Making digital identity work across the Web: GDC 2026

A global digital infrastructure

Interoperability becomes a reality when different communities need to communicate with one another and make their systems work together. In the case of digital identity, governments, standards organizations, open-source communities, the private sector, and civil society often start from different needs, but the technologies they develop must ultimately be able to interact with one another. 

Global Digital Collaboration Conference (GDC 26) brings these diverse communities together in one place, with a focus on digital identity and digital wallets. It is an opportunity to compare standards, architectures, implementations, and policy requirements.

W3C is a co-organizer of GDC 26. What we bring to this discussion is our experience with the Web as an open and interoperable platform: a shared space where different technologies, services, and communities must be able to interact. 

But interoperability alone is not enough. W3C work is based on principles that put users at the center of technology and include security, privacy, accessibility, internationalization, and user agency. These principles also guide the way we think about and develop Web standards.

Making digital identity work across the Web

Digital identity makes these principles particularly tangible. When a digital wallet or credential interacts with the Web, we must ask not only whether two systems can communicate. We must also view them as a socio-technical system that affects people and society, and therefore consider what information is shared, who mediates the interaction, what choices the user has, and what consequences there may be for security, privacy, and user agency.

The W3C community is leading, co-organising, or participating in several sessions that address these issues from different perspectives, including: Will Abramson, Legendary Requirements; Christopher Allen, W3C Invited Expert; Martin Alvarez-Espinar, Huawei; Tim Cappalli, Okta; Giovanni Corti, Fondazione Bruno Kessler; Pierre-Antoine Champin, W3C Principal Data Strategist; Heather Flanagan, Spherical Cow Consulting; Dominique Hazael-Massieux, Interim W3C CEO; Nishant Kaushik, FIDO Alliance and W3C Invited Expert; Nicolas Launois, European Athletics; Simone Onofri, W3C Senior Principal Security Specialist; Silvio Ranise, Fondazione Bruno Kessler; Denis Roio, Dyne.org; Amir Sharif, Fondazione Bruno Kessler; Carsten Stöcker, Spherity; Ehsan Toreini, Samsung; Xiaoyu You, CAICT on topics such as: cross-border trust. Governance, open source, age-assurance, and Digital Credentials API. 

• “A Pan-European Trust Framework (PETF)”
• “Delivering the Digital Identity We Were Promised”
• “Decentralized Trust for a Scalable EU Business Wallet Ecosystem under the eIDAS Framework”
• “The $5Tn Low-Hanging Fruit of Verifiable Trade Documents”
• “From Survey Responses to Shared Insights: A Global Age Assurance Dialogue”
• “Should We Age-Assure the Internet? Necessity, Proportionality and Alternatives”
• “Trust Registers Have Always Existed, Just Make Them Verifiable”
• “Designing Age Verification/Assurance Systems: Panel on Government Needs, Implementer Constraints, and Standards Requirements”
• “Designing Age Verification/Assurance Systems: Using Harms Modeling to Surface Design Requirements”
• “Doing Digital Credentials Well: Engineering and Policy Guardrails”
• “EUDI Sports Wallets: Digital Credentials for Regulated Sports”
• “Plugging the Gaps to Accelerate Adoption Globally of Open Source Software across Ecosystems”
• “Who Holds the Keys? Federated Governance for Open Source Security in the Age of AI”
• “Operationalizing the Cyber Resilience Act: What manufacturers, Open Source stewards and security teams need now"
• “Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials in the SME and Retail Commerce Value Chain”
• “Presenting Verifiable Digital Credentials on the Web: Comparing Architectures and Trade-offs”   and more

If you are interested in learning more about collaborating on secure, interoperable, privacy-aware, inclusive, and worldwide standards for digital identities, wallets, verifiable credentials, trust frameworks, technical standards, regulatory issues, and cross-border interoperability, please register to join us there!