S Rajagopalan
Designation: Professor
Company: IIITB
Topic: Modular Open Source Identity Platform: A Global Digital Public Good
Track: FOSS
Date and Time: 17th October 2019
Hall: 1
About Speaker
Dr. S. Rajagopalan received his B.Tech degree from IIT Delhi, PGDM from IIM Bangalore and Ph.D from IIT Kanpur. Dr. Rajagopalan joined the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (www.iiitb.ac.in) as a Professor in July 2008. His areas of interest includes innovation dissemination, economics of innovations, Geographical Information Systems, and Economics of Information Technologies. He was Founder-Director of the IIITB Innovation Centre, which aims at incubating and promoting innovations in the area of Information and Communication Technologies. Dr. Rajagopalan has been leading the project MODULAR OPEN SOURCE IDENTITY PLATFORM (MOSIP) since January 2018. MOSIP is for creating and making available a Unique Digital Identity System that meets the requirements of various countries legal systems and that helps nation states to attain sustainable development goals. MOSIP will be in open source and modular, so that nation states can pick and choose various modules and assemble their own Identity system, avoiding any technology or vendor lock in. MOSIP will evolve along with evolution of concepts of digital identity, security and privacy.
About Talk
To invite and Encourage Open Source Community to actively participate in developing MOSIP and disseminating it to users across the world A foundational ID system is one in which individuals receive a unique identifier from the government that is used for identity assertion and verification for various purposes. A Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) will help in building a foundational ID system that upholds the principles of inclusion, robustness, privacy, and trust. Countries could leverage MOSIP as a public good to build their respective foundational ID systems and provide universal coverage. A clear definition of the strategy, principles, and governance for the design and development of MOSIP software will provide the right solution for a country that intends to adopt a multipurpose foundational ID system. Some of the factors that drive the technology choice for MOSIP are maturity, performance, scalability, security, affordability, and evolvability. MOSIP will be freely available to countries, so that they can configure and customise the platform for their individual requirement and context. Use of open standards and open source ensures that MOSIP is agnostic to specific applications, programming languages and platforms. The modular architecture provides governments flexibility in how they implement their foundation ID.