Geneva, 1 and 2 September: what we are going to Global Digital Collaboration to find out
The Global Digital Collaboration Conference runs from 1 to 3 September 2026 at Palexpo, Geneva. Around two thousand people, roughly fifty co-organising institutions, and an agenda that stretches from age verification to payments, from driving licences to health credentials. ID30 will be on site on the first two days.
Underneath the whole programme sits a single question: how does a credential issued in one country get trusted in another?
The gap is not technical any more
That question stops being abstract the moment a government opens a procurement file. Which format does the supplier have to implement. Which trust registry, and who operates it. Which foreign relying parties will accept the result, and on what legal basis. Who is liable when a credential turns out to be wrong.
The technology has answers to most of this. Mature standards exist for the data model, for the presentation protocols, for offline verification. What does not yet have an answer is recognition: the procedure by which a sovereign issuer in one jurisdiction becomes acceptable to a relying party in another. Two systems can speak the same protocol and still refuse to trust each other.
So the reframe we carry into the room is this. Stop asking whether a wallet works. Start asking who accepts what it holds, across a border, ten years from now.
What we are listening for
Four things in particular, all of them drawn from questions our government clients are asking right now rather than from the conference brochure.
Trust registries. Who operates them, who can be listed, and what a small state does when running its own public key infrastructure is not realistic.
Formats. The practical cost of choosing between an mdoc trajectory and a W3C verifiable credentials trajectory, and what it really costs to issue both when a country has to speak to neighbours who went different ways.
Offline verification. What actually holds up without connectivity, and the trade-off with revocation freshness. This is not a corner case for island states and remote districts.
Multilateral trust that already exists. The World Health Organization’s Global Digital Health Certification Network is in production across more than eighty countries. It is the closest thing to a joinable, multilateral trust framework in this field, and its governance model deserves attention well beyond health.
One conviction we are bringing with us
A credential signed on a bad record is still a bad record. Cross border trust is won on the quality and auditability of the register underneath, not on the strength of the signature. Any playbook that skips the upstream registration processes is describing the easy half of the problem.
Field notes, each day
ID30 will publish notes from each day of the conference, written from the perspective of the governments that have to implement this, not the vendors that sell it. The conference operates under the Chatham House Rule unless speakers agree otherwise, so those notes will report substance without attributing positions to named individuals.
If you are in Geneva on 1 or 2 September and working on wallets, trust registries or cross border recognition, get in touch. We would rather have a real conversation than a badge scan.
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