Civil society transactions are all the interactions with civil society institutions after registration: the classes you attend and the resulting transcripts that document those transactions, the visits to the doctor, hospital and labs, the accumulation of continuing education credits (CEC) as a professional, or the participation in any regular meetings/activities and voting as a member (Figure 6.1). Individuals present their credentials to the organization and are able to transact with or receive services from the organization.

Relationship to Other Domains

Before being able to transact with civil society organizations, individuals need to go through a civil society registration process. Some employment registration processes require proof of membership in professional associations and proof of current educational attainment from the domain of civil society transactions. Data from civil society organizations are sold to the data broker industry. Data is vulnerable to theft and appear on the illicit market.

What Is the Relationship between Initial Registration and Ongoing Interaction?

During the civil society registration process, individuals are enrolled and have a unique record created for them within the system. This might be just a name or a name and birth date. However, often it involves the issuance of a member number that allows the individual to assert who they are relative to the database index.

This number allows for the persistence and connecting together of records about an individual over the time period of their interaction.

To support both in-person and digital authentications, that is, the process of checking that indeed the individual presenting again is the individual who originally registered, they are asked to enroll any one of a number of authentication factors.

It is in the process of ongoing interaction and transactions with a civil society institution that individuals are asked to authenticate with the factors that were enrolled.

How Were These Managed with the Technology of Paper?

Formerly, institutions that tracked people and their interactions did so with index cards and other paper-organizing and filing technologies.

Tracking individual's interactions with institutions over time involved a lot of paper. Health records of patients created by doctors were all paper-based and involved lots of filing and maintaining of local records at the site of treatment, not in a digital repository.