Cevo helps not-for-profit standards body implement digital capability initiative

MortarCAPS, a non-profit standards body for higher education data operating across Australia, New Zealand and Canada, has finished the discovery and design phase of its Human Capability Record (HCR).

The HCR initiative brings together employers, universities, industry bodies and technology partners to explore a framework that enables individuals to securely hold, manage and share verified evidence of their skills, experience, training and professional capabilities.

Organisations involved in the initiative to date include Commonwealth Bank, KPMG, the Australian Computer Society, VTAC, the University of Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney and Western Sydney University, alongside the Australian Access Federation, Higher Ed Services, CAUDIT and Capability.co.

The discovery and design phase has now established the proposed technical foundations for the HCR and the basis for a pilot involving multiple Australian organisations.

Cevo, an Australian specialist AWS consultancy, and Ingenuity Partners supported the discovery and design work, helping translate the HCR vision and requirements into a proposed technical architecture covering trust, digital identity, credential issuance and verification, consent and participant infrastructure.

The federated design keeps credential information with individuals and participating organisations, while MortarCAPS would operate shared trust services supporting accreditation, verification and consent. It is based on open standards for verifiable digital credentials and proposes AWS infrastructure for the shared trust platform.

“The discovery and design phase has taken the Human Capability Record from a broad ambition to a proposed technical architecture that can now be tested through a pilot," James Lewis, head of public sector at Cevo, said.

"Our work has focused on creating a practical, secure and interoperable design that supports trust between many different participants while keeping individuals in control of their own capability information. With those foundations established, MortarCAPS and the consortium can move into the next phase with a much clearer view of how the HCR could work in practice.”