SSI Cooperatives Re: First two final #RebootingWebOfTrust VIII Barcelona papers

Dear Christopher and All,

I was thrilled to read the conclusion of the article How SSI Will Survive
Capitalism
<https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot8-barcelona/blob/master/final-documents/how-ssi-will-survive-capitalism.md>
 by Gropper, Shea and Riedel, that the future of governance of
Self-Sovereign Identities lies in Rochdale-type
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Principles> cooperatives.  Hence,
I am CCing the Platform Cooperativism <https://platform.coop/> group on
this message.

A key value of cooperatives
<https://www.rochdalepioneersmuseum.coop/about-us/the-rochdale-principles/>
is democracy, with one member –  one vote.  Since Christopher and I
discussed this issue last, about two years ago, our team at Weizmann has
been working hard on the foundations of what may be called "SSI
Cooperatives".   I am now happy to report that we have made significant
progress towards this goal.  Here are three new relevant papers of ours.
All are a bit heavy on the mathematical side, but I believe their basic
concepts are simple and easy to understand.

The first paper aims to address the problem of duplicate identities
(sybils) in an SSI Cooperative using a Web of Trust:

*Foundation for Genuine Global Identities
<https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09630> presents a foundation for a
decentralized, grassroots, bottom-up, self-sovereign process in which every
human being may easily create and own a genuine global identity, realized
as a public key. The solution relies on the formation of a "Web of Trust''
among global identities, but does not rely on biometrics, nor does it
require to store any personal information on public or third-party storage,
except for the public key itself. The approach is designed for natural
realization using distributed ledger/blockchain technology.*

Even if the approach of the first paper is successful, it will only
guarantee a bound on the penetration of sybils, not their eradication.  The
second paper aims to address the problem of democratic governance of an SSI
Cooperative in the face of a bounded sybil penetration:

*Sybil-Resilient Reality-Aware Social Choice
<https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.11105> aims to enhance social choice theory
with effective group decision mechanisms for communities with bounded sybil
penetration. Inspired by Reality-Aware Social Choice
<https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10117>, **we use the status quo as the anchor
of sybil resilience, characterized by sybil safety – the inability of
sybils to change the status quo against the will of the genuine agents, and
sybil liveness – the ability of the genuine agents to change the status quo
against the will of the sybils. We consider the social choice settings of
deciding on a single proposal, on multiple proposals, and on updating a
parameter. For each, we present social choice rules that are sybil-safe
and, under certain conditions, satisfy sybil-liveness.*

An SSI Cooperative will not only vote on candidates and parameter values,
but will also have to make decisions on budgets and on its own
constitution/bylaws.  Ideally, all decisions will be taken within this same
conceptual framework, same deliberative processes, same methods for sybil
resilience, same method of vote delegation/proxy voting, and same user
interface.  Our third paper prepares the grounds for such a unified
foundation for democratic decision making in all these disparate domains.
It is perhaps the most mathematical of the three, and it is still quite
removed from the ultimate goal of a comprehensive deliberative,
sybil-resilient, egalitarian decision making environment for an SSI
Cooperative.

*Aggregation over Metric Spaces: Proposing and Voting in Elections,
Budgeting, and Legislation <https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06277> **considers a
general model of social choice over metric spaces, in which each voter
specifies an ideal element of the metric space. The ideal element functions
as a vote, where each voter prefers elements that are closer to her ideal
element.  But it also functions as a proposal, thus making all participants
equal not only as voters but also as proposers.  We study applications of
the abstract model to various social choice settings, including
single-winner elections, committee elections, participatory budgeting, and
participatory legislation. For each application, we compare each solution
concept to known voting rules and study various properties of the resulting
voting rules.  Our framework provides expressive aggregation for a broad
range of social choice settings while remaining simple for voters, and may
enable a unified and integrated implementation for all these settings, as
well as unified extensions such as sybil-resiliency, proxy voting, and
deliberative decision making.*

All three papers are at various stages of review, so any comments or
questions on them are welcome and will be appreciated.

Best,
Udi




On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 9:29 AM Christopher Allen <
ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:

> The first two papers from last month's #RebootingWebOfTrust (our eighth!)
> in Barcelona are final and are available in Github.
>
> The first was "RWoT8 DID Specification Refinement" paper, led by Manu
> Sporny with Dan Burnett, Ken Ebert, Amy Guy, and Drummond Reed:
>
> "In preparation for this hand off, a group at Rebooting the Web of Trust
> triaged issues related to the DID specification, refined existing proposals
> related to the specification, and gathered new features and requirements
> from the community. The result of this work is outlined in this document."
>
>
> https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot8-barcelona/blob/master/final-documents/did-spec-refinement.md
>
>
> The 2nd paper to go final is "How will SSI Will Survive Capitalism" led by
> Adrian Gropper with Michael Shea and Martin Riedel:
>
> "In this paper, we apply the SWOT framework (Strengths, Weaknesses,
> Opportunities, and Threats) to identify potential paths to adoption. For
> example, what are the general implications of introducing a credential
> holder into existing issuer/verifier relationships? Our analysis leads to
> cooperative (in the legal sense) governance with focus on the holder (the
> wallet) as the key innovation, since issuers and verifiers already exist."
>
>
> https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot8-barcelona/blob/master/final-documents/how-ssi-will-survive-capitalism.md
>
> Share these papers with your colleagues and give them some social media
> love. Only 23 more papers to go (hopefully) before our next design workshop
> #RWOT10 in Prague September 3-6th! Save that date!
>
> -- Christopher Allen
>
>