Platformland #19

Welcome to what I’m half thinking should be rebadged ‘primary key monthly’.* This month is quite identity heavy again, but there’s also libraries, postcodes and digital trade to get stuck into. It’s moved over to Substack because people kept on asking for something more bookmark-able.

Richard

Platform news

• 🇮🇳 India is creating a new addressing system. Digital Address Codes will be linked to coordinates and organised via non linear geospatial grids to account for population density, and allow for non location addresses. The approach paper published by Department of Posts explains the maths behind how the schema was decided upon and lists targeting of benefit payments and e-commerce as the policy drivers. Could it also be a response to the likes of Google’s Plus Codes?
• 🇦🇺 Australia is attempting to use its MyGovID to seed an ecosystem of identity providers (see link to new legislation in the previous Platformland). New company directors must now use it to register for a Director Identification Number. December will bring an app that includes a digital wallet for credentials.**
• 🌍 G7 Trade ministers have made a pronouncement on digital trade. It includes a commitment to ‘single trade windows’ (a euphemism like ‘one stop shop’ or ‘portal’ that’s unique to the trade sector - really we are talking about software, data standards and APIs). This feels ripe for a digital public goods approach. ‘X-Road/MOSIP but for trade’?
• 🇬🇧The UK is building an app as part of its GOV.UK offering that will provide a common identify verification component for services. The team developing prioritised getting real users over the extended discovery and alpha periods that have become the norm in the UK civil service.
• 🍏 At WWDC21 Apple documented how their APIs for verifiable credentials work. The whole video is worth a watch, but Apple has basically adopted the Smart Health Card format (in turn based on FHIR and the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard, minus the blockchainey bit).

Software is politics