Most in the identity and open banking world aren’t paying attention or actively involved in the various GAIN initiatives since the white paper was published last fall. They are right to be skeptical. Technical and governance change, like any culture, happens relatively slowly. Standards are established, roles are defined, systems are built.
The people on social media and at the podium get all the attention, but that’s a bug, not a feature. Working Groups and POC Participants aren’t the bottom, they are the roots, the foundation, the source of progress. Change happens horizontally. But the people who are consistently and actively building standards are not easily distracted; one more small improvement, one more implementers draft, one more standard established.
The internet would like us to focus on what happened five minutes ago. The industry understands that what happens in five years is what matters. Focused, persistent community action is how systems change. Building on what’s built concretizes and enforces both technical (tools) standards and governance (rules).
GAIN is marked by a cross sector, crowd sourced, open, global due diligence. GAIN’s self organized participants are actively seeking evidence that disconfirms the GAIN hypothesis. They are at the IIW in California, the European Identity Conference in Berlin, the Open Banking Work Congress in Spain, Money 2020 in Amsterdam, at Identiverse in Denver and at the Open Identity Exchange Conference in London,
GAIN’s growing participants will keep talking. We’ll stay focused. We won’t get bored, because we’ve a lot to GAIN.
To learn more about the GAIN Proof of Concept and how to get involved, please visit the Community Group page: https://openid.net/gainpoc/
Don Thibeau
OpenID Foundation Non Executive Director