Who chairs what at Global Digital Collaboration
Global Digital Collaboration opens at Palexpo in Geneva on 1 September, hosted by the Swiss Confederation. Around forty co-organizers, 348 listed speakers, twenty-four plenary sessions on day one and over a hundred more across days two and three, all under the Chatham House Rule.
Most previews of an event like this walk through the agenda. We think the more useful document is the governance, because it tells you where decisions will actually be made, and by whom.
The Council
The GDC Council advises the Swiss federal government on the platform’s strategy, on which organisations become co-organizers, on the conference agenda, and on budget. It seats up to twenty public and twenty private actors.
On the public side: a group of eight countries chaired by Brazil, with two more in discussion, and a group of intergovernmental organisations comprising the African Union, the European Union, UNHCR, UNESCO and the World Bank, chaired by the World Bank. On the private side: ten companies chaired by Google, and ten non-governmental organisations chaired by IATA, a group that includes trade associations, standards development organisations, open source foundations and civil society.
That composition is worth sitting with. Wallet and credential standards have, until recently, been shaped by standards bodies and platform vendors. Here a development finance institution chairs the intergovernmental half of the table. For a ministry writing a procurement package this year, the institution that may finance the programme is also helping set the venue where cross-border recognition gets discussed. That is a different centre of gravity than the one most national teams are used to.
Three task forces
Each is co-led by a government and a company, and each carries a deadline rather than an open mandate. Age Assurance, led by Brazil and Google. Trust Registries, led by France and Apple. And a universal device API for identity solutions, led by Germany and GlobalPlatform. All three present their first results this week.
The Trust Registries work is the one we will follow most closely. The question it poses is the question small states cannot answer alone: where should a global trust registry framework be operated, and by whom. Standards for issuing and presenting credentials have matured. There is no equivalent governance for deciding who is trusted to issue them.
What we are bringing
ID30 advises Samoa on its national digital identity programme, with a December 2027 deadline and an implementing agency of five IT staff. The country’s counterparties sit on different technical trajectories: Australia moving toward mdoc under ISO/IEC 18013, New Zealand accrediting domestic providers under its own trust framework, no Pacific trust list in existence, and no procedure anywhere in the region for recognising a foreign sovereign issuer.
So the question we carry is not which credential format to choose. It is who operates the trust, whether a country of that size can afford to be inside it, and who carries the liability when a credential turns out to be wrong. A signed credential built on a bad civil registration record is still a bad record.
What we will publish
ID30 will post field notes after each conference day, written from the implementer side rather than the vendor side, and within the Chatham House Rule: substance reported, speakers not named.
If there is a question you would ask in that room, tell us. We will carry it in.
Source for the governance figures: GDC’s own progress report, published July 2026.
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