Critiera to have pledge accepted and then implementaiton listed

[onthebreeze]

This ticket is designed to trigger some discussion about the criteria that must be met / demonstrated by organisations making UNTP pledges and then registering their implementations.

On the one hand, we want as many pledges and implementations as possible to demonstrate uptake and thereby encourage more implementers. On the other hand, if the bar is too low, we risk reputational damage when

• A technology vendor registers their implementation, someone buys their product and it turns out to be non-interoperable or missing key capabilites.
• A manufacturer / brand registers their implementation, then a week later is in court for unsustainable practices.

A few thoughts spring to mind

• A pledge should be relatively easy to make whilst the bar for registering conformant implementations should be higher.
• We need to clearly distinguish between different roles : value chain actors (ie brands, retailers, manufacturers, primary producers), Assurance bodies (ie certifiers, accreditation, standards), Regulators, and solution vendors - and have targeted criteria for each.
• A pledge probably just requires the party to complete a standard template (see some examples) and to ensure that the pledge is made by an authorised senior public officer of the company (linkedIn verification does a pretty solid passport identity check so asking the public officer to make a linkedIn post as a verified account holder could be a way to achieve that).
• An implementation registration would be different for different actors but generally I think there is a key distinction between solution vendors and actual supply chain actors.
  • Solution vendors must UNTP conformity tests for each major version of their product and provide evidence (as a conformity credential VC - lets eat our own dog food).
  • Supply chain actors must prove that they have actually implemented UNTP in production by providing some digital product passports for some of their products - which anyone can verify. There might be different assurance levels (eg passports with linked conformity credentials have higher assurance). There might also be a traceabilty yes/no - depending on whether traceability events are linked to the passport which allow navigation to at least the next supplier and their passports.

Your thoughts welcome.

[onthebreeze]

lets drop the word "pledge" and instead put a template on https://uncefact.github.io/spec-untp/docs/implementations/Register where implementers can indicate ambition and then evidence of actual implementation.

@onthebreeze to setup the page template for this to allow implementers (of different types) to log progress.