This is how we can help each other advance interoperable decentralized identity
By Trevor Butterworth
The Cardea Community at Linux Foundation Public Health is pleased to announce the third Interop-a-thon on June 16, between 8:00am and 12:00pm MST (UTC-7:00). Anyone building a Hyperledger Aries compatible product or system can sign up here.
So what is an Interop-a-thon? The clue is in “interop.” We all want verifiable credential solutions to be interoperable because interoperability means adoption, scale, and ultimately, a network of network effects, as credentials are used across multiple networks.
An Interop-a-thon is an opportunity for companies and organizations building on the Hyperledger Indy and Aries codebases to come together and test their solutions against each other and against a reference implementation (Cardea). They can even bring their own networks.
It’s also the fastest way to find out if you have any bugs in your build and fix them.
We held the first Cardea Interop-a-thon in 2021, testing the core schemas, agents, and interactions key to the Cardea workflow. Everyone who participated found it really valuable and asked us when we’d be hosting the next…
…And so the second Interop-a-thon was held in February 2022. Participants could do the same testing as in the first but also test out of band invitations and a simple version of machine readable governance, a way to manage governance rules on information flows at the agent level which provides all kinds of benefits.
While the first Interop-a-thon was very much focused on sharing and verifying health credentials, Interop-a-thon II was a signal that these events had much more general relevance to the developer community, the out of band protocol in particular, as it was a chance to get ahead of a significant change to the Aries codebase.
For Interop-a-thon III, we’ll be testing all of the above and both a basic message protocol and a Q&A protocol.
We urge anyone developing a Hyperledger Aries solution to join. These events enable you to quickly ascertain what isn’t working, fix it, and help to accelerate development and deployment. The more interoperable solutions deployed, the more decentralized identity wins!
