Show Notes
In this episode, Heather Flanagan looks back at the most read Digital Identity Digest posts of 2025, exploring what resonated across digital identity, governance, credentials, and AI. The recap reveals patterns behind shifting priorities, recurring debates, and the questions shaping standards work and system design. Discover how topics like agentic AI and authentication, delegation, decentralization, interoperability, and credential terminology signal where identity architecture is headed. The episode explains why governance matters more than technology alone and why clear language and standards alignment are critical for resilient, trustworthy digital identity systems.
More from A Digital Identity Digest
Heather examines the growing landscape of AI standards at the W3C and IETF, exploring how different groups address content disclosure, AI content preferences, automated client authentication, agent capabilities, and identity. Although these efforts may appear to overlap, they often tackle distinct problems at different layers of web and Internet architecture.
Heather explores two emerging approaches to AI agent discovery: the W3C AI Agent Protocol Community Group and the proposed IETF Discovery of Agents with Names (DAWN) Working Group. She examines how their scopes differ, from broad agent architecture and capabilities to the narrower problem of finding an AI resource.
Learn why OAuth is being pushed to reconsider what authorization needs to become as software grows more autonomous. Heather examines recent OAuth working group discussions around proof of possession, HTTP message signatures, threat models, and the architectural question of where software identity should live. The episode explores how agentic AI complicates delegated authorization, particularly when multiple software actors, permissions, and contexts are involved. Heather considers whether OAuth needs new extensions or whether some problems belong elsewhere, and why defining clear boundaries may matter more than creating another protocol.
Heather explores what it’s actually like to serve on the W3C Technical Architecture Group, from reviewing emerging web technologies to navigating architectural questions, consensus, and unfamiliar areas of the web platform. Rather than requiring expertise in every technology, TAG work depends on deep knowledge, curiosity, breadth, and the ability to ask useful questions. This episode examines how to build toward TAG service through W3C participation, standards work, and cross-domain thinking. Heather also discusses the real commitment involved, including workload, travel, employer support, funding, and the importance of maintaining independence while contributing to web architecture.
In this episode, Heather examines the gap between technical interoperability and real-world digital identity deployment. Wallets and verifiable credentials may successfully exchange information, but relying parties must navigate different wallets, browsers, operating systems, credential formats, trust models, and failure states. This episode explores why interoperability must include the full customer experience, not just protocol conformance. Heather considers the growing role of intermediaries, APIs, and verification platforms in absorbing complexity, while asking what happens to trust, privacy, correlation, and governance when another layer enters the identity transaction.