Building a Credential Exchange Infrastructure for Digital Identity: A Sociohistorical Perspective and Policy Guidelines

Credential Exchange Infrastructures based on open standards are emerging with work ongoing across many different jurisdictions, in several global standards bodies and industry associations, as well as at a national level. This article addresses the technology advances on this topic, particularly around identification mechanisms, through the Self-sovereign identity model. It also tackles necessary institutional processes and policy concerns relating to their implementation. Rooted in a sociohistorical culture and practice of inquiry, the goal of the article is to bring emerging digital identity systems within the grasp of a wider public as well as to contribute to mutual understanding across stakeholder groups (technical community, governments, international cooperation entities, civil society and academia) about what is at stake. This is expected to enhance their capacity to better navigate across the pitfalls of this transition period from paper to digital systems and the full adoption of the latter, with each of these stakeholders playing a part in enabling trust around digital identity infrastructure and transactions, both within related ecosystems and in the broader society. This article makes contributions around three axes. First axis is conceptual and analytical. The article outlines three conceptualized phases in the evolution of identity practices in history with the hypothesis that the availability of new record-creation methods invites changes in, and expansion of, the existing identification processes. This helps make a stronger case for why the Internet needs an identity capability. In addition, the article defines or elaborates on key concepts including identity, credential and trust. The second axis of the article is a case study on self-sovereign identity as instantiated by the Sovrin network. The case study presents the technology and its design with a view to enabling a non-technical public to understand what it is and how it works, while highlighting the fact that the technology still needs institutional processes to make it work as intended. The final axis of this article provides guidelines to policy actors potentially facing the need to enable large scale implementations of these emerging technologies, as they mature. Policy-makers approaching this material may want to read this section first and then return to the rest of the paper.