using decentralized approaches to identity management. We’re already working on a blog post dedicated to the fresh PoC, so keep an eye on our Medium page.

Ecosystem for online security and background checks based on decentralized digital identity

Proof of concept
The federal state government of North Rhine-Westphalia has concluded work on a multi-year project to showcase how decentralized approaches and vendor solutions to digital identity can integrate with current IT infrastructure for online security & background checks across Germany. For the PoC, Jolocom delivered major upgrades to our identity wallet — the SmartWallet — and built out tooling to support seamless interoperability with another identity wallet (developed by Spherity). More on this extensive PoC in a future community update.

Decentralized ecosystem for ride-sharing

Pilot project
Also concluding this month was the live test phase of Xride, the #blockchainscooter and fully decentralized ride-sharing ecosystem. Initially rolled out at Deutsche Telekom campuses in Berlin and Bonn, the project was piloted by T-Labs with support from Jolocom and fellow partners RIDDLE&CODE, Bundesdruckerei, and Simple Mobility. Read about Xride here.

Most clicked last month

Did you know that Kai Wagner is on the board of INATBA, and that Joachim Lohkamp is also spearheading its interoperability working group?

—

We had a fantastic time meeting participants interested in the intersection of diversity and technology during Joachim’s session on “Why Open Identity?” at Moinblockchain19

—

Read up on this article about anonymized data, and how it isn’t really anonymous by Tech Review

—

Joachim Lohkamp joins the Ethereum roadmap 2020 session at Devcon 5 in Osaka, Japan

—

IIW29 kicks off in California — watch this video from the previous IIW when Joachim gave his surfboard its own unique decentralized identity

—

A day 1 summary of IIW29 from the eyes of Joachim Lohkamp

—

The Xride decentralized mobility pilot concludes, and we remain proud to have been a part of it!

Where we’ve been recently

01.10
DWeb SF — October Meetup • San Francisco

01–03.10
Internet Identity Workshop • Mountain View

08–11.10
Devcon 5 • Osaka

18.10
moinblockchain ‘19 • Hamburg

22–24.10
Smart Country Convention 2019 • Berlin

30.10
Self-Sovereign Identity Forum 2019 • Amsterdam

Join us for…

11–13.11
Convergence — The Global Blockchain Congress • Málaga

18.11
DWeb.Design #3 • Berlin

Learn more about Jolocom’s vision for self-sovereign identity:

​​​​​​​www.jolocom.io | Monthly Digest

Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | GitHub
Medium | Meetup | YouTube | Gitter

Community Update — October 2019 was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Celebrating the launch of Xride, SmartWallet release 1.7.0, and a growing team

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This month saw the launch of our first completely decentralized mobility pilot as well as significant updates to the SmartWallet and Library — including Seed Phrase Recovery, offline access and more. We also said bye to one of our devs and welcomed a new dev on board. Lastly, we spoke at events around the world. Continue reading for more.

Launching Xride in Bonn 🚀

This month embraced the launch of Xride, a fully decentralized e-mobility pilot initiated by T-Labs, and built in collaboration with RIDDLE&CODE, Bundesdruckerei, Simple Mobility and us here at Jolocom.

The Jolocom team collaborated with Bundesdruckerei and RIDDLE&CODE to supply the next-generation identity layer for the newly unveiled ridesharing system. Now, users can manage their own personal data from their smartphones, verify their credentials, and exchange this verified information with scooter and charger directly, eliminating the need for a centralized identity provider. Check out the video above or click the link below to learn more about the development process and how the project came together.

>> More on decentralized ride sharing <<

The team gets even bigger — meet Cristian 🎉

Cristian is a bachelor’s student in energy and environment from the Hochschule Rhein-Waal near Dusseldorf, and will be completing his thesis with Jolocom while working as a software developer. Here in Berlin he’ll be mostly focused on updating the user interface of the Jolocom SmartWallet application to create a smoother and more intuitive user experience.

>> Learn more about the whole team <<

Engineering update

Release Notes

Following the launch of Xride, our tireless engineers rolled out a stack of updates for the Jolocom SmartWallet in version 1.7.0:

• Upgraded to React Native 0.59 #1380
• The seed phrase screen is no longer part of the registration flow, and is now accessible through the settings screen #1418
• Added UI and functionality for recovering the identity based on 12-word seed phrases #1266
• Updated the landing page screen
• Updated the entropy collection screen #1428
• The wallet no longer requires internet connection on startup
• Added support for custom database migrations #1412
• Various minor UI / UX improvements
• Updated README
• Updated German translations
• Refactored styling structure
• Removed JolocomTheme
• Add debug mixin style for development

Whether you have an Android device or an iPhone, you can now sign up for early access to new releases! To join our beta testing programs, look for a one-click option in the Play Store or App Store.

Team Changes

In other engineering news, we welcomed on board a new developer, Cristian, who will be supporting on front-end improvements.

At the same time, we were also sad to say goodbye to our developer Sean Li, who will be taking his talents to Japan where we are sure he will continue making an impact in any new work he chooses to pursue. To Sean Li, if he’s reading this, we thank you for everything, and good luck!

Most clicked last month

Jolocom calls on our community to join in supporting the global #ClimateStrike #AlleFuersKlima
_
Joachim and Kai prepare to take off to Prague for the 9th Rebooting Web of Trust
_
Should decentralized protocols cooperate with centralized protocols in the sense of Libra? Hear from Pelle Brændgaard (uPort) and Charles Cunningham (Jolocom) on this and more during Web3 Summit
_
Review the rich density of material found in these slides from the first official DID working group meeting at #w3cTPAC in Fukoka 🇯🇵
_
Twitter update: we reached 1000 followers this month 🎉
_
Ellie presents Xride blockchain scooter mobility pilot alongside Lena of Simple Mobility during the Mobility and Blockchain event hosted by SIBB at MotionLab

Where we’ve been recently

03–06.09
Rebooting Web of Trust #9 • Prague

10.09
Blockchain Transformation in Mobility and Logistics • Berlin

11.09
Xride #Blockchainscooter Launch • Bonn

20–27.09
#ClimateStrike #AlleFuersKlima • Global

24.09
Informationstag “Elektronische Signatur” 2019 • Berlin

24.09
Linum Labs Community Call • Online

Join us for…

01.10
DWeb SF — October Meetup • San Francisco

01–03.10
Internet Identity Workshop • Mountain View

08–11.10
Devcon 5 • Osaka

18.10
moinblockchain ‘ 19 • Hamburg

22–24.10
Smart Country Convention 2019 • Berlin

30.10
Self-Sovereign Identity Forum 2019 • Amsterdam

Learn more about Jolocom’s vision for self-sovereign identity:

​​​​​​​www.jolocom.io | Monthly Digest

Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | GitHub
Medium | Meetup | YouTube | Gitter

Community Update — September 2019 was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last Wednesday we had the pleasure of traveling to Bonn to the Deutsche Telekom Headquarters for the official launch of Xride, a fully decentralized e-mobility pilot. This pilot project was initiated by Telekom’s Innovation Laboratories, or T-Labs, and built in collaboration with RIDDLE&CODE, Bundesdruckerei, Simple Mobility and us here at Jolocom…

Dear Reader,

We have moved this article to Jolocom Logbook,
our official new blog since 1st July 2020.

For the full story, visit
jolocom.io/blog/xride

Decentralized ride sharing launches in Bonn 🎉 was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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We spent August hosting the Identity Node at Web3 Summit, meeting members of our network from far and wide during Berlin Blockchain Week, onboarding new team members, and revving up for our next big events like #Xride 🛵 Continue reading for highlights and insights.

Web3 Summit & Berlin Blockchain Week

Last week saw a gathering of hundreds — if not thousands — of individuals here in Berlin working on blockchains, P2P protocols, platform neutral computation language, data distribution protocols, transient data/messaging, encrypted storage, protocol-extensible developer APIs, and the latest developments in decentralization in time for Berlin Blockchain Week and Web3 Summit.

Jolocom had the pleasure of co-hosting the Web3 Summit Identity Node with DAppNode and Iden3. Found in the Hackerspace at Funkhaus, the Identity Node ran from 19–21 August and was a space for both curated and informal talks, workshops, and protocol deep dives into all things decentralized identity.

>>Read a recap on our interoperability discussion<<

Welcoming a new Jolocomer — Liz 🎉

With over 4 years experience in the design field in startups and product companies, Liz has joined Jolocom to help support Iryna in design, and our developers Eugeniu, Charles, Mina, Volker, and Sean Li, in user experience improvements for the Jolocom SmartWallet.

>>More about design at Jolocom<<

Engineering update

Our engineers have spent the past month building on the major release of jolocom-lib v3 to ready v4 for release. For a summary of what major and breaking changes were included in the last release v1.6.0, click here.

Also keeping our development team busy have been changes and updates needed to prepare and foolproof the Xride identity layer in time for the 11 September launch.

Lastly, some of our front end changes would not be possible without the help of our newest team member, Liz, who will be supporting all UX and UI design changes to the SmartWallet.

>> Take me to GitHub <<

Most clicked last month

At #DWebCamp check out our teams’: favorite moments, what surprised us, and what we would do differently next year

–

Sean Li spends the evening showcasing our Blockchain on the Move demo to members of the Disrupt Network in Frankfurt

–

We’re looking forward to taking part in the Xride decentralized emobility ecostructure launch happening on 11 September

–

Read Volker and Ellie’s interview on self-sovereign identities in layman’s terms as part of the Betapeople series by Betahaus

–

🎉Our huge thanks to Web3 Summit 🎉 We had a great time discussing, hacking, workshopping, debating, and curating the identity node

–

Iryna’s design insights for companies working on complex topics to onboard users as products move from beta to production ready

–

Read our report from the forefront of the decentralized web summary digest from July

–

“Technology that is built for everyone should be built by everyone.” — Ellie, in her interview with Women in IdentityWhere we’ve been recently

Where we’ve been recently

18–29.08
Blockchain Week Berlin• Berlin

19–21.08
Web3 Summit 2019 • Berlin

21–23.08
DappCon • Berlin

22.08
betabreakfast with Iryna • Berlin

And where you’ll find us in the coming months

03–06.09
Rebooting the Web of Trust #9 • Prague

10.09
Blockchain Transformation in Mobility and Logistics • Berlin

11.09
Xride #Blockchainscooter Launch • Bonn

24.09
Informationstag “Elektronische Signatur” 2019 • Berlin

01–03.10
Internet Identity Workshop • Mountain View

08–10.10
Devcon 5 • Osaka

18.10
moinblockchain ’19 • Hamburg

22–24.10
Smart Country Convention 2019 • Berlin

30.10
Self-Sovereign Identity Forum 2019 • Amsterdam

Learn more about Jolocom’s vision for self-sovereign identity:

​​​​​​​www.jolocom.io | Monthly Digest

Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn | GitHub
Medium | Meetup | YouTube | Gitter

Outcomes from a week of Web 3 in Berlin was originally published in Jolocom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.