Identity is Already Decentralized. We Need Better Ways to Prove it

For decentralised identity to reach its full potential we need high levels of trust and high levels of inclusion.
As a community we have developed some great standards and practices for identity verification, but they mostly rely on having strong documentation issued by a government if you want to gain the higher levels of trust.
The reality is not everyone has strong documentation and not everyone has access to digital technology to verify that documentation remotely. For example, in the UK around 11 million people have neither a passport nor a driving licence, the 2 primary documents used for identity verification. In many countries this number is far higher.
And, while we drive forward with more and more technological means of proving who we are online, some people will always struggle to use these technologies or simply not be able to.
Vouching for someone as part of the identity verification process has been around for a while but is only now crystalising in the minds of identity experts. It is also one of the most decentralised ways of proving who you are.
The process of Vouching is intended to increase inclusivity of population scale identity systems by enabling people with insufficient documentation (identity evidence), or those unable to complete a conventional identity registration to gain a digital identity.
In this session Adam Cooper seeks to outline the issues we should be addressing and the approaches we can take to create better inclusivity in digital identity ecosystems based on over a decade of working with governments, citizens, and the private sector to deliver better outcomes for all of us.