Dgital ID in Cities – Use Cases and Pilots

Digital ID in Cities – Use Cases and Pilots

Conveners: John Wittrock (john@sidewalklabs.com), Chris Anderson (canderson@sidewalklabs.com)

Notes-takers: John Wittrock, Chris Anderson

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Cities, Municipal ID, Self-sovereign ID user experience, ...

• Intro to Sidewalk Labs:
  • Building a part of a city, and sees identity as crucial to the experience in a city from the internet up
  • But see the need to preserve privacy and social contracts around how we already interact with cities.
• Why cities?
  • Flexibility - doesn’t need to work for an entire country
  • Smallest unit of gov’t - allows public oversight
• Precedents
  • Municipal IDs: nycID, Elm City ID, Dubai
  • Digital driver’s licenses
  • Federated logins: Securekey
  • Status quo: log in and pay parking ticket with your driver’s license
  • Digital ID: Dubai, Switzerland, Singapore
• How do cities tend to work?
  • Pilots, RFPs, etc.
• Unique challenges to cities
  • Cities are going to require a credible “help button” for users
  • Cities may want some sort of ability to reset the system or at least prevent forks
  • Equity, accessibility problems pervade all city services problems
  • As much as we like to talk about the backend tech, much of this is a user experience problem
• Use cases
  • Access to city services
    • Physical services - courthouses, police stations
    • Digital services
  • Verifiable citizen engagement
  • Proofing for service providers
  • Physical access control
• Existing pilots
  • Illinois, would love to hear about that
  • British Columbia: DIACC
• Potential pilots
  • Start small: citizen engagement, feedback, homeowners association
• Open Questions:
  • What’s the best-in-class tech for user experience and backend implementation?