MOSIP community lays out digital identity insights, challenges, and a long to-do list

On day two of MOSIP Connect 2025 in Manila, Philippines, it was the community’s turn to set the agenda. MOSIP turned to Kaliya Young (“Identity Woman”) and Lucy Yang to facilitate Wednesday’s proceeding as an “unconference.”

MOSIP Product Manager Resham Chugani explains that the organization introduced the unconference format in response to feedback that the previous year’s event was overwhelming.

“We wanted this time to have a community-driven approach, rather than a one-way line of information.”

The success of the format in that regard was visible in the rush of participants to call sessions during the opening, agenda-setting portion of the day.

“It’s been a great outcome today,” Chugani says, citing the response and feedback throughout the day. “They got to speak, they got choose the topics, they got to connect with the community, with like-minded people.”

Sessions ranged in the number of participants from just a few people to around 25, but even the smallest appear to have been positive and productive.

The unconference format will “most likely” be considered for inclusion in MOSIP Connect 2026, she says.

The Open Space Technology method used is consistent, Young says. Yang notes that it was customized, in terms of tailoring the communication to the diverse community represented at Connect. That diversity includes many people who do not speak English, and Yang notes that even during the opening introductions, people spoke in multiple languages.

“Throughout the day there’s a structure in place to really release people’s energy, so who cares what language you’re speaking,” Yang says.

“What really brings people together is that they share a passion for digital identity and making something good happen.” She emphasizes how the format releases people’s energy, in contrast to other event structures.

The community asked many questions when the format was announced, leading to further communication about how it would work.

MOSIP Product Owner Pragya Kumari notes that the only complaint she received during the day was disappointment from people missing one session to attend another at the same time.

“That’s a good complaint to have,” Chugani says.

Young notes that the format includes note-taking and sharing to address exactly this issue.

The community speaks

Morning sessions addressed on onboarding challenges and scaling issues with verifiable credentials, ways to reduce fraud during biometric enrollment, migrating legacy national ID systems to MOSIP, and overcoming barriers to last-mile financial inclusion. There was an “ask us anything” session from MOSIP’s legal team, and government representatives from different countries shared insights on best practices for national IDs.

The definition of biometrics was debated during a session on whether digital ID is possible without biometrics, with some disagreement over whether using a selfie to create a cryptographic key (an example offered by Seventh Sense) counts or not.

UNHCR is considering upgrading its biometric system, and discussed its options with other participants in an afternoon session called by BixeLab’s Ted Dunstone on “sharing experiences in brown fields biometric implementation.” Participants determined that a playbook based on the anonymized experiences of different countries could be a valuable resource.

Attendees and MOSIP officials also discussed including people with special needs in identity systems, hybrid hosting options for rapid deployment of MOSIP, challenges and opportunities in communicating with the public about the benefits of and concerns related to digital ID, and how large language models (LLMs) can help improve Digital Public Goods.

World Bank Technical Consultant Adam Cooper argued that in some smaller nations, biometric deduplication is unnecessary. Fraud is so unusual in communities, often on islands, where everyone knows each other, that the expense is not justified, he says. Some participants pushed back, in one of many lively debates during the day.

Something in a box?

The idea of a lightweight and ready-for-deployment “MOSIP in a box” that smaller countries could use was discussed during an afternoon session.

Sivananda Lanka, VP of engineering at MOSIP, explained the concept as scaling down MOSIP, which is designed to support populations of 100 million, down to 100,000.

The idea of packaging technologies in a way that aids implementation was a common theme of the day.

Dunstone and Edward Duffus of OpenCRVS teamed up to lead a discussion on a minimum Digital Public Infrastructure stack for all countries, or “government in a box.” The idea was to determine if a package of open-source technologies could be curated to help countries, particularly smaller ones with capacity challenges, to understand what they can do with DPI and move towards implementation at scale.

“The real power of OpenCRVS comes in combination with other systems,” Duffus says.

The idea runs up against a challenge (though not necessarily an insoluble one) of how a set of technologies can be practically helpful while both broadly applicable to different countries and simple enough that it can be quickly and easily used. There are other challenges as well, but the idea seemed to have traction, and several participants expressed optimism that the right tools and technologies are available.

One of the themes arising from the unconference portion of MOSIP Connect 2025 is that there still needs to be more clarity about what countries actually need to implement and fully benefit from digital identity.

“We set out with an objective of hearing the community,” Chugani concludes. “And I think we got that.”

 

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Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital identity  |  DPI stack  |  identity management  |  Kaliya Young  |  MOSIP (Modular Open Source Identity Platform)  |  MOSIP Connect 2025  |  MOSIP in a box