Kia ora e te whānau
What a year! A record 270+ registrations for the Te Matarau and Āhau sponsored DINZ event ‘What is digital Identity and what does it mean for Maori’, the first-of-its-kind state of digital identity in Aotearoa report, a record attendance at the Digital Trust Hui Taumata keynoted by the legendary Victor Dominello, and the country’s first ever Age Assurance event with ‘The emergence of euCONSENT in the digital economy and Age Verification’s crucial role’ last week. This latest one offered a sobering reminder that while New Zealand is sadly behind in a domain where nothing is more important than protecting children from harm online, this community can help with effective and pragmatic industry – government collaboration. I want to draw your attention to these among our list of great achievements this year, because they have each broken new ground for Aotearoa
Alongside the above, and our monthly Coffee Chat series now boasting well over 100 registrations, we ran our Perspectives on Decentralised Identity series in the late summer featuring DINZ members RealMe, Mattr, TANZ, and CentraPass (now Futureverse). In autumn DINZ hosted US based digital identity conformity assessment company Zygma who presented the first ever technical analysis of the DISTF Trust Framework. As winter gave way to spring DINZ member ForgeRock put its customers Kiwibank and Westpac on the stage to talk to a big crowd about their experiences with Continuous Delivery. Earlier this month DINZ members Air New Zealand hosted another sold out event with partner Authsignal sharing their successful implementation of passkeys – the first implementation for an airline and the first known implementation in the Australia/NZ region.
December sees us at the Reserve Bank ‘myth busting’ some often misunderstood aspects of our domain, and then our members Annual Meeting on 7 December to announce our 2024 Executive Council, which will round out our events for the year. With it we will farewell the Council of ‘23 under whose custodianship of the events above, the list of mahi below and a refreshed 2024 strategy and action plan, have propelled DINZ to new heights. Our sincere thanks to them, particularly those that finish their term this year.
Aside from the standout successes above, members have curated two submissions – one on the Privacy Commission’s consultation on a code of practice for biometrics, and the other on DIA’s targeted consultation on the DISTF regulations. Being an election year, we published DINZ’s Manifesto and have just completed our Briefing for Incoming Ministers to be published shortly. Our perspectives have captured the attention of national and international media following biometrics but also the fallout from the Latitude and Optus data breaches and the findings outlined in our report.
This newsletter that you are reading is published 11 times per year bringing you digital identity-related news from members and from around the world. By any measure, our events and written work is a stellar output from a part time team, only made possible by members’ subscriptions and sponsorship. So thank you! Not a member and not sponsoring? There are many sponsorship opportunities available. Please get in contact: info@digitalidentity.nz.
Looking ahead, 2024 is already shaping up well event-wise as more members recognise the value of DINZ hosting their events. We have several online and in person events planned for Q1 and Q2 and DINZ will be supporting its members at the Fintech Hui Taumata in February, the National Cyber Security Summit in March, and the Government Data Summit in May. Our member working and special interest groups are already gearing up for what will be a busy year ahead with member expertise shaping submissions and the development of education & guidance materials. The refreshed strategy calls for deeper, wider and more international context given the extent of change coming such as the EU Digital Wallet, Australian digital identity related legislation and our own DISTF Act effective 1 July.
My New Year’s resolution: Put an end to silos. Teach ourselves to view different activities ‘in the round’ and interrelate them, not silo them to save effort under the guise of ‘focus’. I have seen too many silos in our domain in 2023 and as a nation we are the poorer for it.
This is DINZ’s last newsletter for 2023, so on behalf of the 2023 Executive Council, Ngā mihi o te Kirihimete me te Tau Hou.
Read the full news here: 2023 – the standout year that keeps on giving! | November Newsletter
