Musings of a Trust Architect: When Technical Standar...
Reflections on recent conversations about digital identity, sovereignty, and the erosion of foundational principles Echoes from Geneva I wasn’t presen...| Life With Alacrity
Reflections on recent conversations about digital identity, sovereignty, and the erosion of foundational principles Echoes from Geneva I wasn’t presen...| Life With Alacrity
A blog on social software, collaboration, trust, security, privacy, and internet tools by Christopher Allen.| Life With Alacrity
ABSTRACT: “Fair Witnessing” is a new approach for asserting and interpreting digital claims in a way that mirrors real-world human trust: through personal observation, contextual disclosure, and progressive validation. It can be implemented with the decentralized architecture of Gordian Envelopes to allow individuals to make verifiable statements while balancing privacy, accountability, and interpretability. At its core, fair witnessing is not about declaring truth, it’s about showing y...| Life With Alacrity
In early 2025, Blockchain Commons architected and engineered a major project for the Zcash blockchain: the ZeWIF specification that allows all of its wallets to interoperate. Interoperability is something that I consider vitally important for a technological ecosystem, so I was thrilled that Blockchain Commons could improve interoperability for Zcash. Here’s a bit more on why, what Blockchain Commons did for Zcash, and what I’d like to do for other technological communities. The Limits of...| Life With Alacrity
When can you trust a software release? How do you know that a software repo is safe, that it represents the intent of its creators? On the 20th annivers...| Life With Alacrity
I recently wrote about “How My Values Inform Design”. There I discussed the issue of autonomy and how it can be supported by progressive trust, proof ag...| Life With Alacrity
ABSTRACT: By grounding technical decisions in ethical values, we can create compassionate digital architectures. This article examines how core human va...| Life With Alacrity
Progressive Trust—it sounds a bit like something from a relationship advice column, right? But in the world of digital interactions, it’s actually a revolutionary model, one that moves us away from “all-or-nothing” choices into a more human, flexible way of establishing trust. Progressive Trust is about mirroring the natural ways we build trust in real life, adding depth and resilience to our digital interactions. “The basic idea behind progressive trust is to model how trust works ...| Life With Alacrity
This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024. My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the United Nations in New York, I wrote “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, the article that described the ten precepts of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and provided the name that defined our ecosystem. Eight and a half years later, I ask the SSI community to reflect on a difficult question, one that challenges the very foundation of SSI. Has...| Life With Alacrity
I regularly post all of my “Musings of a Trust Architect” to both here and Blockchain Commons, but other posts at Blockchain Commons may be of interest as well. Here’s a look at other topics at Blockchain Commons this year. Quarterly Reports What is Blockchain Commons exactly? And what’s going on there? Those are discussed in the quarterly (and yearly) reports. Blockchain Commons: Q3, 2024 Blockchain Commons: Q2, 2024 Blockchain Commons: Q1, 2024 Blockchain Commons: 2023 in Review Ech...| Life With Alacrity
Digital communities are collections of individual entities that are connected together. They can be modeled as graphs, with the individuals being nodes and their relationships being edges. Traditionally, identity models have focused on the nodes, but in Musings of a Trust Architect: Edge Identifiers & Cliques, I suggested that both private keys and public-key identifiers could be based on the relational edges, and that when you combined a complete set of edges you could create a cryptographic...| Life With Alacrity
ABSTRACT: Self-Sovereign Computing is a transformative paradigm designed to empower individuals to take command of their digital journey and to uphold their dignity, human rights, and resilience online. It encourages proactive collaboration among individuals, collectives, and platforms to enhance digital autonomy and to mitigate vulnerabilities. Building on Christopher’s initial ideas of self-sovereign identity, self-sovereign computing introduces an allegory that revisits some foundational...| Life With Alacrity
This article was originally published as an advance reading for RWOT12 in Köln, Germany on August 9, 2023. It has been slightly edited for this reprint. ABSTRACT: Self-sovereign identity represents an innovative new architecture for identity management. But, we must ensure that it avoids the pitfalls of previous identity systems. During World War II, two identity pioneers, the Dutch Jacobus L. Lentz and the French René Carmille, took different approaches toward the collection and recording ...| Life With Alacrity
