Privacy-Respecting Identity for Artists and Musicians

UPDATE!
We are entering round 3 of the competitive bid. We have done really well to get this far and our community credentials product is looking good! We’re working on a demo video and storyboard for an exciting use of our new credentials system, showing how they can be used
to community help independent artists and small local venues get back on the road to recovery after the devastation of the covid pandemic.

The story goes like this:

A community roadmap for post-covid economic and social recovery for independent music and artists:

  • Independent artists encourage their local community listeners to join the Resonate community;
  • Local venue and music store teams also join the Community and build relationships with the artists and listeners to build future potential audiences;
  • Listeners encouraged to play and ‘buy now’ and receive digital receipts from Resonate so that artist income is boosted in short term;
  • Artists recognise loyal fans and friends they know by awarding badges and credentials;
  • Artists recognise (/ verify) the badges / receipts to admit existing and new fans to artists’ fan circle in the Community;
  • Artists put on live streams or other digital immersive events for their supporters, with access granted on verifying a credential;
  • Artists, local venues and fans collaborate and plan events in circle discussions;
  • Local covid certificate issuers join the ecosystem. working with local health and safety regulators. Community forum provides guidance and news;
  • Artists and venues issue covid-certified digital gig entry tickets using CC ticket credential issuer;
  • Covid-risk managed events begin, with credential check at door;
  • Long term relationship established between Artists, Community Venues, Listeners and Resonate.

How does that sound?

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This all looks amazing. I definitely think including venues and shops too is a great idea, particularly if they’re able to create a profile similar to that of an artist profile. There are some really nice apps which gather together information on all the record shops in an area and obviously venue listings, but rarely do they include any other part of the music ecosystem or give each other the opportunity to interact with one another.

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Some examples of those apps would be great @RobertaFidora - any links?

So with the listings apps, it’d be things like Songkick and Bandsintown (which gives the option of signing up as an artist, venue, promoter or publisher but they don’t intersect, as far as I can tell), but the main one I thought of with record shops is The Vinyl District app, which has a social element built into it so you can share what you’ve found there. The Unsigned Guide has a similar listings setup but for venues (except it’s paid).

There’s also a database through Discogs, which combines both the map and Wiki ideas that were mentioned in another thread (formerly Discographer - For Discogs but now part of the official app).

Some time ago too, there was a social app that had a record icon as its logo and it was like a Twitter and Instagram hybrid but for sharing your favourite music recommendations, regardless of the service or format. Can’t remember what it was called though and not certain it even exists anymore.

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Since this thread launched, @Nick_M has been instrumental in securing funding to implement a privacy-respecting identity solution for Resonate members. The Co-op’s commitments to open-source, decentralized principles with maximum interoperability, readiness, and versatility have lead the technical team toward solutions based on the W3C standard known as Verifiable Credentials (VCs) or, as we refer to the solution we are building, ‘Community Credentials’.

Resonate’s more technically inclined Members may be interested in this very timely discussion of different ‘flavors’ of VCs as they are being developed for a variety of use cases around COVID-related personal data.

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Thanks for this @richjensen! Kaliya Young does another great job there in looking at interop across different types of verifiable credentials. The W3C VC spec is deliberately neutral on the 3 main flavours, so that is the level at which we have implemented our Community Credentials. We support multiple schemes and can ‘bridge’ across them if our ‘bridge’ is trusted through our community governance and transparency. So in that sense I think we can, as a co-operative network, get functional interoperability across the ecosystem.

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Here is a rough-cut of the video and demo we mentioned above on Community Credentials, explaining why we need them, what they are, and how they work, with a demo. We finish with some ideas on how they might be used to help independent artists and small local venues get back on the road to recovery after the devastation of the covid pandemic.

(updated)

Hoping to get a new one out later with more voices in the commentary… and maybe some music!!!

(err… sorry it’s on YouTube - that’s not by choice, the sponsors nominated that as the place to put it :expressionless: )

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WE HAVE WON A PLACE IN THE FINAL 5!

Just received the following message from the EU’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) programme on Self Sovereign Identity:

Dear Team Community Credentials,

We are happy to announce that you have been selected to enter the third and final phase of eSSIF-Lab.

The objective of Phase 3 is to test a real use case of the solution you have developed for eSSIF-Lab. This means finding at least one real user to assess your solution for a dedicated use case. Shortly, you will receive an invitation to the kick-off event on Thursday 11th at 14:00 , please think about a list of possible users for your test and we will discuss further then.

Find below the final score provided by the committee.

Business Score | 4.3/5
Tech Score | 4.2/5

Regarding your Phase 2 deliverables and payment, you will receive more information in the coming days.

Congratulations and we are excited to chat further on Thursday,

Kind regards,
The eSSIF-Lab Team

Project funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union, Grant agreement Nº: 871932.

This means we will receive not only the payment for phase 2, but also the payment for stage 3 if we successfully deliver the MVP.

Our partners at Verifiable Credentials Limited also got through with their ‘policyman’ product and infrastructure (that we are using).

Thank you to everyone who has helped with this so far! So much more to do!

Nick

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Wow Nick this is incredible!!! Amazing work from you and everyone who has been involved in this!! :zap::zap::zap: :beers::beers::beers:

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Yes, that is awesome!! Great job to everyone involved! CONGRATS!

Hey everyone, just in case you missed it, here is a recording of a presentation on Community Credentials to a group of fellow co-operators hosted by Digital Life Collective at their monthly get-togethers:

" April’s First Wednesday Call throws the spotlight on Resonate Cooperative, the equitable music streaming platform. They’ve been doing innovative work on what they call Community Credentials, a cooperative privacy and trust system which helps communities to award simple badge-like credentials that can be proven and recognised across organisations. Assuring safety, confirming identity, but protecting our data and private information.

Peter Harris and Nick Meyne from Resonate will present their work and talk about how it helps Resonate’s mission. And of course we’ll dig into the potential for how this technology could be used more widely in support of cooperation at scale."

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Wider uses of Community Credentials

I’m re-posting something in here that we posted in our Basecamp… (Amongst more stuff that needs to be move out of there and on to our Community here, now that the design is shaping up! Thanks to all working on that!)

Community Credentials is an implementation of a W3C standard called ‘Verifiable Credentials’. It’s our way of boosting mutual trust, while respecting members’ individual privacy, all WITHOUT sharing a lot of information with a centralised service. Our video hints at many more possibilities within the co-operative and music community ecosystem.

We have talked about ‘portable’ membership credentials across co-operatives - Know Your Co-Operators The possibility of a ‘commons of co-operative membership’ with co-ops busily ‘cross-selling’ frictionless membership to each other, growing solidarity among co-ops and boosting that 1.2Bn members of co-ops globally.

We have also discussed the possibility of having a ‘play anywhere’ portable ‘owned tracks list’ as a verifiable credential , recognised across a number of players / DSP’s which accept that the artist has been paid a ‘decent reward’ by that listener via another service in the music playing ecosystem. Resonate could lead the way in establishing a standard credential, and the ‘play fair’ process and governance around it.

There could also be a portable ‘social’ credential , which would privately keep the user’s follows, feeds, friends and social contacts list, held in a private VC and accessed by a client app, for greater privacy, explicit consent to connections, and less centralised storage of the ‘social graph’ (yes, today exploited heavily by Facebook and Spotify). We might manage this nicely in a player / wallet app perhaps, limiting the amount of information we make public for ‘discovery’ purposes and allowing for privacy-respecting version of apps like these.

On the foundations of a web of trust between co-ops, underpinned by community credentials we could build loyalty points systems to reward solidarity or we could even grow a full-blown ‘circular’ mutual credit exchange or community currency ecosystem of ‘barter’ for services … who knows?

The folks at W3C envisaged a whole lot of use-case ‘patterns’ for this technology. Use case C5 ‘Social Authority’ in there is very close to the community credentials concept.

There are all sorts of use-cases possible, but I think our strength in Resonate begins in the Community and social solidarity around music. That’s where we start, not as a tech solution looking for a problem. Let’s take it step by step, growing organically from our co-operative, community core.

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Some of you who know about SSI (self-sovereign identity) will be aware that the emerging vendor ‘stack’ for it is based on a couple of standards - Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and Decentralised IDentifiers (DIDs). Community Credentials is big on VCs… but quiet on DIDs… Here’s an SSI meetup presentation from Philip Sheldrake that highlights the possible risks of just sticking yet more numbers on human interactions in a community… hoping there won’t be unforeseen consequences.

For Resonate Community Credentials we’re keeping it simple. Until there’s a need for global inter-operability for Community Creds, we’ll avoid the complexity of DID-based solutions until we are sure we will need them. We’re also conscious of the concerns that Philip raises above. let’s wait and see. We can get on and use what works already in the meantime.

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@merefield responded recently to a post about a federated, community based social media alternative to Facebook and the like.

Just linking these two ideas up… a potential privacy respecting solution to avoid centralised aggregation (and exploitation) of a social graph?

Mastodon / Fediverse protocols and Matrix / Riot are another way of doing this sort of thing, but I wondered if for us, we could use the same privacy-respecting mechanism to do our follows and feeds in the player and across federated community solutions, linked by community credentials.

One for the very long term, perhaps… Unless someone would like to back / work on that?

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What is the status of the verifiable credential implementation that Resonate demonstrated last year?

What are the obstacles to artists or community squads experimenting with the protocol in the context of the co-op?

Where are the endpoints for pursuing further work?

Hi @richjensen

It’s still available, but licenced for test only. May need some sorting out and upgrading.

We’re selecting, together with FairBnB, Pavilion and several other coops, an alternative infrastructure (conforming to the standards, open source if possible).

See coopcreds.com and the co-op community there.

Meantime the use cases need to be elaborated and reviewed so that we have something that works across the ecosystem. Plenty of work there, especially on the business process, levels of assurance and business models.

Endpoints? Not sure what you mean, but if it’s where is the action on this, I think coopcreds.com and the Stay Fair Play Fair use cases (independent music touring and tourism) are still a good place to start?

My understanding of an endpoint would be (this is a proposition)

What could be the first “flagship” feature we implement at Resonate to showcase it and what would be the timeline on such an implementation?

@llk we have several proposed use cases (aka propositions) in StaFairPlayFair and a few more, including the ‘Artist Circle’ one we did for the demo, but they are ‘thin’ and need more thinking through.

FairBnB/Pavilion (and Resonate as an admin partner) have some grant funding from eSSIF Lab BoC2 to work on Coop Creds, so we could perhaps do it there, collaboratively without impacting on the other priorities here at Resonate.

Here’s the timeline Our Work Plan - Co-op Credentials

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I’d be keen to join a working group about that. :heart_decoration: