Re: [saag] Interest COVID-19 'passport' standardization?

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2021-07-31, at 17:42, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> wrote:

Hi Stephen,

probably we are agreeing but just talking about different parts of the elephant.

> On 31/07/2021 16:17, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>> I don’t understand why the fact that governments buy inane
>> applications (*) should prevent us from thinking about this space.
> Nor would I. Luckily that wasn't my argument.
> 
> For international travel: we're not needed.

Apparently we were — there is lots of tech in there that the IETF standardized.  (If that tech works well and solves the problems, we are indeed not needed any further.)

> WRT feature creep: we shouldn't help.

Maybe unless the features actually are about areas where the tech also needs features, e.g., for privacy.

> For those reasons, IMO the IETF shouldn't touch this topic
> with a barge-pole.

Most certainly we don’t want to be the entity that standardizes the actual system (DGC/ehealth or whatever) or how to decide who gets to be trust anchors, etc.

But I still don’t understand why a topic that comes up in such a system (e.g., how to interface QR-Codes with our representation formats) can’t get IETF attention, in particular if it already came up in other contexts (e.g., IoT initial security setup (“onboarding”)).

Of course, the current systems are a done deal.  But we should listen attentively what will be needed for any 2.0 (or 1.1) — in the end we don’t want limitations in our tech to be the reason the upgrades don’t exhibit properties that one would want to have (data minimization etc.).
Establishing communication is a good step in that direction.

> WRT incompetent implementation: it's slightly useful to name
> and shame.

Which each of us can do but the IETF as an org can’t really.

Grüße, Carsten