---
id: introduction
title: Introduction
---

The European Self-Sovereign Identity Lab ([eSSIF-Lab](https://essif-lab.eu/)) views itself as an ecosystem of parties 
that work together to make existing (and new) Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) technology into 
a scalable and interoperable infrastructure that businesses can use very easily
for conducting (business) transactions with other businesses and individuals alike.
Typically, the libraries, code or components for the infrastructure should be open source.

In order to support the use of such an infrastructure by businesses and individuals,
eSSIF-Lab parties also create applications and other tooling to support such actual use
on top of the interoperable infrastructure, which may or may not be open source,
and are expected to be used as/in products of organizations that want to make this their business.

At the start, eSSIF-Lab is one of the European [NGI projects](https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/)
and helps (EU) parties that want to contribute by publishing [open calls](https://essif-lab.eu/?page_id=134) 
to which such parties can submit work proposals that eSSIF-Lab will then consider for funding.

## eSSIF-Lab Framework repository

This repo contains the documents that describe the vision, architecture and other
topics that are relevant to the eSSIF-Lab Framework. Currently, it contains:

- [Vision and purpose](vision-and-purpose)
- [Functional architecture](functional-architecture)