Episode 072: 10‐12‐2024 Intro to MOSIP for foundational national identity - GluuFederation/identerati-office-hours GitHub Wiki
Title: Intro to MOSIP for foundational national identity
- Host: Mike Schwartz, Founder/CEO Gluu
- Guest: SasiKumar Ganesan, Head of Engineering. MOSIP
- Co-Host: Yodahe (ዮዳ) Zemichael, Executive Director, National ID Ethiopia
Description
The Gates Foundation and other donors are funding the open source MOSIP platform to provide some of the tools nations need to build a foundational identity system--a key enabler for digital public infrastructure. Making a foundational identity offering accessible in nations with significant ethnic and regional diversity is especially challenging. This discussion will introduce some of the basic features of MOSIP and how it's used as part of Ethiopia's National ID program.
Homework
- White Paper Lessons Learned: Reflecting on MOSIP’s Journey to Scale, 10 pages
- Recent Biometric Update Article on Ethiopia Nat'l ID
- MOSIP Modules
Takeaways
⚡ MOSIP's three part registration system is based on the experience gained rolling out Aadhaar at scale. The first part is for citizens to schedule an appointment (if possible). The second part is to safely collect registration details, even when disconnected in the field. The third part is to process and verify uniqueness of the data, and upload to the IDP.
⚡ With foundational id programs in motion, the next logical area to focus is web identity federation--making the national id usable at government and private sector websites. This is the low hanging fruit with the highest ROI.
⚡ Yodahe's main challenge is accessability--how to reach the approximately 80M people who don't use the Internet in Ethiopia. Digital wallets on smart phones are not the answer. Out of the box thinking is needed.
⚡ By providing an open platform for registration, MOSIP has fostered a more competitive ecosystem among the national id vendors like Idemia and Thales, who now offer their services ala carte, reducing lock-in for commoditized biometric and eKYC services.
⚡ MOSIP provides mostly backend APIs. They provide some sample web applications, but these must be customized by the country. With the support of the MOSIP team (weekly meetings), Yodahe's team was able to design and deploy MOSIP into production. Operation continues to be a challenge. MOSIP had 30+ releases across their components this year--each component has its own release cycle. So customers need to batch these releases, train their staff on the changes, QA and rollout to production. On top of this, they need to operate their own cloud native infrastructure, or even their own hypervisor. Kudos to team Ethiopia National ID!
⚡ Read the white paper in the homework for an interesting discussion on the privacy considerations of MOSIP--for both third parties and the government operator.