All right, folks, let's get started here. I'm going to start ripping through things. We're here today, just quick look at the agenda. All he's gonna give us an intro to kick us off and then I'm gonna dive into some basics on what is a trust registry? What's wrong with the trust triangle? That's kind of a backup into the decentralized identity SSI world of some background information you'll need. Talk a little bit about some examples of trust registries that are in the wild or being built out that are solving real problems. And then at the end, we're gonna talk about, where are we now? Trust registries are kind of a newish concept, but not. There are twists and turns when we get into a more decentralized, more distributed world. But we don't understand, what do we really know? What are we fairly certain about? As well as what's next? What are we not as certain about? But we know we're heading in the right direction. What needs to be done? And then we'll slide into Q&A. As we go through the presentation, please feel free to use the webinar Q&A feature. If you need to use the chat, if the Q&A feature is not functioning on your device, Ollie's gonna help run that off. But Ollie, why don't you give us a quick intro? Sure, well, first of all, thank you so much guys for joining us. So it's our first webinar of the year. We're trying to do this on a monthly basis. So this one is about trust registries. So we are recording this session, by the way. So if you want to get the recorded version, we're gonna post it on our website. I'm gonna put everything in the chat. So our website, continualloop.com. We're gonna create the YouTube channel as well as shortly after this. So just make sure to comment it, share it, put a thumbs up as well for your colleagues that missed the opportunity to be here today. So a little background. So I was lucky enough to meet some of you already in meetings with Darryl. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Olivier Dubot. You can call me Ollie Oliver. Or if you want to practice your French, you can call me Olivier. So I'm the new business development director for continualloop. So we are a boutique SSI digital identity consultancy firm based in Ottawa in Canada. We work with small, medium, large organizations all across the globe. And so I've been working with Darryl for quite some time now on other ventures. And a couple of months ago, he asked me to join him in this SSI journey. So my main role with this company is mostly connect with you guys, develop strong relationships, partnerships with any business leaders, whether you're a bank or SSI startup in the fit and tech world, educational space. We just wanna make sure that you have all the tools and knowledge to complete or to start an SSI or digital entity project. We have a lot of relationships in this space, especially Darryl. So he spent hours, 100 and 1000 of hours to develop the rules, the framework, the ecosystem on his trust over IP foundation. And it's a space that in the most four years is gonna probably grow 1000%. So we need to make sure that we have everything possible to help you guys to complete the project that you guys wanna do. And it's on the business leaders and governments to take the lead and try to implement this technology and rule out the other less secure and easier to implement alternative. So we're here to do that. So without any further delay, I'll add it to it, Darryl. There you go. Thanks for the time, Ollie, much appreciated. So we're gonna dive in folks on a few different things. Quickly, Ollie already indicated kind of who we are. We're a boutique consultancy, small shop. We are based in Ottawa, Canada, but we do operate pretty much globally. It's actually kind of strange when we see substantial activity, which we are right now in our own home country of Canada. Background, we've been developing systems for over 20 years, not necessarily as continuing loop, but as companies that I've been involved with founding multiple startups, some were acquired. It was nice, some burned out, wasn't so nice. But we were building mission and lay critical systems for search and rescue, combat search and rescue. We've worked in the payment space, crisis information sharing. So various different spaces where time reliability was absolutely critical. Now we are a consultant advisor for organizations of various sizes from the tiniest of startups. Many of you would know me for many of these sessions. We provide hours and hours of pro bono advice and help people make sure they're heading on the right path, but all the way up to largest corporations, governments, militaries. And we work in really three different ways. One of which is peer advisory and guidance where we come in basically and help your team mentor. We mentor your team, help them make the decisions that are needed. At times we also embed as an executive. I'll speak to one project where that was the case. And at other times we will actually go out and build out the team, partner with the folks that we know who are global leaders and help you execute on projects. Just one of the things I do is I sit on, and at times we wonder if it's too many, but I sit on various different groups, IEEE, blockchain group. We're one of the co-founders and funders of trust, the trust over IP foundation, sit as a steering, I sit as a member of the steering committee. I'm co-chair of the identity for all council along with Nikki Hickman. That's hosted at the sovereign foundation right now. We've been involved heavily and I'm gonna speak to the Good Health Pass collaborative work. We actually led the trust registry work that was there. I've been past chair of standards at Oasis, various of another standards and interoperability groups that are really key. We're actually doing a discussion at some point the next month or two on interoperability, but today let's talk a little bit about trust registries.  We actually condensed it down as part of the chapter on wallets and agents in Drummond and Alex's book, self-sovereign identity, if you do wanna take a look at that, that might be relevant for you. It's actually a little more condensed version. But the important part of that was with regards to trust registries, answering really the questions. How do I know, particularly how does a wallet know that it can trust the parties at the other end, those issuers and verifiers who were there and how they got their authority? Is it legislative? Is it a community-based authority? Is it really informal? And how does this evolve over time? But part of that report that most folks don't know about, many people have looked at that report, is there actually were two reports? Just one sec, my mouse, there we go. The first one was the public one, which everyone has seen. The other one was more of a private wallet strategy, which the project partners that we worked with are still executing on. This really got into the, what does it mean to your business? Where is it gonna be? Where are things gonna be in three, five, 10 years from now? What does it matter? And we looked at two different types of trust registries, both an issuer registry, a credential registry, things have evolved, as you'll see here a little bit later. I just wanted to be clear on one thing. One of the things you will not find in the list of stuff we do is reports. We don't typically produce reports. This one was done under duress and the people involved would know it was kind of done under basis of temper tantrums. I do not like writing reports. I actually physically detest it. What we've learned in the past over this period now is we do have access to some of the best researchers and report writers out there. And next time, if we ever have to do a report or participate in a report, we will help guide it and not do it ourselves. So let's back up and say, what is a trust rich? Then I'm actually gonna back up even further and kind of show to you, prove to you why it even matters. So at the fundamental basics, a trust registry is there to answer some of the hard questions that really just drive our trust decisions, especially on a technical basis. For example, one of the hardest questions and most important questions is, is the issuer of this credential authoritative? If you have a driver's license credential, is it truly from the province of Ontario where I live? Or is it some high school kid? There you go, Sankershan. I see you in the audience. Is it some high school kid pretending to be from the province of Ontario so that the people he sells fake driver's licenses to can get into a bar? Additionally, as a holder, if I'm carrying my driver's license around or I'm carrying a travel pass, which includes some of my personal health information, can I trust the verifier? Do I know that they're gonna operate under the rules of a particular governance framework? Are they authorized to see that information? And are they responsible when they receive it? There's a lot of other questions that come up. We'll deal with some of them right now, but this is a high level discussion on trust registries. What I just wanna stress as we go through here is that there are more questions, there are more answers needed, but we already know the general path we're heading on. So let's back up just a little bit. So I'm gonna talk a little bit, just for those who are not deeply entrenched in the SSID central identity space, we'll talk a little bit about the trust triangle. This is the issue of a credential gives something to a holder, that's me, the person, and then I use it later with the verifier. So what happens here is the issue where in the holder have a whole bunch of crypto magic stuff, that's my technical term, crypto magic, where they know that they've issued a credential to me, it's in my wallet, it's not in someone else's wallet, that I can use then later. Later on, I want to use that credential, let's say it's my travel pass, I want to enter the country, the airline wants to know that I largely speaking have met the rules and regulations of changing countries, whether that be vaccination, various different visas, et cetera, but I'm gonna provide proof to the verifier.   That lets me know that the thing I handed you is real, it is cryptographically proven to be solid, but the verifier at that point has to trust the issuer. And in this case, what we have are decentralized identifiers, DIDS, and the issuer has a public DID that they have signed that with that the verifier can go to a registry. We, I sit on the board as an ex-officio trustee for sovereigns, a lot of folks are anchoring down to sovereign, there's tons of other networks out there, but the key there is there's a public DID that is referenceable by anybody and the verifier can confirm that, but there's a problem. This triangle is not enough. Business question, there's two of them that get asked is one, how do I know that that's actually the verifier? If we take these public permission networks, I can put a public DID and claim to be anybody. It's a cryptographic crazy looking string of text and numbers. It's not humanly consumable. I don't know what it is. I'd have no way of saying, oh yeah, definitely that did, unless I've gone and done the homework and contacted the province of Ontario and said, hey, you're issuing a digital driver's license as a verifiable credential using this DID. Okay, great, cool. So I don't have an answer for that question. And additionally, as a holder of my driver's license, as a holder of a travel pass, as a holder of a diploma, electronic health records, I don't know if I can trust the verifier. That verifier could be a very well-meaning but poorly implemented system. It could be a nefarious system. It could be the perfect system. I just have no idea how to do this. So we have a solution to this where this triangle kind of falls down and really it's been called in the term that was actually Charlie Walton when he was at MasterCard, started calling it the trust diamond, which we look at the same pattern. We have the issuer giving a credential to a holder, presents that to a verifier later, but the verifier is able to answer or ask a couple of questions because there's a governance authority in charge of things. The governance authority manages who the issuers are. It manages who the verifiers are. And it does this by publishing a governance framework and effectively running something that lets me ask the question, how does this verifier trust the issuer? How does the holder trust the verifier? This critical piece of the governance framework is absolutely, totally critical. Governance itself really is how do you manage the complexities? If it's just you and I in the world, it's relatively easy. That's actually complicated enough. But when we start adding in people in a larger circle, we start adding organizations in that we do not know. They all have different needs and there are different incentives for having their behavior. So the governance is really needed and it's hard. But the governance and that concrete implementation of a governance is really where all the value is. I wanna give you a day-to-day example of a credit card network. I can go to a store, pull out a card, doing a drumming here, pull out a card and walk into a store and use it because a bank has issued me, I'm the card holder. They've issued me a credit card and I then present it later to a merchant. And they know through the governance of this network, whether that be this network that they're gonna get paid, I know that I'm gonna be charged. I also know I have some protections that are due to the governance of the network that maybe if this thing breaks and or is not what I thought it was, there might be ways that I can actually get my cash back. But this is why we trust MasterCard, Visa, AmEx, Discover and lots of other cards because of this credit card network, it's the governance behind it. Yes, there's deeply technical stuff that wires this thing up, but without the governance, the whole system falls down. We have a good question, Darvel. Yes. How does the user know about the governance framework and more importantly understand if they manage to obtain it and finally which users can be bothered to do it? Yes. So this is where we're in the early days. If I take a look at the systems that are out there right now that are using decentralized SSI based patterns, they are in discrete ecosystems and they code that into the wallet itself. So the user has no knowledge that, oh, here's the governance authority that I'm operating under because it's part of it. And I'll speak to one example, which is MemberPass. But as we get better and as things grow, it becomes these trust registries where the wallets can make decisions, where we have software agents that can make those decisions, but that's a little bit down the road. I'll get, and I'll cover off parts of that. That's for David Chadwick. Governance back to it, it's hard. It's a human construct. What Nick Zabel calls it's wet code. It's stuff up here. It's stuff on legal contracts that really is hard to execute on, but it's human. This is how we operate, how we always have operated. The hard part is where's the dry code? Where's the actual stuff that systems, architects, developers can get answers to the question like, hey, where's the list of public dids that are definitive for Canada issuing driver's licenses? They need to answer that question. They need to answer, and I'll get into more detailed questions in a little bit. And that's right away, I'll get into those. And tying governance to technology, I'm gonna jump in here, I backed up my slides here, to talk a little bit about why this is really important, how we're separating governance and technology. And this is one of the reasons why we as a very small company helped co-found, drive the need to create the Trust Over IP Foundation was because of two things. It was this separation of the trust and governance which was always being blurred, but as well as the layering of the solution that we were looking at, which became what we call the four layer model for Trust Over IP. This starts to help us understand the difference, especially the governance at the top level or at any level of the stack. What's the governance side? And then what are the key technology pieces that help us get there? We'll see the term member directory, provincial registry, these really are what now I'm calling the trust registries of the world. So here's what the questions we need to basically start asking ourselves at the most basic of levels. This is, I need to know, is the issuer authoritative? And to answer, to put some qualifiers on that from David is says who? More particular, is the issuer authoritative? And I'll get into the detail on that under what rock conditions. But additionally, is the verifier authorized if you're asking for that to happen? You don't need to. You don't have to have a verifier listing, but you may want one depending on what it is the usage. But as well as, as we grow, and I'll speak to where this becomes more important as a decentralized community. And how do we start taking multiple trust registries and chain those together? So David, you get an answer of, well, if 25 different country level organizations trust this 26 one, that's probably good enough for me until it isn't. And then we get into the signals that are being shared. This is down the road type of stuff. So here's the detailed questions that we actually have already started asking, particularly under good health pass, but this has now been moved in the trust over IP trust registry task force is specifically this, is this issuer authorized to issue this credential type under this governance framework? This lets me know, is say the province of Ontario authorized to issue a driver's license under the rules of Canada? This lets me know if you're really an authoritative issuer. Similarly, is this lab authorized to issue a PCR test for COVID-19 as authorized by the province of Ontario, the country of Canada, or some other national body, which may have sub national groups inside of it. We'll get into that in a little bit. Similarly, is this verifier authorized to request this proof type under this governance framework? So this is a good example of the nightmare scenario for most SSI de-central identity folks is the, I want to use my driver's license at the bar to prove I'm an age majority. There's actually a really, the reason it keeps popping up is it's a really good example. Well, one can imagine a driver's license has different ways of being requested. And this is actually under the MDL, kind of old school standard with ISO. You can ask multiple profiles of driver's license. I'll use two examples. A law enforcement officer who pulls me over probably wants my full driver's license information and I probably should provide it to them. So my wallet may want to say, hey, we've already checked them out. They're a law enforcement officer. We recommend you share that driver's license fully. Go for it, press a button, off we go.  And it says, yeah, this is a pub age majority request.  And it has a check mark over 18, 19, 21, whatever that jurisdictional rule is you need. That's perfect. But then I go to another restaurant. This actually is happening in many places in Canada where they scan the driver's license and they asked for my full driver's license for information at a pub or at a restaurant. This is bad. This is a, you are asking for far too much information. And under the privacy laws of Ontario and the very super promises we have, it's likely illegal and may need to be reported. This gives you an idea of some of those trust questions we're asking. I'm going to get into the trust registry as well. Like for example, is that this particular trust registry understood think countries and COVID-19 and vaccination and travel passes, authorized, recognized for a particular type of credential under a governance framework that I recognized. This is where you can have signaling of countries trusting each other. There are a couple of interesting questions that might fit this slide. Well, let me take a look here. How is an issuer a verifier on boarded in the first place? Yeah. I'm going to get into that in a moment. Keep that in mind, Ollie, because I'm going to discuss with the internal, how do you run inside your place, the trust versus what does the outside world need? We'll talk about that in just a little bit, if you don't mind. Okay, and Sean, we'll take a look at your questions in a little bit if you don't mind. Thanks, Ollie. So what actually happens with the governance side and the trustworthy, this is where the governance and the tech kind of meet because I have to look at the situation. And depending on the ecosystem I'm operating in, I'm going to have the public dids of issuers. I may have a private did of a verifier because it doesn't have to be necessarily on a ledger listed in a trust registry, depending on what it is that I need. Later on, the verifier will want to confirm, hey, I have Daryl's credential here. He provided to me as the holder, but are you really the province of Ontario? Are you really the lab issuing a vaccination credential? So they want to confirm against trust registry is the issuer authoritative for that particular credential type? Similarly, the holder may say, hey, listen, I want to check out this verifier. Are they allowed to ask for, should they be asking for my stuff? If we take a look at vaccination passports with smart health card, they're closed systems right now. You have the card and you have typically a province or state issuing, here's our verification tool because they don't want to share necessarily the keys that are out there. So they can't operate in a larger spectrum. And here's what we're gonna do the internal and external. So the internals of a trust registry really about the, how do we onboard an issuer? That from the external world isn't relevant. It's extremely important to know that, the United States state of Virginia has vouched for a lab that is issuing COVID-19 PCR tests because of their legislative process. That's the body who is in charge of that lab. They will go through various different rigmarole, various different rules to say, yes, this is a bonafide authoritative issuer. Boom, they get added, they manage, they do the create retrieve update, delete of their own business life cycle to maintain that lab. They have to revoke it later if they need to. That's the important part for them managing their own stuff. Another example, I am a professional engineer in the province of Ontario. There are various different regulatory and technical things I have to do to maintain my license. Professional engineers Ontario is the body who is in charge of my license. In different provinces, they have different names, but this is all legislative. How they do might be slightly different rules province to province. The key thing there is at the end of the day, they are the authoritative body, the governance authority, who is operating under their own governance framework and they maintain a list of those issuers, people who are allowed to sign as a professional engineer in the province of Ontario or the province of Quebec or down the states. It's a PE, everybody has their own. So they manage that membership. They also manage what types of credentials they're using, well, how those credentials should be used in the wild. The external world is where we're concerned about, you know, what governance frameworks does a trust or agency operate under. The professional engineers one may not be of interest to many, for those in the insurance world who are making sure that, you know, but buildings are being built correctly, that nuclear capacity is being addressed. It becomes very important for the average person on the street, not relevant at all. So depending on what you need, it's a different governance framework, but we wanna know about those issuers, those verifiers and trust strategies that are known. We'll talk more about what are those credential schema and definition as well as presentation requests that drive the usage of these. Just looking through the questions. Wow, we got lots. I think some of them are gonna need to wait a little bit. Yeah, I think you just answered one of them. I wanna give you two examples of trust registries. One of them is in the wild and the other ones are being developed. Member Pass was a CU ledger now called Bonify. I was the contract CTO for it for a few years because it was really the first operational production use case of SSI, certainly anchored to the sovereign network, but arguably potentially one of the more powerful ones. What it does is it helps credit unions in the States. It's actually got a global mandate, which is important for trust registries. To solve a problem, how do I know you're really a member of this credit union when you phone in, when you walk in and when you log in? They have different technology providers, so they have no control and finding out which is really you. If you wanted to phone in and get your bank balance, you're likely two to three minutes before I can even ask, you can ask the question, what is my bank balance? Cause I really need to know it's really you. You're not trying to scam your aunts. You're not trying to scam some stranger or take over someone's identity. But the key there is that the trust registry evolved. We didn't need it in the beginning. In the beginning, it was the investors of Member Pass of Bonify. The board of directors were really the credit unions who were participating. Everyone knew everybody. So everyone was able to say, yeah, yeah, here's the list of digs. It's just a config file, go for it. But then we started getting smaller credit unions who actually have more of a digital identity problem because they have a fractured set of tools and systems they're using. And we started to get questions from other credit unions, the larger one saying, oh, who are they? We realized that we didn't have a list of those Member Pass issuers that was being maintained. So we started to do so. The principal use case for Member Pass really are two-fold right now. One is inside a credit union, is this credential, do they hold a credential? I issued them, which is not important to know other people's issuing dates. It's just not important at that point. But then the next business case becomes, well, how do I know and prove that I can now take funds out of a different credit union from my own account? That's when we started to get really concerned and wanna make sure that this is an official member of the Member Pass network, that their did is registered, which is anchored to sovereign, but it is in the Member Pass trust registry because it's a very strong authentication signal, a very high level of assurance that if I walk in with that Member Pass from credit union X into credit union Y to take funds out, it's harder for them to get a Member Pass and it is to get a fake driver's license and spoof me, which is a very well-known attack factor right now. So this one's been deployed for, well, year, year and a half. And again, it's focused really on the US credit unions, but Boniface mandate is global. It's also beyond just credit unions, it's community banks. So they start to get different communities. So the Member Pass becomes that anchor and that trust registry is the source of truth. Just taking a quick look at the, yeah, we'll get into some of these questions. I love these questions, but I think it's probably better to go in and the mentions of PKI especially, because yeah, we'll get into that in a little bit folks who are diving in on that. Sean, yeah, governance authority and trust registries are different entities. Yes, let me deal with that when we get back to one of the diagrams, but the trust registry is a concrete implementation that serves a governance authority, particularly serves a governance framework of a governance authority. It is the concrete instantiation. It's the thing I can talk to digitally, but further, we certainly are planning and anticipating that a trust registry may serve multiple governance authorities. Not everybody wants to stand this kind of thing up. It just doesn't make sense where it's all to stand up a full server system when I can just say, yeah, yeah. I'm a, you know, the professional engineers in Canada, they're all served out by one particular trust registry because it's just, you know, cost savings type of thing. Want to dive into quickly, the good health pass collaborative work, the blueprint and again, we led the trust registries segment theme. I don't know what we called them at the end of the day. Before we go in this, when you go back to member pass and there's a question from Alex saying, why do you need sovereign? And when could you just have the, oh, just let me just go up. There was another question, sorry. So why do you need sovereign? And when could just have the public this anchored in the member pass itself? Yep. Whoops, there we go. Yeah, so sovereign. So one of the points that we have to do here is if I take a look at the overall, how do I present a credential? A proof of a credential. So imagine I'm sitting here at Unify out of California. They've issued me a Unify credit union member pass. I walk into desert financial in Arizona. They wanna do a couple of things. One, am I the holder cryptographically speaking of this credential? Do I still control my side of it? Then they wanna do the crypto check to make sure one, I haven't tampered with it, but two, that it was signed by a did by the credit union. The only information we have in a credential is the did itself. It's an identifier, the decentralized identifier. What I need to do when I want to do is go to a public reference point, an anchor, which in this case is sovereign, to say, hey, I just got this information about this, did. What is the public key as anchored to this third, this reference source, which is the decentralized ledger that I then compare that against how the credential was signed? So I'm not saying to member pass, hey, give me mine. This is a closed PKI system. We'll say, yeah, here's a list of all the public keys you need to worry about. But we'll talk a little bit about why we're not doing a centralized PKI system because there are many, many of these things and we can't all be doing the same PKI because someone's gonna be in charge of that who doesn't make any damn sense for us. So I need to use sovereign for that particular anchoring. Member pass certainly could have created its own ledger. That's one of the first things that we looked at doing. Business wise, we looked at what is the business problem we are trying to solve? We're having difficulty in this case with trust internally of our own systems because they're run by many vendors and we've lost control of things. And it made sense, we did the analysis that it needed to be a ledger or utility, could have been a database that is accessible by everybody, but not controlled and owned by any one particular entity, which sovereign in that case fit the bill. It's a public permission network and get into the whole stuff behind it. And again, I am an ex just for disclosure I am an ex officio trustee because I am co-chair of the Identity for All Council. So I mean, it was a business decision which a lot of different groups start with, no, I need to control this myself always almost always ended up with, oh yeah, I don't wanna control that. That's just too much right now. So that's why it's sitting on sovereign. Thanks, Ollie. So backing up to good health pass, good health pass was created to, in Charlie Walton at the time at MasterCard he's now at a vast, was basically trying to answer the following question. How do we show the world what good is not perfect, good. What's good enough to start opening our borders because international travel is cripplingly. It's crippled right now due to the manual and paper-based processes and inability to understand different travel corridors and all the intricacies that are already there. How do we start to use that information to open up in, in New York, they have a single system, IBM has deployed it for the state. It's called Excelsior, which allows me to show my vaccination information if I'm in the state and recognize in a privacy respecting way that at a restaurant, the problem is if I'm from New Jersey or Canada, my daughter was just down in New York, what did they do? It doesn't work because it's a closed type of system. Really wanna answer a couple of questions. Is this health pass authentic? Is the traveler, the authentic holder of that health pass, meaning I'm not using all these Quebec-based vaccination credential, which would be quite easy for me to do, other than there's a little bit of naming, but that crypto's already been broken. And does the data on the health pass satisfy the travel rules? Travel rules get really complicated really quickly. If you take the Canadians who have a mix of Pfizer and Moderna, the states doesn't recognize that. So there's a whole bunch of these different rules that kind of get ties and knots, but we tried to solve the problem. And the way we did it was, we looked at the who are the issuers? There's various types of issuers. And this again is why you can't get a single PKI solution involved. It's just, it's not possible. When you have test administration being run in every country on the planet, may or may not be managed at the national level, could easily be regional. You have testing devices themselves that need to be brought in potentially. You have healthcare providers with their own privacy regimes, which are usually quite stringent. Each managed at potentially a national or subnational level. And don't kid yourself that WHO is not a standard. It is a body that kind of advises and pokes at health authorities. You have national and regional health systems. And you have a ton of other information, issuers of the identity data. So you have a ton of different types of issuers issuing information to us, the traveler, the holder. And then the actual travel groups, whether that be a government border, an airline wanting to make sure that from what I can tell right now, you're going to be accepted into the country. Cause if you're not, it's on the airline to get you back to your home country. Various different secure areas, airline boarding systems. And then you step into the ancillary, the next level of the hotels, the various different conference entertainment venues that may want to know, are you vaccinated? Did you get into the country by those rules? That's good enough for me. Welcome, Mr. O'Donnell. Please take your seat at the restaurant. So then we looked at, okay, where's the trust registry fit? Well, the issuers are listed in A trust registry. This is going to be key, A trust registry, or many depending on who they are. The verifiers may be listed in those as well, because depending on the regime or the governance framework, the ecosystem governance framework we're operating under, I may have to hive, have what's called verified verifiers in that you don't get to ask, you're not allowed to or we don't recommend you answer the question from a unknown verifier who's about to slurp down your private information. All of these things, the holders use the trust registry to know that's a good verifier. The verifiers use the trust registry to know that's a good issuer. All of this is done under the governance authority that manages that particular trust registry or its portion of that trust registry according to their own governance framework. This is a more technical diagram. I'm going to jump past it. The key part I want you to see is, here is a jurisdiction. When I say a jurisdiction, that could be a country. It could be a state. It could be a city. It could be a region. Who knows, but they've got their own rules, their credentials, their passes and the trust rich and governing authority. The reality is this is where the PKI falls down dead is in my world of just travel, there are dozens and dozens and if not hundreds of governance authorities who are needing to share this type of information. And they are the ones in charge. You can't say, hey, we're going to go use the WHO, which didn't actually, I don't think it actually landed PKI because they don't have the authority from the state of Virginia to go into the WHO because that's nation state only. There is no answer there unless you go to a, call it distributed, call it decentralized, and that's where PKI starts to fall down. Effectively, what we're talking about is distributed PKI. That's all. It's not anything magically wildly different. It's just, there's no root of all roots that we're talking to. So let's back up to what do we know? And this gets into the, what do we know we absolutely need to do and we're doing? We need to know who the authoritative issues are, who the authorized verifiers are and who are, where are the recognized trust registries because we have this distributed ad hoc systems being stood up all over the place. That's a freaking disaster when you try to do it on paper. It's hard enough to do digitally, but I need to answer these questions quickly. So what we've done so far, we took the good health pass collaborative work, the good health pass blueprint, have moved to continue the work over at trust over IP, the trust versus protocol. Two things that are there, very short document, the version one specification, which answers those questions, are you an authoritative issuer of this credential type under government's framework? Are you an authorized verifier? Same rules. And are you a recognized trust authority? Any one of those questions, you can answer all of them or just one. You can follow the specification working draft and the open API SPAC is in GitHub. We'll share a follow-up email pointing you folks at this, just don't wanna jump into a browser and jump into GitHub and just cause everyone to just slam into a coma. So I would do wanna raise up, where do we know we need to do work, but we don't have all the answers right now. We're fairly happy that we know the answers here. We're actually moving the spec out to more of a community draft to get some more input. We're not seeing a lot of churn. We think we've got it going pretty good. Drum and Rita from Evernim and I lead that particular effort. So we know on what needs work is in a particular ecosystem, what credential types are used. If it's a driver's license regime, perfect. Driver's licenses are the credential type. In a good health pass type of system, we have many different things. Proof of immunity, proof of vaccination, diving into electronic health records that provide that proof of vaccination or the immunization system that drives in. So a whole bunch of different data types as well as the travel linkages. How do I link your vaccination credential to some sort of identity proofing if that is necessary for a high assurance credential? One that's kind of got people wrapped around the gears a little bit, no one's thinking too hard on this. One is what wallets are approved for use in this ecosystem? Governments are very concerned about this. In the wallet report, and since then and even before then, I've jokingly asked the question, can I trust Bubba's wallet? Imagine Bubba's wallet shows up in the app store. It's got 555 star reviews. It's got the best user experience and it makes my digital life awesome. I don't have to worry about anything. Problem is it was written by North Korea. We've got a serious problem if we don't know how to accredit and certify the wallets that are used in a particular ecosystem if and when there are sensitive data. If it's completely non-sensitive data, maybe it doesn't matter at all. But also what uses of the credentials are normal and abnormal. So as I give you that example, again, if someone from a restaurant asks me for my full driver's license information, even the data I can't see on the driver's license itself in the physical world, what do I do? That might be an abnormal use, but what would be normal? Well, the pub asking for age and majority, totally normal. My wallet just may simply either, hey, we recommend you to hit the green, yep, share it, or might even just go as far as just share the damn thing. I don't want to be bothered by that. It's a routine thing, just make it happen. That gets to me in my choice, helps my wallet and the agents that are working for me to do that. Additionally, we're doing this right now about trust registries. What information can trust registries tell each other? What are the signals we can give that help us understand that 25 countries trust this one particular trust registry, your country 27, you want to commit and say, yeah, that's good enough for me. Hey, perfect, awesome. Or hey, we've had privacy, we've had faults reported in the trust registry of somebody who has done abnormal use of credentials as a verifier. The trust registry signals may want to say, hang on, that's the 33rd report we've had in the day, shut them down. All these things kind of need to be thought about. What else is out there? We talked a little bit about the pieces of the credentials being shared, running out of time, I'm gonna jump into some questions here. How do I use those, those presentation profiles? Additionally, what ledgers and did methods as a particular governance framework support? There's gonna be, I think right now there were 50 plus did methods, are they all gonna survive? Probably not. Are they all gonna be relevant under various different situations? Probably not. But I need to understand, hey, listen, if I'm doing professional engineering credentials under a particular framework, do I anchor to Ethereum? Do I anchor to sovereign as an indie method? Do I anchor to Bitcoin? I need to know business answers because I'm gonna get someone who's anchoring to something I'm gonna say, sorry, I don't do that one because we can't do everything. As well as we get into more of the interactions amongst the whole system. A part of the question I've got for folks here is people are asking, where do we need to do more? A lot of it comes down to helping out in the open source world. For example, Medcredge is a project I've advised on a pro bono basis, the proof market team behind that. It's got a really good trust strategy for someone who needs to stand up, labs, doctor's offices for issuing credentials, but it hasn't done the trust for protocol yet, needs probably a week or two of development for someone to help work on. Start thinking about the schema, the cred deaths and the presentation requests in your own ecosystem. But also what can you do? Part of this comes down to if you're doing something internal and private, perfect. Still get your teams participating because they need to start learning on this stuff. For critical projects, I would say start learning now. We deal with our clients really have two different things that they want. One is help their teams learn because they want to build the capacity and capabilities inside the house. So we come in and we help with them. They engage leaders that either on our team, ones that we recommend, as well as get open up your discussions for your projects. If it needs to be private, great. If it can be public, you'll probably get even more interest from the open community. But those critical projects, and we've worked on projects that range from wildly open to extremely closed, highly classified. So it depends on your business needs. One rule I want to just point out to people is what you're going to find as you dive into this open world is the 1% rule, where there are tons of people in trust over IP who are doing great work. Some of them are contributing pretty heavily. A lot of them are watching. Call them lurkers. They're watching and learning a bit because they're not necessarily doing they may not be learning quite as much. But then you look at the who are the hardcore creators who are driving things. And we can encourage you to join in as creators or contributors or if it serves your business purpose, start watching what's going on in particular area. As a follow-up and I'll dive into questions real quick. Actually, let's dive into questions right now, Ollie. Just looking at where we're okay. That was one. So how is an issuer verified on board in the first place? You talked about that. Governance. So can you elaborate on that? I didn't like to dive in on Sean's question. The first one? Yeah. So Sean and I know each other from the past. But part of this decentralizes the world, SSI decentralize Danny is I don't trust corporations and organizations. Hey, great, cool. You at some point need to decide are you going to maintain a list of all the issuers on the planet that you trust? That's totally fine. At some point you're going to reach a particular level of a trust reserve. You say, that one's good enough for me. It's going to start because it does, you can trust the math or the legal authority. Or once you stop trusting them, yank them, pull that trust registry from your good list, or go through their list and say, yeah, that's great, but 10% of them I don't trust anyways because it's my decision. There's a country tied to this particular country that breaks my rules, great, toss them out. But it's the trust registries that allow me to know that these are the groups that I can trust that one list.  There's a community-based trust registry that I can point at and believe in because of my rules and I don't trust the corpse or the individuals behind the other ones. Nothing wrong with that. If you had to be part of a PKI regime, you can't even answer that question. As an issue where you need to trade the DIDS, create a relationship first, will he be phoning home? Yeah, no, when we do the relationship between a holder and the issuer, the relationship there is off-chain. It is completely private. And this is another reason why we don't just ask member pass for the DIDS. That verifier doesn't want member pass knowing that it's checking against a particular authority because now you can get correlation in bulk. I want to go out of band on my own and just simply look at this ledger and say, yep, that's in the list. That works out the key matches and you don't have to call the trust registry every time. You just do it when things change. Okay, onboarded. That was answered. And Sean, yeah, this has become a new set of terms of service that users don't need. Certainly some of the governance frameworks may have terms of service over time. That's an area we're gonna need research in. We should note that, what's a normal term of service? What's a weird trust registry? What's a, if I enter a particular governance framework, what are the rules of engagement? Some of those ecosystems will be very rigid as they should be. If I take a look at, it's PKI based, but if I take a look at the passports, yes, I can now decode some of the information in the wild from my passport. But if I want the key information, that critical confidential information, I need to join a very rigid system run, I think by IKO. So depending on what the needs are, it could be completely loosey-goosey all the way up to, used only on closed classified networks. The terms of service would hopefully be a little normal. This is more just what data am I sharing? What else do we have here? Where are the holders authorized? Do I need a personal trust registry? You might, Sean. Really depends on when it comes down to holders. I would think registering holders would be probably draconian, but maybe there are use cases where that does make sense. I'd be more concerned about registering the wallets that holders are allowed to use because we don't want the system we've defined. It doesn't call home. It's privacy-respecting. It doesn't correlate. But if I have a wallet that is calling home, correlating and sending information off and off-gassing to somebody who is nefarious and wants to do surveillance-based economics, I have a problem there. I can't, one of my old developers had a T-shirt. I loved it.  The approaches we're using can be used inappropriately and or circumvented. I want to make sure that when I use a wallet for serious use, carrying a vaccination credential around making it easier than pulling out paper, which I just did. I went to Quebec. I'm not from Quebec. I had to have my vaccination, which I was smart enough to highlight. You have received two doses and it has, that was my wife's name, but if I just want to get into a restaurant, I'm not as fussed. If I know that there are privacy concerns or relatively dealt with, the wallets are the key thing. Holders, you might need to be registered. Who knows? We've got good questions in the chat, Darryl. So one for Karen. Is there a way in Canada in the specific provinces to leverage the digital identity systems being launched or in use for startups in other sectors? And is this important? Where did you see that one? It's in the chat and not in the Q&A. So is there a way in Canada to in the specific provinces to leverage the digital identity system for startup in other sectors? Yeah. So right now there are some initiatives in Canada that I can't get into too much detail on. But there is an overall goal. BC government has done this for corporate registrations. The goal there is give those corporate registrations to two different parties. One is the general public who have a right to see it by law, corporate registrations. These are the list of companies that are listed or registered, but also to the companies themselves for various different purposes so that I can tie, for example, an insurance certificate to a corporation and see, oh, yeah, that contractor I'm bringing into my house is insured as opposed to them wagging a piece of paper in front of me. That's already underway in the government of British Columbia. And if a startup finds a reason to use it, yes, it's totally open. They're based on particular hyper ledger areas, implementation, working hard on creating interoperability test suites, both between trust over IP, hyper ledger and Diff, the essential identity foundation. When you get into the actual identity documents themselves, so identity credential, like a driver's license, like a health card, a government identity, it gets a little tougher because there's no examples in the wild that are real. But once there are, it's the same interaction as if I was asking for a corporate registration, I'm just saying, hey, I need to know, hey, Darrell, can you share your government issued driver's license number? Because I needed to rent my car or something. It makes it just easier for me to check in, hey, perfect. But yes, startups can certainly do that when those are in the wild. And if they pay attention to the news, I would think over the next few, three, six, nine, 12 months, they'll see more and more examples of exactly that. It's the same type of question Darrell. So can you talk a bit about the role of the government in all this? They are the issuer of the foundational identities. Do they not have a role to play in defining the governance framework, the standards for the wallet, et cetera, et cetera? Oh, 100%. And the government, the government, this is something where I'm proud that, you know, the Canadian government at multiple levels, federal, provincial, territorial, and even municipal, have been doing the hard thinking of what is the role? If you take a look at who would I like to receive a digital identity document from, I would pick the government every time if I can share it in a privacy-respecting way, as opposed to a third party who is taking a picture, I'm doing a selfie, it looks okay. Yeah, that's good enough. I'll take the assurance level that the government has with the processes that are in place every single time. Further, I want the government to play a role, not run it, but play a role in defining the rules of the road. What wallet is authorized? What wallets are authorized is a key one because I want to know that there's a protection for that they're following privacy expectations of Canada, that there are groups who are monitoring the usage in a privacy-respecting way. What's interesting is governments, when they first touch digital identity, learn quickly that there are things that could be done that could be badly used. I've talked to one government official was like, you know what, they love the idea of every time I use my government digital credential, they would know. But then they realize quickly, we don't ever want that information because the minute you start monitoring my activity that I use my driver's license to prove my age at a casino, to prove something at a particular bank, the government knows way too much about me and that violates Canada's privacy laws. The good thinking has been done. The actual, if I take a look at the public sector, pan Canadian trust framework, which drove some of the activity at the Canada's CIO strategy council. I'm vice chair of one of their tech groups. That's a standard now for the government, for Canada, not just for government, but for business. And it is considering all of those things that a lot of that deep thinking came out of the government whose role is on policy, not really on running stuff. And hopefully that gives a quick answer. Another on privacy, it's a good one too. So if I have a trust registry and lying on someone else's trust registry, can a third party discover who is in that list or find out who I trust? Yeah, liar, the only way they could do that is to ask you and you would have to answer because you're getting a signal back that's private to you. You're talking to trust registry and all you're asking is, hey, can this did issue a COVID-19 PCR test under this governance framework? Yes or no? If you want to broadcast that to the world, say, hey, listen, I trust lab X, hey, go for it. But the trust registry is not gonna be telling anybody that you've done that. Now, down the road, the deeper thinking that two, three, five, 10 year horizon, you may want to signal to the outside world, this is something I trust, much like I like a post or I may wanna put, I believe this post, I will sanction, not sanction, I will vouch for this particular post, you may wanna send a signal so that those of us who don't wanna use formal trust registries can derive data that say, hey, the math says, there's no way that 37,500 people trust this one and it's not trustworthy. They gain the system, there's no way they can get to that level of trust. I'm just gonna trust them. Another one, how will an interrupt be endowed across trust registries? Yeah, so that's one of the reasons why we have the trust registry protocol, which is focused again right now, laser focused on only answering three questions. Is this issue authorized to issue this credential type under this framework? Is this verifier authorized to use this credential presentation under this framework? And is this trust registry trusted? We're looking at the, how do you share information? And we did this back in the 90s with geospatial so that I can hit a trust registry that is informally managed, but it actually is aggregating for 2,500 different trusters that I don't ever wanna know about. I can relay information, I could synchronize. That's down the road though. So we're not there yet, but hopefully that gives a quick answer. I think we're running out of time here, Ollie. I need to jump onto a board call. Just real quick folks, I do need to close this up. We'll do our best to send out an email with answers to the questions that are in the, that have remained unanswered. These projects, as you probably guess, we've been in it for a long time, we can say with pretty high confidence that some of the projects are really daunting. They seem daunting. If you don't have the right perspective coming out of the gate, you may not even decide to start. We've helped dozens and dozens of organizations and we love helping projects get started in the right direction. If you have questions, reach out. Ollie, can you share in the chat? So if you haven't already, the links that we've got here, especially the link to the Contact Us, just hit our website. If you don't just hit our website, see the Contact Us, click it. Reach out to me on Twitter, reach out to Ollie and I on LinkedIn. That should be able to get you a little bit of information. We'd love to help a little bit. Make sure you're understanding one, what are the right questions to ask, as well as what's the direction you probably want to head in. With that, I think we need to run. Lawrence Ma, you've asked some questions, I would say are not in scope for this. Please reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn or directly through email to ask those and I'd be happy to point you in the right direction. That's about it, folks. Thank you very much. Again, we'll have a recording of this. We'll make that available, probably by hopefully late tonight. And I thank you and don't be afraid to reach out. Have an awesome one. Thank you, have a good day, guys. Bye.


So welcome everybody here to the Martinie Siegel Theater Center, the Graduate Center CUNY. It is 1230 noon time in Manhattan and we are having with us today one of the great workers in global theater, Dorota Maslawska, a great writer, artist, singer, poet from Poland and Christina and Tomek from the Polish Cultural Institute and from Yale University and we are going to talk today about Dorota who has been many times at the Siegel Center and we are celebrating a great event which we got done in the time of COVID. It is the book for place by Dorota Maslawska and the plays are no matter how hard we tried a couple of poor Polish speaking Romanians, Bowie and Warsaw, which actually will be shown live today at 730 at the Bohemian National Hall and how I became a witch. It's really fresh out of the oven. It still smells like fresh print and came out last week. So welcome everybody and Dorota, where are you and how are you today? I'm really excited. I'm really happy because we started to plan this book before pandemic and then the works stopped and actually in the past few months I wasn't sure if it really comes out. So the fact that it's not a prop but it's a real book, as you said, smelling of fresh print is really a beautiful surprise for me and I think that in Poland such a book doesn't exist. Like I don't have the anthology of my place. So this is the first one and it's American and I'm really proud of it. Yesterday I came from Chicago where Bowie and Warsaw was staged by Trapdoor Theater and this is the play you mentioned that will be shown in Bohemian Hall today, tonight. Yes and I'm in Manhattan right now and I'm really excited to have this talk with you. Fantastic, thank you. I didn't know that there was no anthology of yours in Poland, so it's quite a privilege for us here at the Siegel Center who had you actually very early I think 2006 already or something you came to us in the very beginning. So let's welcome Christina. Christina, tell us a little bit about you first where you are, what time it is and what you do. Okay, nice to be with you. It's very funny that usually I would be with you in New York, but it happens so that I'm speaking from Warsaw. So I'm with you in New York, so I'm in Warsaw. Yes, hello. And, and, well, I would like to say a few things about Toyota. Yeah, let's, let's first say hello to Tomik.  Tell us a little bit about your work. I work at the university, yeah, the university where I teach Polish, I teach Polish culture, and among other things I teach Polish film, and I teach Polish theater and I have to say that in both my courses. Toyota's work is prominently present because I find Toyota's work one of the most important sonorous I will speak about that in a moment voices so my students are connecting to your work through film and through when possible through theater as well. And excerpts from how we tried. Fantastic. And you wrote also the introduction or for our book at Tomik. And welcome here tell us where you are and how are you connected to the world of Dorota Maslowska. So, I'm just across the Hudson River across from Manhattan and where you are in Jersey City. And I am a film and performing arts curator at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. Frank and I are good friends, we go way back organizing events together. And around four years ago, we had the idea to publish the anthology of Dorota's theater works and as Dorota mentioned, the pandemic actually stopped the project for three years. This event was supposed to happen in June 2020, but had to be postponed. So finally, three years later. Yeah, we have it. I used the opportunity of this book being published to also present play by Chicago based trapdoor theater, who are staging Bowie in Warsaw, written by Dorota. Today's weekend audience in New York and Jersey will have opportunity to see it today and tomorrow at 730 at Bohemian National Hall during the rehearsal for truth festival organized by Pavla Nikola and what's up have a library and on Sunday at seven o'clock. The audience in New Jersey can see the play in at the Jersey City Theater Center during the voices International Theater Festival organized by Olga Levina. It's gonna be at seven o'clock and after all the performances there will be Q&A with the cast director and also with Dorota so please come over if you're around. Yeah, yeah, it is so important that in New York City we see listening here global international theater so much has closed down the Lincoln Center Global Festival, the Coral Festival, many, many others. Even the end of the radar, you know, is in a way endangered so it is great to have our international collaborators and with us and it is wonderful that Dorota took time out of her life to be with us to fly to Chicago see the production now come to New York. So this is really a big honor to have you with us Dorota before we come to you. Christina, since you are someone who over decades monitors the Polish scene in theater and in film. Tell us a little bit how does Dorota fit in what where is her place. Well, I want to say I want to start just saying that something that I mentioned before that Dorota you are one of the most prominent voices sounding from Poland and I always approach your writing as the writing of the generation that is a post communist generation it's kind of millennial, a little bit partly millennial. Anyway, the generation that very importantly bridges the fall of communism and the legacies of communism and this transitional periods and transitional periods have been always for every cultural critic, the most interesting periods because very many things are happening there. I have to say that that Dorota's voice is very prominent one for me, one of the most prominent voices and as we see here. Dorota is an iconic figure at the publication she's really heard by Polish society by Polish critics, and that being heard sometimes also entails, let's say very critical voices in a way when Wojna Polska, so Snow White and Russian Red as in Benjamin Paylock translation is worded these were voices raging. But still, it's, I think, I think this is a pattern that every publication, every, every time you do something, either as the novel or as something on stage, it produces people's reaction, and you are heard. And that's that's one of the most important thing that and very positive things people discuss people have arguments about your work. So you are present even the language you use kind of goes out from the printed page and goes out from the theater becomes a part of the general lingo. And if I were to say what your work is about. Well, sorry, I am speaking here as a professor. Well, I think that as I said you dissect that Polish society and try transition in a very, very often very brutal language, very unpleasant language. And as you say a spoiler change for his name you whether society is unpleasant, and the society really is unpleasant. Nevertheless, the society notices your work, the work is about everybody and every single time Poland, on the other hand, Poland is everywhere. So this is the society that's that's facing commercialization dehumanization lies something that we are accustomed with everywhere. And according to me again. The language that Dorota uses and something that that resonates.  This is these are the echoes of Vito de Gombelewicz and Gombelewicz is language humor the way. Which is past and present merge together. Sometimes it's difficult, because we are unable to decipher which is which. This is also to me. And all kinds of voices all kinds of narratives that happen simultaneously that overlap and confused very often. But this is confused the reader, and the reader has to be confused. So this is what we end in another great name that comes to my mind from Polish the theatrical tradition with all its strange names characters funny laughter. And I heard what amazes me in your theater is laughter, and that laughter that's all encompassing everybody laughs and then boom, there is a moment when I remember I experienced that for instance when I was watching no theater how hard we tried, then silence because people know that there is something very, very, very important very serious dangerous even underneath lurking. The theater, if I had to summarize, this is the post dramatic post modern theater, which lacks unified dialogic linear exchanges, which is as I said very patched, and in which the audience is a very kind of very active participant. So, maybe I will stop here. And then we'll return to all these questions. Yeah, wonderful. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you and and true the work of Dorotai is a novelist and a playwright is a significance that's being noticed as you say her. She's quoted on the top pages of newspapers the German Spiegel magazine asked her about opinion about daily cultural and also political matters. And for the country, something that in America, unfortunately, since the time perhaps of the living theater author Miller has gone it doesn't exist anymore but Dorotai now to you first of all, again, thrilled you're here thrilled we could do your book thank you to come back to the Segal Center which isn't a little bit your American home and hope that you will like the performance tonight but how did you come to the theater you. I remember right you were a high school student and on the side wrote a book became a sensation that the highest literary price you started out as a novelist. Oh yeah. Thank you for calling martini she goes into my American home because I remember my debt you hear my debt you there and in the beginning of 2000 something. I came for the first time to New York and there was a reading of two poor Polish speaking Romanians with Benjamin payload. I remember I was, I was a small girl girl really thrilled and frightened by by by this, this giant city. But be sincere, I, I, I appeared in theater by accident. I used to be another list. I made my debut very early when I was 19, as you said. It was strongly criticized and highly applied at the same time. It was the language of the book. I'm speaking about snow white and Russian red. The language was paradoxical it was at the same time very very brutal very ruthless, very vulgar and stuff with figures and metaphors from classical literature. My head was stuffed off because of my preparations to my high school exams. And this language I think that this language may theater directors to to to ask me for writing for theater. In the meantime, there was, there was my second novel, which was written in a sort of wrap style. Like, it was a mixture of colloquial language and rhymes and it was just the stream of something it was really weird but it was adapted by theater. And it was really, I, I, I, I saw this spectacle. I saw this spectacle and I, I, I felt something I felt that this language really works in theater. It's very oral. It's very vital. People are laughing like mad. And I thought that even if I was from a small town. I never went to theater. I didn't know anything about theater. I felt that I could do something for theater. And, and when I got my first commission from Wurzho Rosmai Tosti Theater. I know that it was a very naive decision to sign the agreement. And, and, and I remember very well that first thing that I did after was I went to a library and I borrowed a copy of Macbeth to check how to how one should write plays. And then I asked my, my, my friend who studied on the first year of theaterology how to write plays and he told me that there are three rules. And this one was that character should characters should say something different that they think. The second was that there should be some bridge between the beginning and the ending. And the, the, the third one I can't remember, but as random as they are, they just served me for writing my first play, a couple of four boys speaking Romania. And that was really, I think it was my main international success, the only one, I would say, because this piece occurred to be, I don't know, the most universal of my of my works, even it was very Polish and touching very Polish problems. In superiority complex, there is this mockery about Romania's as worse people, but the play was staged in first in London, then somewhere, then in Berlin, then, then in Sahaling, suddenly, then in Havana. So, it was really staged everywhere now I'm at the moment I'm writing a screenplay based on it, writing the screenplay I feel very well how all of this piece is that it's, it's, it's really written. Almost 20 years ago and it's just all the problems, the social problems that are reflected in it are really. I'm not current and more, but to me and the director I am how much that I am writing the screenplay with are trying to adjust it to do more actual situation in Poland and I think that I think it might be a good movie based on it. Okay, so this is my, this is the story of my presence in theater that is not that obvious and I didn't mean to be a playwright. Yeah, so you are an accidental tourist in a way and yes I do remember when you came first and the great Akada Brenda helped to make that happen and made us aware of you. And I'm talking about now you have to go to prepare for the work tonight at the Bohemian National Hall for the 730 show of Bowie in Warsaw. I'm talking about you present for over a decade and even longer, almost two decades maybe even work from Poland in New York City, so one of the great active centers like Japan society the French cultural services good to the Romanian cultural center and others. What is special about Dorota's work how Polish Polish universal she said, is it and how do you relate to it. Well, it's a, I kind of compare it to also to like Gombro vision with cuts like Christina did in a way that you know Dorota creates her own language, creates her own words. It's, it's very funny it's, it's very surreal and sometimes psychedelic and it's, it's a fresh voice from from the Polish, you know, playwrights and, as you mentioned Agata Brenda brought your attention and our attention to Dorota first and then we continued the focus on Dorota as the one of the main playwrights in Poland. And all the readings and paging of her plays were always very well received in New York and Chicago with great reviews from your crimes and Chicago Tribune. So that's, that's also shows that, you know, her plays are relevant here and important to the American audience. Yeah, I mean they were stage which is rare, you know for place they do not come from American writers place they do not come from the British Empire. It's very rare to have a staging to be directed at it but you, Dorota made that happen through your work and the interest. And now you also am back. Dorota, why do you write. Why, let's take the play a couple of poor Polish people Romanians. I mean, you're also with the novels but what is special about theater what, what challenges you what makes it interesting. Actually, I don't know. I really think it's, it's a, it's a sort of nightmare question for every writer. Why do you write. And but sometimes I quite often I'm exposed to this question so so I'm used to it, but the answer is difficult. I thought that theater gives me some sort of very lively connection with other creators other artists that I will be able to work, for example with actors with some kind of improvisation. And there will be something very creative creative about it. I think it's also the temptation to see, because work of a writer is a bit boring, because first you sit completely alone and writing your book and then the reception of it is also very individual and and sometimes you have, I don't know, conversation with people who read your book and give you their feedback. But when you start to work for theater you have this very vital spontaneous reaction of people. You can see it you can feel it you can feel the audience becoming one laughing or crying body. And I think this is, this is something that that made me to write for theater. Of course it was sort of illusion. But I also like that very long and colorful life of theater pieces that they you write them, and then they are staged in so many different cultural context. And that's my, my lines my text is fulfilled by actors from so many countries by their experience, but by their bodies. They're intuitions and I think that this is this is something very comparing to literature. It's something really intense and and fulfilling for for an author. Yeah, no that's that's that's quite something to think about that the loneliness of the novelist you know of the that in theater it is about a community human beings in a room talking to each other making agreements, and at a certain time in a space they show something and share it with others in dark. And it's about the energy and and and it's about the moment that we are together in. So how do you write menu when you write your work do you sit in cafes are you at home to what you're traveling. How do you, how's the craft how do you do it. How I used to do it because at the moment I'm. I think it's a completely different moment in my life when I just finished finished my album finished book that that is a collection of my essays about Warsaw. I'm really I'm set up with creating and I'm exhausted. So, it seems difficult to to even imagine how I work because I don't work but usually usually it's very. I think it's a very. It's a source of solitude. I never go to cafes I always sit at home. I have to be very focused. I always do it in the morning because I'm more intelligent in the morning. You can see me now this morning. I'm very talkative and elaborate but the closer it is to the evening I'm I'm I'm just. More and more silent and frightened and intellectually not active. I always wanted to be a professional writer when I was a, I don't know a teenager, but when when you go professional it. Of course it's disappointing because it's a it's a job. You earn money like this. It's not. It's not very romantic, but I must say that. This work even if you do it under some pressure, even if you make money like this, even if you have deadlines. Even if you are forced to writing there are some moments of of insight I think that this is the work that the work on language.  I think it's just because you track the way people speak and it's so it's usually it's very banal and and it's just a cheap chat but when you when you go deeper into it, you see that it's so full of some of history of proverbs saying some some very subconscious level in which Poland shows up. And this is what I find that the most freeing moment of my work and I think that all the pieces I I have written are about it. Yeah, maybe before we come to bow in Warsaw which we're going to see tonight. You said a couple of poor Polish people Romanians is something that put you on the stages shall be nibble in and so many others in London. Tell us maybe very shortly the story and what was what were you interested in when you wrote it.  Romanians, and it always functions like this that I hear a sentence like that and I start to develop it to develop it to a story. And, and I think that's I don't know why it turned out to be so universal. It's a story about a couple of random people who met at the party and they were drunk they were high they decided to, they wanted to have a joy right they terrorized a driver that they met on a gas station. They pushed into his car. And that's how their nightmare trip through winter Poland started. And I think that this when I read it now I think it's a story about. Now I see that the story about a man and a woman conflict. And that's about misogyny about Polish inferiority complex, things like this. And the idea is that, you know, they pretend to be Romanians and not speaking well Polish and misbehaving, but they're actually Polish.  And the idea is a country the home and, and as you say, you know, that's what they do what they think and how they act who they are. So this sentence so this sentence about two Polish speaking Romanians so freely. Because Polish speaking Romanians don't exist. They do exist but not not. It's not a very obvious figure. And that's a beautiful complex stories as you say so many levels and in a way reflecting and absorbing like a spot but also reflecting in a way like a diamond where more light comes in and shines out of that country that European country a country and change and transition from from the past and no matter how hard we try talk a little bit about about about that play. It's a, it's a play that I have written for commission of some German festival. I was, I think that the title of this festival was digging deep, getting dirty. And since, and since this were German people who asked me for a piece, I thought it should be something about the Polish German issue, which I think is very, which is still very active in Polish subconsciousness. Even if, if this resentment and, and the feeling of being the most injured victim of war in the world in Polish people was slightly diminished by Ukrainian war. And now, I think it's still very present in people's minds. I find it very interesting because this is my one of them. One of my most of the most feeling themes for me how trauma and resentment and the feeling of being hurt is transmitted to to next generations. And that's all this prejudice and feelings of being hurt that I have towards German people who didn't do anything wrong to me. And I feel very well that it's that it's inherited from my grandma. And I made it a subject of this play this weird, mysterious, mysterious intergenerational transmissions of prejudice and resentment. You know, it is it is really quite stunning how you like an echo load in a ship, you know, the depths of what we don't see under the surface but it's what's really there how you detected and how you combine it. And that is, Christina said, you know, create in the static way laughter cries, sad feelings and, and also astonishment sometimes a little shock about that vulgar root language and then the incredible beauty of also of your sentences. So, tonight we will, we will see Bowie in in in Warsaw what was the idea for that. I heard many times. This story, a very short one story about David was David Bowie came to Warsaw in early 70s. And it was, it was always very, it seemed to me very inspiring. And even it was very short because he, he, he was on his way from Moscow to Berlin, he spent only 40 minutes on some very random walk on Zoli bus. The district of Warsaw where I used to live. I always found it really inspirational because, of course, as a person who was born in early 80s, I don't know this times. I know them only from movies and books, especially books that I read as a child and a teenager, very didactic in tone, old fashioned novels for teenagers, written in 70s with very. What is most exciting for me as a writer is the language, which is very old fashioned and very slang. So it's impossible mixture. The authors wanted to make it as teenage and slang and crazy, crazy as possible. At the same time, they were very adult and very formal, very didactic. This were mostly educational novels. So realistic, let's say, and so, so 70s in Warsaw. Well for me like this, very social realistic, very gray, very sad in a way. And suddenly this stranger 40 minutes of David Bowie Warsaw. It made me think that he was a sort of, you know, a flare of color or some kind of unnoticed messiah. And that's how this this piece came to me. This was inspiration. I know that will be will be will be so interesting I cannot wait to see how trapped or interpret that Christina what comes to your mind when you listen to a daughter. So what comes to my mind is language and the question about the rhythm because when I read your stuff, no matter whether this is theater or or prose, it's like, you know, I hear this, this rhythmic prose, and I want to immediately say it aloud. So this theatricality is there. It's, it's something amazing that when you write for instance when I was reading. The Queen's peacock or puke, if you want. Yes, well this is like you know that the overlap. I had to. I started reading it aloud so so how is that theater built into your language how do you hear you see you very often talk about language. How do you hear that language. hard to explain I think it's. The main factor in this process is a pleasure of pleasure of a beautiful sentence, like I like to write sentences that are astonishing. And, and read me call and there is some hard to spot beauty in it. And this, these are sentences that I want to give to people. These are the sentences I love. And I think that's this love is the factor and I just love how they sound. I love how people react to them. I like to derive the audience into some sort of chain of associations, rhymes, weird connections. These are visions, and I think that the. This is what I like about theater that it gives this opportunity to observe observe the reaction of the reaction of people that spontaneous reception sometimes. I think that a couple of times I, I really saw people that start to clap their hands to. To physically involve into a spectacle. And this is what is very what I don't like theater very much but this process of. Having this impact on people this very physical impact by language is really something for me as an artist. Yeah. No it is it is quite quite but I might even read a few sentences you might hopefully maybe read to us at the end of the talk in your play your next movie might talk about how I became a witch. Because only you said when I started out as a novelist and I was there I didn't know which is which, but you became a witch. And so it's interesting and it's a grim fairy tales base story a children's story but actually for grown ups as all grim fairy tales were not for children they were for grown ups they were told in the homes I actually come from that region in Germany, where people told them in the cold winter nights. So here, which says, when I'm walking home all wet cold and mean I look in the windows that I pass with a layer. I live at the world's edge so the walk takes two years. There's so many windows and all of them lit and wherever I look. I see people sit. And so far someone their parents knees but they're all staring blankly at flat screen TVs. They're checking to see if they have more more more or too little as little as they had before. Tell us a little bit about this play. It was, it was a play I have written as I learned from Christina's prologue actually yesterday, when my, my daughter was only nine and I think I was very deeply immersed in literature like this, we have a strong tradition of written of children literature that is very written cow like Emma's poor children, I would say. And this is what I wanted to do to to make a story that is very informative very traditional and and old fashioned, but I wanted to I don't know this, this criticism criticism against consumerism capitalism and watching TV, which is not very actual. You know, when, when everybody's addicted to smart phones, rather than TV sets. But I wanted to to to fulfill this very traditional form with something with with some modern critical attitude to to to I don't know pop culture trash and to see how children react to this. So if they did they didactic in tone as well. I don't know. Children liked it. It was based in it. There was a huge Broadway, Broadway, I would say a show in Warsaw. The studio. Children loved it. It was very funny and to glue me at the same time. So, but it's not, it's not the most important thing I didn't like that for sure. And incredible the author at Tabalowski by the way did that translation so beautifully which I read from a friend, I think I got a collage. If I say the name right from Tia Barsova said also great daughter's coming.  So that's for sure that this, this very different measures that I use to express myself influence each other. For example, I think that my, my, my way of my development is not, it's not a very obvious way. It's, it's, it's bumpy and it's not logical because I started as a novelist then I started to write for theater, then I was a novelist then I started to write songs, I started to produce music. And for now, I think that I became a poet, which is, which is weird, but I see some logic in it, like this process of writing and writing and writing. I think it gave me some sort of precision and what I, and what I say. And that I need less and less words to express something that I want to express. And that's why, that's why I turned to music as a matter of expression. I also think that the situation in Florence, and political and, and so so is so tense, and so dense, and so unbearable in some way that literature is unable to express it anymore, like how many times can you say, Oh my God, it's like nothing worse can happen. And there is always something worse that happened next day. So I think that I just, it was an intuition that I need something more more radical, more expressive, more violent. And I think that there is always some, some kind of belly knowledge. What to do now, what to do next. And, and this intuition told me that it, it should be music at the moment, but I don't, I never know what is next. I never know where, where, where it's it will bring me, where it will bring me. Let's talk about Poland. Oh yeah, Christina. Could I ask a question, you know, mentioned it in relation to this that you are doing films you are doing music. Where can people see your films because, for instance, other people in Lugia, or some other films are not available. And this is a part of a very important part of kind of sharing with with whatever you do with the public. I think that the movie, based on Snow White in Russian Red by Ksavir Ksavir-Juarski is easily available on YouTube. I'm not sure if in states, but in Europe for sure, but other people. This movie is a special case because the language of the book which is actually a rap song was so difficult to not only to translate but also to put into subtitles that they are I am not even if it's a question of if they are comprehensible, but if they still make any sense at all. So I think that this this movie is just unbearable for foreign spectators. And I think that it's, and even it was published in it was published in the difficult period after just after pandemic. So it didn't have a big audience. And was very, its presence in cinemas was very short. And now it's available only on Cannot Lose, I think, but it's not. I think that the whole distribution of movies changed and this, this special movie felt victim to that. Well, there will be, I'm sure, ways down the future and it's on channel, but let's go back because you touched on it on Poland. I think Heinrich Heiner wrote his famous poems also when, I think in Germany in the night, when you think about Germany in the night, you know, what do you think about Poland in the night. Well, I think, I think only one thing, let's not allow to win peace and not this election, because it will, it will turn this country to to to abuse health and say, it's quite a hell at the moment because, because of polarization because of permanent conflicts because of the very populistic line that peace has in its politics. But now the tension is so high, so unbearable that it's really our country is turning into an nightmare and it's such a plot twist, such a dark plot twist that we dreamt about democracy so long for so long, and that this longing for turned into something like this. Like, I always say that police society has a sort of, it's a sort of, we have a sort of society cancer. Like, after so many years, so many centuries of very dark history made people unable to be free. And this is what I would say. I know that this conversation doesn't allow us to develop this subject, but I think that my words are traumatic enough. There are and, as in Brecht said, you know when we live what do we write about in dark times what do we sing about he said we write and sing about the dark times as in the US, you know, also so many critical voices as everywhere as in Germany, there are artists who always have had the role in society, you know, to, to show strong problems to to discuss conflicts on a stage and a peaceful way in an open arena, and where people can make up their minds and and, and it's a celebration of free speech and that's why it's at the very core of democracy and that's why theater is so deeply connected to that idea and it's life in itself because we are part of nature in a play. Andres Weber, who we talked about philosopher German philosopher who said, you know, we, he sees theater as the expression of, of, of life of forces of lies in this chaotic world we live in. I can agree because theater is so. It's very avant garde is that it's very active it's able to contain on many very current things that are other genres are much more. There's more time to adapt, and the other is always very, but I think it's also treated trap because showing things, expressing things is not always doesn't doesn't always mean going deeper, like you need time to get deeper to see the whole picture and it's just a thing of theater that it's too, to current. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so, what are you, what are you working on that is screenplay now and then you say you will have to take a time off to recreate but what are your, your dreams as a little metal girl, which you are in a way and we're going to hear that monologue no matter how we tried but what are your dreams what are you thinking about what would you like to be and what would you like to write to write about or how to express it what are your your plans for the future. I never like. I don't like to show my plans. Because it's a sort of bias. And I think that you can adjust, burn down in this, you know, expressing the, them, but in past few weeks, I thought, madly about my, what I will do next in music. It's my obsession right now. Like I see that with this album that I published last month or two months ago, the whole world of this sort of expression opened in front of me. And now I, I'm really obsessed, but I will show and tell. When you, you said when you were, you know, that high school student and you didn't know which is which, or what is what in theater. What, what did you read what what were your influences, what were your, the music you listen to what. What, what was it is there a moment even where you said yes I will be a writer can you remember that. Yes, I am not not the exact moment. This I can't spot but I remember very well that since I learned how to write. This was my way of expression this was my second line that even yesterday, walking down the New York streets. I thought that so very early I developed this second life of mine that I live, but along with normal life. And notebooks I had my essays I have my writing and when I remember this, this years, just before I made my debut. I think it was. Before the snow white and Russian red is just parked with things that I had in my mind at the moment, which comes from a very classical literature. I think that this is the, this is the very huge mixture of this small town brutality of life, and, and classical literature, the did this sort of metaphors poetry, beauty of language. I think this was I was. What was the literature what did you read what was it. I remember very well that I was fascinated with Henry Miller, a nice name, this, this very. Can I say that they were literary impressionist. But along with it, there were this education system that I was part of so this was a history of Polish literature.  So, but at the same time I think that I was listening a lot to a lot of music, and this is always a thing that I think about when I'm in New York that that I was obsessed with the listening to Sonic you. New York Manhattan based group. And this is the mixture I, I grew up in. Amazing amazing and you claim that heritage for you, you listened to what you were the moment you were in and you also anticipated in a way, a future and you wrote something, and something down as a as a as a as a singing poet and representing your country was that great tradition that great Polish tradition of literature poetry, and of course of theater and so very well and, and it's, you're so big honor and privilege to have you with us. Maybe we are coming to the end and and it's already over an hour but maybe we to us a little bit would love to hear your voice. I, I could read the short monologue of little metal girl from no matter how hard to be tried, which is very emblematic for, for, for, for give a little, give a little context what's happening when she is speaking that or what's about to happen. I think it's. I think that the whole play is built on her arguments with her grandmother. And they are discussing Poland, all the time in some way. And, and at some moment, little metal girl just explodes with a monologue about being Polish. If it was dying and gloomy old BD says of Poland glorious land I can still see your beauty dying. A little metal girl girl says, if it was dying and it should should have pop a couple of aspirin.  The architectures ugly, the weather is gloomy, the temperatures are cold, even the animals have run off to hide in the woods. The shows on TV are bad. The jokes aren't funny. The prime minister's look is the prime minister looks like a pumpkin, and the president looks like the prime minister.  And that's why the other one became so ugly and evil. In France, they have France in America, America, they have got America, Germany is Germany in Germany, and even the Czech Republic is Czech, but in Poland, all you get is Poland. In France, they have baguettes. In England, go talk. The Germans have roles, and in France, you get roles. But in Poland, it's bread, bread, bread. In France, they all speak French. They speak English in England, but in Poland occurs like everybody else does in Polish, which nobody understands. I have long since made up my mind that I'm not Polish, just European, and I learned the language from records and tapes left behind by the Polish cleaning lady. This here is not my mom, but our personal cis person from Tesco. She brings Tesco to our house on a tour please, and we just point out what we don't want, and she takes it back again, and how she skips around these corners. This is not our neighbor, but our private leaflet dispenser. She brings the underpass for our door and hands out leaflets there. She ignores them for us and throws them away around the next corner. She's so fat, we keep her locked up at home. Once have her wobbling around in normal people's slew of you. And this here is not my grandma. She's our cleaning lady. She's so old and transparent because she just rode in from Ukraine today in this wheelchair. And we exist on the best terms we can. There are no rules, that's normal false. We came to Poland from Europe to get good bio organic potatoes grown in real soil, not like those water ones from Tesco's, and we learned Polish from records and tapes. Bravo. Really, really, really thank you for for spending time with us and Christina also thank you for your presence for being with us and it was great to listen to you. And, and, and can't wait to see the play tonight as part of the rehearsal for the truce festival at the Bohemian National Hall, the Butzlap Havel Center and important venue I think so for global theater and especially center European theater. So, thank you all thanks to how around Talia and VJ for hosting us and the learner here at the Segal Center, and of course to our listeners who take time out of their busy lives. We did so many talks in the zoom time and there wasn't so much going on. And but now of course life is back for this is wonderful and and zoom is often not the best action but I think there is something to listen to these artists in a way what it is and it did go deep. What we heard today from daughter who is a great artist who is struggling as we also hear with her craft with her heritage with a country with a future with her work, and the medium she works in and so really, it was a moment where we felt at home, there's a little secure space a beautiful space just to listen to an artist and I think it made them world more meaningful and to all of us and more excited about what theater is about and the mystery behind that great great art form. Thank you very much, and I hope you all will come back to us to the upcoming Segal Docs thank you. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


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