Bullseyes and Breakthroughs: A Recap of the Transparency.dev Summit

It’s a special day when you find yourself in London, playing darts while discussing transparency technologies, and with a couple of Levchin prize winners on hand for added inspiration. That was the scene on Wednesday 9th of October after the first day of the Transparency.dev summit. The event was a 3-day event bringing together practitioners of transparency technologies to meet peers, share best practices, and learn about the latest developments in the community. Here are some of the highlights

Evolution of the Bar for Trust

The summit kicked off with an inspiring keynote from Al Cutter who took us through the fascinating evolution of transparency technologies. He shared how these technologies have redefined trust in the industry and underscored the growing importance of transparency as the gold standard. Cutter also highlighted C2SP specs which are driving interoperability across ecosystems. Cutter’s insights set a powerful tone for the rest of the summit, framing the discussions around how we can drive further innovation through collaboration in open source.

Tiled Logs are the Future

Matthew McPherrin shared the operator pain of logs in his talk about Let’s Encrypt’s experience and the evolution of the Sunlight log. Sunlight has led to the development of the standardized static-ct API. Al Cutter and Martin Hutchinson also introduced Trillian Tessera, a new tiled based log that supports the static-ct API but also works for any transparency log. Hayden Blauzvern gave an overview of Sigstore and highlighted their efforts to capitalize on tiled logs, as they experiment with Trillian Tessera with the goal of enhancing simplicity and reducing costs.

A Witness Network is Coming

Andrea Barisani, Filippo Valsorda, Martin Hutchinson and Al Cutter came together to explore the journey from the foundational concept of “witnessing” to the realization of fully transparent, end-to-end ecosystems. Their four talks interlocked seamlessly to provide a holistic view of witnessing and its broader impact.

Certificate Transparency Continues to Grow and Evolve

Joe DeBlasio and Philippe Boneff spoke about the challenges transparency ecosystems run into when they scale, and highlighted that CT is going strong, and is a great model for other ecosystems. CT continues to evolve and address challenges such as adopting post-quantum cryptography.

Transparency is Successful, the Community is Awesome!

Filippo Valsorda emphasized the community’s success, noting how it has broken out of its niche and reached a broader audience. This progress was further reflected in the diversity of the talks, such as Edona Fasllija's presentation on digital identity, Peter Well’s overview on using transparency in healthcare, and many others, showcasing the wide range of topics now engaging the community. Key transparency and binary transparency were also important topics for discussion.

The summit was a great way for the community to connect and have fun.

“This community is filled with people that want to do the right thing” - Joe DeBlasio, Chrome

“Huge thanks to the #trustfabric and all the org team members for the hard and wonderful work. And to the warm Transparency community for its capacity to welcome new members even if they are not core contributors (by far!)” - Christophe Brocas, Assurance Maladie security engineer

“My favorite workshop of the year.” - Bas Westerbaan, Cloudflare

If you missed the event or want to stay in touch with the community for future events, check out these links:

Also stay in touch with the community through these channels:

• Join the transparency-dev Slack (invite link)

• Watch the talk recordings on the transparency-dev YouTube channel

• Follow the Transparency-dev Community Blog