Mission & Goals
Underpinned by our country’s values, DIDAS is the Swiss ecosystem with the goal to enable an inclusive, privacy-first & frictionless future for our society’s Digital & Data needs. We are advocating for global standards with local governance for digital identities and data sovereignty.
Through this identity-centred approach, DIDAS supports the fundamental change how social, public and business sectors will operate, interact and transact, perceive one another, and work together. We aim to overcome complex, systematic, multi-faceted challenges in service design and enable more seamless digital processes & experiences.
Approach
DIDAS gives individuals (citizens / intra / entrepreneurs) and organisations the opportunity to shape and accelerate the Digital Identity & Data Sovereignty movement in Switzerland.
As we build our multi-stakeholder ecosystem with passionate support from our members, experts and partners, we use a collaborative, human–centred approach, commonly called co-creation to drive positive outcomes.
We provide a neutral ground to our individual and organisational members to fundamentally rethink how digital identities can help us to create the future we want for our children. Not being constrained by any maxim, legacy of products, mindset and mentality or political motivation. A place where ideas can flourish, where you meet with an inclusive team of experts with diverse backgrounds: policymakers, commercial businessmen, rethinkers and visionaries, inventors and start-up founders, professors & faculty, lawyers and technologists, from various industries, all with a hands-on mindset to bring things to life.
Every member of DIDAS is strongly encouraged to carry the ideas, concepts and results of the dialogue back into their organisations — to create value and drive impact through broad adoption. The success of DIDAS is thus dependent on YOU to contribute to this effort.
Learning About Digital Identities And Verifiable Credentials
Why Do We Need A Digital Identity And What Is It?
Identity is more than a name, photo and date of birth. In fact, all of your personal or company details form your identity. As you conduct your activities, different details will need to be presented — ticket to ride a train or enter a concert, medical insurance to get a doctor’s advice, drivers license to rent a car, username & password to login, your registry information as a company etc. Digital Identity is a way to present and share these details (also called Credentials) digitally, without the need of a physical document.
It goes without saying that Digital Identity has to be trusted and verifiable, protect your privacy and be easy to use for various current and future needs interact and transact in the digital world.
Why Is Your Data Privacy & Digital Sovereignty So Important?
Your personal or business Credentials and the ability to use them reliably, form one of the fundamental building blocks of the future of our society. That Future is being increasingly defined and determined by technology, where all our activities are handled by interconnected computer systems and increasingly sophisticated software algorithms.
On one hand we don’t need to re-enter and re-process our information everywhere and enjoy the resulting conveniences and speed. On the other hand, we don’t really know how our data is really used, as well as who has copy of our data and for what purpose.
We are convinced that future systems need to be designed and built with data privacy in mind. Data Sovereignty is a key principle of that design, which allows the subject of the data to have full control of who gets to see it, why and what for.
What Value Does A Digital Self-Sovereign Identity Contribute?
SSI or Self-Sovereign Identity is a new set of principles, technology and standards that are designed to allow a person, a company or even a machine to securely receive data about them (so-called Credentials ) from a trusted source (or Issuer — e.g. a municipality), store it in a trusted environment that they control, selectively and only with their permission share these Credentials with a counterparty (or Verifier — e.g. Bank) over a secure channel.The details of this exchange stay private between the parties (e.g. a municipality doesn’t know that you’ve provided your registration confirmation to the Bank) and only the required details and nothing more will be shared.
Through that, it helps to remove friction from cumbersome processes or even enables new ways to interact and transact by reusing your credentials across the network consistently & instantly.
