Open digital product passport discussion

Looking for legislative progress, information about data structures and schemas, and just generally how things are going with DPPs I’ve discovered it all seems quite secretive. 

All the articles are referencing each other, or citing the one legislative document and making a lot of assumptions if not blatant mistakes. I’m not seeing much discourse beyond posturing and bad marketing on LinkedIn.

So TL;DR, I built something we can work on: https://rhys-the-davies.github.io/open-dpp/index.html

The CIRPASS2 event

I attended a CIRPASS2 webinar event last week though which was really good. Carolynn and Marco did a lot to explain their work so far and answer the crowd’s questions. They said they’ve been working with 13 pilot groups. 

This was news to me, but news I was glad to hear. 

Unfortunately, like all the other EC projects I’ve been a part of or spied on, they did have to make a point that they are quite limited by the budget they have for the project. 

One participant asked if and how they’re aligning themselves with various standards bodies who are also working on this. Unfortunately, unsurprisingly, the answer was ‘there’s no budget or resources to sit in all the standard bodies meetings and discussions’. 

There was a similar feeling listening to Marco talk about his work setting up a mock registry and validator. It was good and with some tightening could do the job, but I got the feeling if the EC came out of the wood work with a surprise it would all be affected. 

But I did get something quite useful. They mentioned a link to a Semantic Treehouse, somewhere they're drafting ontologies and models for their work. I haven't been able to fully read through it all yet but as MVPs go it looks substantial.

Where is the discussion happening?

I’m the Product Lead at AWARE™, working with DPPs in production, and with factories in China, India, and Bangladesh asking me what they’ll need to provide. Or sometimes, optimistically, how they can use DPPs to prove how good they are. 

Yet I don’t see much in the way of a technical discussion. It seems even the people who are supposed to know, the CIRPASS2 people, have questions. Which to me says it’s either:

• Not happening, which feels unlikely. 
• I’m not seeing it - which at this point only feels possible if it’s buried in massive documentation that surely no one expects the average person looking to contribute (me) to sift through?
• Or it’s being done behind closed doors, which I don’t like. 

I popped into the UNTP slack for example, the closest thing I could find to the right kind of discussion, but it’s a completely different topic. 

So I’m hoping to start a discussion. 

So I built something

I’ve built a site where I’ve compiled everything I think I know about DPPs - the legislation itself, and the data - in a way that I hope is informative, but is also ‘contributable’. 

It’s built on GitHub pages just out of HTML so anyone can propose a change to every line, and there’s ‘discuss’ buttons everywhere for anyone to start a discussion or ask questions. 

The only thing you need is a GitHub account - but I can probably get rid of that too if it’s a big barrier to entry. 

Since this is work I’m doing anyway I’ll continue to update and maintain it myself but I’d be very glad for contributors and other opinions. 

My next to-do, unless a discussion points elsewhere, is to upload the schema AWARE™ is currently using so it can be criticised, improved, and maybe used as a reference. 

Take a look, let me know what you think, or point me somewhere better.

https://rhys-the-davies.github.io/open-dpp/index.html