Ayra @ GDC

As a co-organizer, Ayra was involved in at least 13 sessions during the Global Digital Collaboration 2025 event, July 1-2, 2025 in Geneva.

The event was an incredible success and thanks go out to the co-organizers that made it so successful. 

Ayra-led Sessions

  • A Keynote on Day 1 (covering the business, governance, and technology approach that we take) in the main stage with over 1,000 attending. (🎥 Watch the keynote)
  • Skills-based Economy & First Person Credentials – I facilitated a panel led by Velocity Network (Etan Bernstein) about a set of principals that can be applied to help open up job markets. Tanya Troshyna of Affinidi joined that panel. We had multiple Ayra members in the intimate room with us. (Read more about the session here)
  • First Person Credentials – two sessions: 
    • A backgrounder with DIF (Kim Hamilton-Duffy), LF Decentralized Trust (Daniela Barbosa & Hart Montgomery) and the First Person Project lead (Drummond Reed). 
    • A more business and governance viewpoint that we brought to the Trust in Open Source software (Drummond, Daniela, Hart, and Darrell). Marie Wallace of Accenture holds an honourable panelist mention as well! (Link to the related blog post)
  • Empowering Skilled People in Refugee/Displaced Context: Skilled Pathways – We (Maxwell Baylin and I) led this intimate discussion with members Fragomen (David Crawford and Marc Geer), Velocity Network (Dror Gurevich), SICPA (Cathy Fankhauser and Vlad Vujovic), and Sharon Leu (Jobs for the Future). 

Bridging the Organizational Identity Gap: From Nano-Businesses to Global Commerce – with GLEIF member (Ivan Mortimer-Schutts) alongside Pramod Varma and David Porteous. Cindy van Niekerk gets an honourable panelist award for diving into some interesting organization ID concepts with the panelists and audience. (Link to the blog post about the session)

Our members were everywhere, providing leadership and thoughtful inputs and discussion:

  • Agentic AI and Digital ID – Andor Kesselman was wearing several hats – DIF and Ayra and did a fantastic job. Maxwell Baylin (Ayra team) attended and participated from the audience. They were joined by Kim Hamilton-Duffy, Wenjing Chu, Scott Perry, and Eric Drury – all part of the Ayra community.
  • Sovereign by design: Trust Frameworks – Etan Bernstein (Velocity Network) joined the Eclipse Foundation and Gaia-X panelists. 
  • Investing in the Smart Data Economy – GLEIF (Ivan Mortimer-Schutts) and Affinidi (Tanya Troshyna) were part of this panel session.
  • International Trade : Identity across borders – combining SSI and authoritative registers – Drummond Reed (First Person; Ayra Governance team) joined this panel with the UNECE UNTP team.
  • Trust Management: Mission Critical for Global Interoperability (Standards Track) – Alex Tweeddale (cheqd) was a leader on this deep dive panel. 
  • Education Credentials and Digital Human Rights – Etan Berstein (Velocity Network) joined DIF and DCC leaders on this panel. 
  • Wallet-Attached Storage – Inrupt lead this session.