Civic Identity

Semantic & Data Protocol

One of four canonical Civic.Social specifications, and the identity layer of the model. Defines portable, privacy-preserving identity and credentials built on open standards — DIDs, Verifiable Credentials and OIDC. Supplies the identity, eligibility and disclosure primitives that Civic Process depends on for determining who may participate in a given process and what they must reveal to do so.

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Details

License Documentation only under CC-BY 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt with attribution. No implementation code, licence for implementations, or reference implementation is present in this repository
Dev Status 📝 Draft
Owner Civic.Social — 501(c)(3) nonprofit civic technology initiative; documentation published through the Mosaic Foundation GitHub organization. Individual specifications carry a named document owner in YAML frontmatter
Governing Body Civic.Social (501(c)(3) nonprofit) — single-organization specification authorship; individual documents carry one named owner in frontmatter. No external standards body, multi-stakeholder process or independent editorial board
Country United States (Civic.Social is a 501(c)(3), a US federal tax designation; specific location not published in the repository)
Stack Language-agnostic specification; no implementation stack defined in the documentation
Funding Nonprofit — Civic.Social is a 501(c)(3); no specific funder or grant disclosed in the repository. The repository contains case materials explicitly directed at funders and partners
Last Investigated Aug 3, 2026

Use Case Domains

Identity & Trust

Affordances

Sovereign identity Portable attestations Contextual disclosure

Semantic & Data Protocol Attributes

Origins Self-sovereign identity applied to civic participation — built on existing decentralized identity standards rather than defining new identifier mechanics, with the aim of making civic eligibility provable without requiring participants to surrender more information than a given process needs
Database N/A — a specification; defines no storage layer
Query Language N/A — no query language defined in the documentation reviewed
Data Formats W3C Verifiable Credentials and DID documents, with OIDC flows for authentication. Civic-specific credential types and disclosure structures not extracted, as the specification itself was not retrieved
Collaborative Live Editing N/A — specification, not an editing surface
Rich Text Editing N/A — specification
Mobile Support N/A — specification; client support is a matter for implementations
Web Support N/A — specification; no implementation exists to assess
Native Apps N/A — specification
Terms Free / open documentation under CC-BY 4.0; no fees and no registration
Funds Unknown — no figures published
Based On W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs); W3C Verifiable Credentials; OpenID Connect (OIDC) — all three already present in this file, DIDs on ID Pro and VCs on this tab. Civic.Social canonical specification set: supplies eligibility and disclosure primitives to Civic Process
Semantic Web Compatibility Likely Full via W3C Verifiable Credentials — the VC data model uses JSON-LD as its base serialization and is RDF-interpretable. Whether Civic Identity mandates the JSON-LD securing lane or permits JOSE/COSE was not established from the documents reviewed
Protocol Maturity / Standardization Working draft (v0.2) — single-organization specification with no standards-body involvement, no conformance suite and no independent implementation. RFC 2119 conformance language is used, which is more discipline than most early drafts show. Refinement is planned through pilot implementations rather than through a standards process
Vocabulary / Ontology Type Civic identity and eligibility — a credential-type and disclosure vocabulary layered on existing identity standards, in the same family as Personhood Credentials and Verifiable Relationship Credentials on this tab, which likewise define credential semantics rather than identifier mechanics
Usage Pattern Embedded in other protocols and applications — provides the identity and eligibility layer consumed by Civic Process for participation gating and disclosure, and by Civic Space for membership. Credentials would be exchanged over standard protocols such as OpenID4VC rather than any Civic.Social-specific transport