The Digital Fiduciary Initiative is a project led by Legendary Requirements a requirements engineering firm specializing in decentralized identity. Our team helped create DIDs and VCs and remain active in the W3C working groups advancing those standards. We are long time participants and contributors to the Internet Identity Workshop and Rebooting the Web of Trust. We’ve also been a part of the ProjectVRM movement since its early days.

Some of the people involved in the starting this effort include Joe Andrieu, Scott David, Lynn Parker Dupree, Eric Schuh, Will Abramson, Kevin Dean, and Erica Connell.

We incubated these ideas at Rebooting the Web of Trust and the Internet Identity Workshop over the last five years, bringing it all together to apply for a federal grant to literally create the Digital Fiduciary Association, under the NSF’s solicitation NSF24-585 Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing in Practice solicitation. Our proposal is currently under consideration.

Because we want to take the time to get the structure of the association right. A recent study showed that 90% of ecosystems fail from bad design decisions. For Digital Fiduciaries to become a social institution that is broadly available across the United States and other jurisdictions, we need to get a lot of details right. In particular, the strength of assurance we get from the Fair Witness approach is dependent on the financial consequences of a Digital Fiduciary violating their oath. For the movement to achieve its goals, it will have to be as painful to lose your Digital Fiduciary certification as it is to lose your medical or law license. When the incentives are properly aligned, the entire socio-economic framework for fiduciaries will ensure a level of quality that can only be achieved by a self-sustaining, self-regulating professional class.

We’ve done that before and we learned our lesson. Joe Andrieu founded the Internet Developers Association back in 1995, where he learned the hard way that governance structure drives politics and politics can make or break non-profit volunteer collaborations. The IDA merged with two other peer nonprofits to form the Association of Internet Professionals, which we naively thought would be better able to serve the marketplace since we could stop competing with each other and all support essentially the same member base. The reality was a new board that did not have a coherent vision and we struggled to align the motivations of three times as many volunteer leaders as each group had before the merger. It was extremely challenging to get anything done with the structure we created. The organization suffered as a result.

Complicating the Digital Fiduciary opportunity, we have a weird order-of-operations challenge with the grant. Because the organization doesn’t exist yet—and there was no way to create it AND get non-profit status in time for a proposal—we (Legendary Requirements) applied as a small business, putting us on the hook for the deliverables in the proposal, if we get the grant.

However, once the governance of the association is set, the DFA will have its own, independent authority. Necessarily. [The initiative fails if we don’t create an autonomous organization run by its members.] This independent authority could decide NOT to go in the direction of the grant proposal, leaving Legendary Requirements in a tough spot in our relationship with the National Science Foundation.

So… we have framed the effort in two phases: an Initiative that will gather the right people and resources to figure out how to set up this organization with the best chance of success. Then, once we’re confident we have an approach that will work, we’ll set up the Association with proper governance and file for 501(c)6 tax-exempt status with the IRS.

Great question. The oath gives digital fiduciaries the privilege of being a part of creating the organization and setting those rules. As a self-regulating-organization (SRO), the DFA is a cohort of peers that collaboratively maintain the quality of the profession. Shaping the oath. Defining the structure. Figuring out how one qualifies as a certified Digital Fiduciary. Figuring out the details for the first Digital Fiduciary Protocol. These are the tasks that will be driven by oath-bound fiduciaries as we create the organization.

If you want to be a part of creating that organization, if you want to help set those rules, take the oath and join the conversation.

If that is still a bit too vague for you, we welcome you to join as an Ally. You won’t have the same privileges as an oath-bound member, but we’ll keep you informed of how things develop and when things mature enough for your comfort, you can join then.

We’ll have 3 years and $1.5 million USD to bring the DFA fully into existence as a functioning SRO for Digital Fiduciaries. We’ll have the endorsement of the federal government as we work through defining a new alternative USCIS I-9 procedure. We’ll also have the framework to define, build, and test a working architecture for auditable Fair Witness ceremonies that satisfy federal requirements for identity assurance. We will also be holding annual outreach meetings in Seattle, Washington to bring together interested parties to share and advance the work. Finally, we’ll have the resources to build out a proof of concept that realizes the digital USCIS I-9 procedure using open standards technologies including Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials.

If we don’t, we’ll keep on advancing the work, just with fewer resources. 

The technical solution for a digital USCIS I-9 is, in our opinion, a straightforward engineering and standards development task. We, Legendary Requirements know how to advance both of those tasks and we’ll continue to work with DFI members to define and realize the vision of the DFA. 

We’ll be bootstrapping our way into a working solution rather than leveraging the funds and good will of the federal government. However, we’re confident that our approach is a paradigmatic improvement over existing practice and we will continue the effort to get it working in practice and get it recognized by the federal government.

Whether you take the oath or not, we appreciate any support you might be able to provide. We are looking for volunteers and advocates who can help us connect to resources and partners who can advance this work.

Join today and let us know you are interested in chipping in.