Re: The "self-sovereign" problem (was: The SSI protocols challenge)

+1 to Adrian Doerk's definition in his thesis (which I highly recommend,
BTW—Adrian's work is very comprehensive and thorough).

FWIW, even though the forthcoming Manning book
<https://www.manning.com/books/self-sovereign-identity> of which I'm a
co-author (along with 54 contributing authors) is titled "Self-Sovereign
Identity: Decentralized Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials", in
the opening chapter we explain the origin of the term and then recommend
(and enforce throughout the rest of the book) simply calling it "SSI"—which
is also what I see happening in the market. I predict that within the next
2-3 years, many who have become comfortable with the term "SSI" won't even
know that it is an acronym or what it stands for (just as many today don't
know what "IBM" or "ATM" stand for).

As a final point, I was a speaker this morning on a webinar hosted
by Condatis called "Scaling Digital Trust in Healthcare" where Charlie
Walton, VP Digital Identity at Mastercard, shared the following slide,
which is the first time I've seen the term "Commercial SSI".

[image: image.png]




On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 6:54 AM sankarshan <sankarshan@dhiway.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Mar 2021 at 18:40, Michael Herman (Trusted Digital Web) <
> mwherman@parallelspace.net> wrote:
>
>> RE: "Decentralized identity" is a *better* choice. Others use
>> "self-asserted," I think this has some of the same socio-cultural issues
>> that "Self-sovereign" has.
>>
>>
>>
>>    1. QUESTION: Why is there this pervasive (pandemic?) of thinking
>>    spreading across so many of our communities (CCG, SF, ToIP, etc.) about
>>    giving in to this type of authoritarian, centralizationist thinking?
>>    Why are people giving up on self-sovereignty in such large numbers?
>>    Reference:
>>    https://hyperonomy.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/model-2c.-social-evolution-self-sovereignty-political-spectrum-1.png
>>
>> The representation such as the above often create an all-or-nothing
> inference on the topic of SSI. It feels appropriate to cite a recently
> published work Doerk, Adrian. (2020). The growth factors of self-sovereign
> identity solutions in Europe. 10.6084/m9.figshare.14182586. and especially
>
> *We use the terminology of self-sovereign identity for describing a
> concept of giving individuals or organizations control over their digital
> identity. The identity resides with the identity subject in question, who
> is central to its administration. Sovereignty implies that individuals are
> equal among peers and are not administered by a central authority. This
> doesn't mean that individuals can suddenly issue themselves a new passport.
> Instead it means that individuals have control over how their personal data
> is shared and used. Moreover, individuals can now choose whether they would
> like to reveal their personal data and also which kind of data they would
> like to share in the event of a transaction or interaction. Through the use
> of cryptographic proofs SSI enables verifiability for all involved parties.*
>