Global Birth Certificate Issuance Processes: An Open Library and Reward Program

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Marcus Ubani

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

ir@larissa.health

Additional applicants

Wibke Ubani

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

12

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

Yes

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

Not all countries have an established governmental birth certification process (GBCP), some countries do not even provide birth certificates.

The technical roll-out of electronic DIDs and their connection to birth certificates is still in its infancy, so we are providing the foundation to build upon.

We will address these issues by

• focusing on countries where a GBCP is well known and established (e.g. Western countries are low-hanging fruits)
• researching how other countries may have established a different process, circumvented identity management, or don't have identity management (which will also be important information for identity projects)

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

Project will be fully open source.

[METADATA] Category of proposal

Dev Tools, API or Library

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGE

Identity projects are facing the challenge of addressing birth certificate issuance.

We will not solve this problem, but we will provide an overview that will ease the thinking process to propose a globally acceptable solution. The latter will eventually lead to an applicable standard in use.

We see an extension in the library with pointers to API connections or technical specifications like addresses. These might not be of existence yet, but preparation is key.

Our solution provides an elevated starting point of information for each developer or solution architect. It helps not reiteratively to reinvent the wheel, which would be extremely inefficient.

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GENERAL APPLICATION OUTSIDE CARDANO

The solution is for the broader SSI - world and usable as a universal library.

We have recently become a contributing member of the ToIP, and have joined their working groups (Technology Stack, Ecosystem Foundry WG) to discuss and promote the library.

We hope that everyone interested in developing solutions working with DIDs will find this library easy to implement.

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COMMUNITY REWARD PROGRAM

We want to offer contributors from the community rewards for creating useful pull requests to the project. These pull requests will be reviewed by a steering committee that is elected from respected Atala Prism Pioneers or the SSI community that have proven to be consistent in their contributions towards SSI. The steering committee will receive rewards for their work.

These reward funds are not available for PR created by team members, members of their families, or other closely related people outside the SSI community.

Currently considered reward model: Allocated funds will be distributed amongst participants according to their value-add. In this way, early and sincere participants will have a higher reward chance than late adopters or low-engaging participants. However, and most importantly, all participants will have an equal and fair chance of participation.

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DELIMITERS

We will not request those reward funds if there is no community contribution within a defined time interval.

If there is not enough people to form the steering committee, we will not request those funds.

Once we reach the limitation of the information available, we will not request further funding for this project.

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

By creating this library, we are laying the foundation and actively helping to identify stakeholders including issuers, holders, verifiers, policy makers, and their business requirements of birth certification. Which will ultimately support the creation of Governance Frameworks.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

Any DID-project - including existing Atala Prism projects - intending to work with birth certificates will probably have to address at some point a trust-registry related to birth certificates; thus, we expect a reasonably good acceptance of our work.

If the project gets accepted by the broader SSI community we can expect an increasing level of participation and adoption.

We consider the project being a success when we get an easy-to-understand and structured overview of the different processes associated with the different jurisdictions in the different countries. There are currently 195 (including the Vatican State) countries worldwide and many of these countries are constituted of federated states in themselves. Although we strive to accomplish as many countries and jurisdictions as possible, we consider it a reasonable success if we can understand the industrialized world while creating a reference for those countries that haven't established GBPCs yet. (As noted above in Dependencies).

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

The output will be publicly shared with an introduction and as JSON on GitHub, and we will announce some of the results as articles on Social Media (YouTube, Twitter) and our website.

Feedback loops with the Atala Prism team and ToIP members will ensure the sound quality of the outcome.

Means of measure could be stars, forks, and pull requests on GitHub, but also referencing discussions in Atala, ToIP, DIF or Hyperledger working groups.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Wibke (2011) and Marcus (2008) have been working in Marketing for over a decade now.

Both are Atala Prism Pioneers.

Together they have founded Larissa.Health, a platform focused on digital Midwifery in hybrid health.

Marcus has been in web technologies as an entrepreneur and with APIs, where JSON is a common standard, since 2010. He is also SPO of BIRTH Pool.

Both team members, Wibke and Marcus, have been in research.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

We consider the project a success when we get an easy-to-understand and structured overview of the different processes associated with the different jurisdictions in the different countries.

There are currently 195 (including the Vatican State) countries worldwide, and many of them are constituted by federated states (e.g. Africa, Germany, France, Spain, USA). Although we strive to accomplish as many countries and jurisdictions as possible, we consider it a reasonable success if we can understand the industrialized world while creating a reference for those countries that haven't established GBCPs yet. (As noted above in Dependencies).

Over the course of the project we will probably have to iterate, adjust and unify the JSON-representation of the samples.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

With Ramp-up (1), Countries (195), and the additional documentation-close out (1), we see a total count of 197 Milestones over the course of 12 months.

For a better overview we cluster the countries in 12 waves, starting with the quick wins of industrialized countries.

We are meeting the timeline if we manage to deliver:

Month 1 Ramp-up, meetings, creating the foundational structure, steering committee

Month 2 - 3 Focusing on 37 (e.g. OECD 2020) countries to strengthen the blueprint hypothesis

Month 4 - 12 Focusing with the community on 158 countries extending the blueprint,

Month 12 Additional documentation and Close-out

This is a research project, so there are unknown variables. Therefore, and even with the help of the community, we might not be able to accomplish all tasks. However, depending on our work schedule and the outlined dependencies, we can potentially complete deliverables within a shorter timeframe. In all cases, we will adjust accordingly.

We are using the EU metric system so decimals are divided with "," and thousands with ".".

We are assuming a valuation of ~0,265 EUR-ADA.

We have excluded tax events.

We have applied a freelancer's average German hourly rate of around 100EUR.

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1. Ramp-up (~35 hours => 3000€ ~ 11.300ADA ):
2. Define the library structure
3. Create a collection of country-sets with their jurisdictions
4. Create Documentation (Readme etc.)
5. Iterate community participation reward program
6. Form a steering committee from the community to
7. review community contributions
8. approve funds for contributors from the community with merged pull requests
9. Implementation per month (~32hours => 3.200€ ~ 12.100ADA )
10. For each country, there must be
11. Research and implement the number of jurisdictions per country
12. Verify the current status of the jurisdiction regarding the issuance process
13. Add data to the dataset
14. Verify dataset.
15. Additional comments
16. Updates on the documentation
17. Meeting with Atala Prism and ToIP working groups (~4 hours => 400€ ~ 1.500ADA * 12 = 18.000ADA)
18. Community participation reward program in (Pull Requests (PR) => 3000€ ~ 11.300ADA):
19. Additional documentation and Close-out (~15 hours => 1.500€ ~ 5.600ADA)

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281.900ADA => 282.000 ADA Funding Request over a total period of 12 months

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

We are aiming for a library that is also human-readable and can be programmatically used by developers.

We are currently aiming at JSON format.

We might learn along the way that we will have to split across different folders.

The project language will be English.

We define the major milestones as a country.

So there are 195 milestones with a current undefined amount of deliverables.

1. A glossary explaining the different identifiers and attributes (laying the foundation for Governance Frameworks)
2. A representation of every jurisdiction per country (workload =195 countries * x jurisdictions).
3. A general explanation of the country's birth certificate process in predefined attributes
4. An explanation in fields by DID roles (holder, issuer, trustee, etc).
5. Representation of current status

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

We are assuming a valuation of ~0,265 EUR-ADA.

We have excluded tax events.

We have applied a freelancer's average German hourly rate of around 100EUR.

We have another proposal, where we will meet with Atala Prism and ToIP working groups.

If both proposals get funded, we will ensure that there is no double spending requested from the Catalyst funds and request a lesser amount.

You can find the proposal here Open Translation Library For eIDAS connectors.

With Ramp-up (1), Countries (195), and the additional documentation-close out (1), we see a total count of 197 Milestones.

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MONTHLY BREAKDOWN

1. Ramp-up (~30 hours => 3.000€ ~ 11.300ADA )
2. Implementation per month (~32hours => 3.200€ ~ 12.100ADA)
3. Meeting with Atala Prism and ToIP working groups (~4 hours => 400€ ~ 1.500ADA)
4. Reviewing and rewarding community participation in ( 3000€ ~ 11.300ADA):
5. Additional documentation and Close-out (~15 hours => 1.500€ ~ 5.600ADA)

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TOTAL PROJECT 12 MONTH BREAKDOWN

1. 1x Total Ramp-up (~30 hours => 3.000EUR~ 11.300ADA )
2. 12 months implementation (~384 hours => 38.400€ ~ 145.000ADA )
3. 12 months meeting with Atala Prism and ToIP working groups (~48 hours => 4.800€ ~ 18.000ADA)
4. 9 months Extra Budget to compensate community participation for adding Information via PR (~270hours => 27.000€ ~ 102.000ADA)
5. 1x Additional documentation and Close-out (~15 hours => 1.500€ ~ 5.600ADA)

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281.900ADA => 282.000 ADA Funding Request over a total period of 12 months

This is a research project, so there are unknown variables. However, depending on our work schedule and the outlined dependencies, we can potentially deliver deliverables within a shorter timeframe. If so, we will adjust accordingly.

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Creating a fully open-sourced library will reduce future work and costs for developers and solution architects working in decentralized identity, especially with birth certificates.

It will also reduce the error rate for international applications working with eIDAS and other emerging international standards.

The library can be a living teaching example attributing the different roles in decentralized identity, such as holder, issuer, verifier, trust-registries and other stakeholders.

Furthermore, it encourages active development and references to Atala Prism and the broader SSI community, thus improving the outreach of Cardano.

With the extra budget aside, we potentially could encourage the community to participate in open-source development and also grow inexperienced members into using open-source tools like GitHub.

This could create the side-effect that new members engage in CIP or CPS proposals.

We will use resources from governmental websites, and midwifery councils, for rapid proto-typing and time efficiency, we will include the power of LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT or MPT), and manually verify the results.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept