Pilots

Project Working Document

This document and the documents within this folder are working documents for the project. They provide supporting information for project participants and viewers. They are not part of the project deliverables.

GRID Test Pilots

The GRID is anticipated to be a major global contribution to world trade efficiency, transparency and trustworthiness. On a global trade scale, it represents trillions of dollars of value. For established UN Member State economies it represents hundreds of millions of dollars of value, and for emerging economies it represents a way to increase the recognition of their legitimate, registered trading organisations, and amplify their economic reach and activity on the global stage.

Being a pilot participant in the GRID represents an opportunity for authoritative registrars to explore and test the benefits of GRID participation and to help shape and confirm the design and operating model decisions for the GRID.

GRID Pilot Participation Benefits include

• Experience and Influence: Exploring and shaping the GRID technical design and operation approaches
• Networking: Forming connections with other pilot participants that mirror global trade interests at both technical, operational and governmental levels
• Reputational: Demonstrating a leading position in a global digital trust initiative

GRID Pilot participation has been designed to be as simple as possible while following modelling the core design principles for the GRID.

The pilot participation principles are that pilots:

1. MUST NOT be part of, or impact, operational solutions.
2. MUST support low cost, high velocity iterations
3. MUST use test data, not operational or sensitive data
4. MUST use easily accessible (freely available) technology platforms
5. MUST follow the core design principles for the GRID

Following these principles, a design has been chosen that requires negligible levels of compute, store and network resources.

Pilot participants will need to make time available for appropriately skilled team members in their organisation(s) to support their participation. The skill sets required are familiarity with GIT repository operations (including commit SSH and GPG key use), markdown, frontmatter and json data structures.

It is expected that the effort required for reasonably technical people to build a pilot environment and begin experimentation is in the order of a few person days. Further experimentation, such as issuing Digital Identity Anchors, would require an additional person days of effort.

Pilots are expected to be run as projects within their UN Member State. Each pilot will need to explore the UN Member State's specific interests, including technical, commercial, operational, and legal perspectives.

Similar to agile and iterative projects, pilot projects will likely follow a pattern of design, build, test, interpret, and then (if more work is identified), design again.

A model of the expected iterative project life cycle is shown below, Initial business case, review, design and environment establishment is expected to be ~4-8 weeks and then the iterations of design, build, test, learn are 4 week cycles. A typical active participation is expected to be 3-6 months.

Note that the majority of time taken by Pilots is expected to be stakeholder discussion and engagement, not technical build processes.

The architecture proposed for the pilots is described here: Pilot Design Document.

An example business case template for pilots can be found here: Pilot Business Template.

About the Pilots

The project uses pilots to test and explore the thinking we are developing for the GRID and the use of DIAs.

We have created a pilot test environment using our UNICC GitLab environment that Pilots can participate in (see the Design Document).

Pilot participants will help support the following UN/CEFACT objectives.

• Explore: designing, building and running the pilots will generate insights that will test and improve the recommendations and specifications.
• Demonstrate: the pilots should show that the approach being recommended can work if adopted and deliver benefits to all participants.

Pilot Participants

Ideally, pilot participant teams will have representation from the following types of roles:

• Pilot representation of UN Member State Authoritative Registrar(s)
• Supply Chain Participant(s) - e.g.
  • Supplier
  • Buyer
• UN/CEFACT Global Registry Information Directory (GRID)

There is expected to be a network effect in pilot participation: as the number of participants grows so does the opportunity and value.

Pilot Use Cases

Use cases can be considered under two broad headings:

• GRID Related, for example
  • Register with GRID
  • Self-maintenance of Registrar data
  • Harvesting by GRID of published data
• DIA related, for example
  • Issue DIA
  • Present DIA
  • Verify DIA
  • Check Registration

An example use case and set of interactions is a supply chain / trade based interaction with the issuance of a “Digital Identity Anchor” by an Authoritative Registry (AR) to a Holding Organisation (HO), and the presentation (and/or linking to) by the Holding Organisation of the DIA they have been issued to a Relying Party (RP).

Joining the GRID Pilot

The sequence diagram below gives an example of the steps involved in GRID Pilot application and registration for a UN Member State Registrar.

Registering a Supplier and Issuing a DIA

Issuing a DIA for members of a register is optional but encouraged for Pilot participants. The sequence diagram below gives an example of the process.

Verifying a DIA and GRID Membership

The sequence diagram below shows example steps that can be tested with pilot developments of the applications of DIAs and the GRID in verifiable trade interactions.

Guidelines for Pilots

Use Case design

Each pilot will be responsible for defining the use case for the parties and the interactions that they propose are part of their pilot.

Additional factors are likely to be considered for pilots, for example the application and use of other UNTP specification credentials and trade documentation, including:

• Digital Identity Anchor
• Digital Conformance Credential
• Digital Product Passport
• Digital Facility Record
• Other trade documentation exchanges (invoices etc.)

These will likely be chosen to reflect the particular interests of the pilot participants - the ideas they want to test and the benefits they want to explore.

Benefits

Each pilot should consider how the pilot supports their interests and can demonstrate the benefit of the GRID and Digital Identity Anchor concepts. For example:

• Authoritative Registrars who want to extend reach and visibility; and the utility and value of the data they manage; increase the competitiveness of the companies they register and enhance productivity in their jurisdiction
• Peak Body / Industry Group / Industry Representatives who wish to reduce risk and cost in trade transactions and benefit from increased supply chain transparency
• Software / Development / Consulting companies who want to build expertise in delivering products and services in this space

The benefits sought from the Pilot and by the participants should be declared in the pilot design.

Summary of Principles for Pilots

The following is a summary of Pilot constraints and recommendations:

• Pilots are self-sustaining. Pilots provide the resources (people/technology) they need.
• GTR recognised Pilots need to be approved: The UN/CEFACT GTR project leads will approve pilots on the basis of the planning materials presented to them.
• Plans are essential, shared, and evolve: The plans must be present prior to approval, but may be updated as the Pilot progresses.
• Pilots will need to be self-run: They will determine their own way of working such that they can deliver the outcomes they seek.
• Pilots will be supported. The UN/CEFACT project leads (and other contributors) will check on progress and provide support where possible.
• Pilots provide feedback to the Global Trust Registry project to enable exploration and demonstration of recommendations and specifications
• Pilot promotion: The GTR project will provide space for the Pilots to present their work in the Project environment and meetings.
• IPR: Contributions made by pilots to the Global Trust Registry project IP will be under the general UN/CEFACT IPR rules
• Costs are the responsibility of pilots. UN/CEFACT will provide a pretotype GRID implementation and can provide space for code/documentation and other deliverable artefacts in the UNICC GitLab environment as appropriate.
• Pilots are not expected to be operational. To avoid the risk of confusion, it is recommended that Pilots make use of non-operational environments and dummy organisation identifiers rather than using operational systems and legal entities. HOWEVER this will be up to the pilots to decide.