Re: Announcing the 10-Year SSI Revision Project

ne 16. 11. 2025 v 20:31 odesílatel Christopher Allen <
ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> napsal:

> In 2016, I published The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity (
> https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity/)
> and with it proposed ten foundational principles for digital identity
> systems. These principles were centered on human dignity, agency, and
> consent and quickly became a touchstone in the emerging world of
> Self-Sovereign Identity.
>
> At the time, I asked for support in refining those principals. And, we
> tried: at ID2020, Rebooting the Web of Trust, IIW, and elsewhere. But for
> nearly a decade, the original principles have remained largely unchanged,
> inspirational yet sometimes misunderstood.
>
> Now, in 2025, as the *Self-Sovereign Identity movement turns ten next
> year*, I’m renewing that invitation. And I'm asking for your
> participation.
>
> 📌 The 10-Year Revision Project
>
> The 10-year SSI Revision Project is an effort to revisit and refine the
> original SSI principles, not as a rigid standard, *but as a living
> framework* for people designing, governing, and deploying identity
> infrastructure that respects and protects the people it serves.
>
> SSI is no longer a theory. Its infrastructure has been adopted by
> governments, companies, communities, and protocols. As that adoption
> accelerates, the *foundational values must evolve *to meet today’s
> ethical, legal, and technical challenges including coercion, use of
> biometrics, AI agency, exclusion by design, and gamified behavioral
> manipulation.
>
> The goal is ultimately to revisit old principles and to propose new ones
> while making a renewed call to protect the dignity of all identity holders.
>
> 📅 Join the Collaboration
>
> To support this project, I’ll be hosting a series of *open online calls*
> over the next year to co-develop and discuss revised principles, new
> proposals, and system guidance. These sessions will welcome technologists,
> designers, researchers, regulators, and community stewards from across the
> SSI and identity ecosystem.
>
> The first of these will be *December 2nd, at 10am PT (7pm CET)* for
> maximum availability from EU to West Coast. Another friendlier to
> Asia/Pacific time zones is planned for the second week of December (time
> TBD based on participants).
>
> The goal of these first two meetings is to discuss opportunities for
> different topics, with the goal of writing up some initial rough "concept
> papers" (ala RWOT's "topic papers") to scope some of ideas that people have
> of what needs to be done.
>
> Hopefully you'll join us for these initial calls. No longer commitment is
> required, but the goal is to investigate your participation in writing some
> papers on this topic by May! But the most important thing is ultimately
> that your ideas and your feedback help to shape the continued development
> of Self-Sovereign Identity.
>
> Please let me know that you're interested in joining us!
>
> 🧭 Team Topics
>
> If we get enough participation, I expect we may split up into teams, to
> cover some of the various topics that bear discussion as we rethink SSI.
>
> Some early broad topics that we are considering currently are:
>
> 1. *Beyond Property: Principal Authority and the Legal Foundation of SSI.*
> Agency law, principal authority, and revamping or expanding the SSI
> principles based on them.
> 2. *Anti-Coercive Design and Cognitive Liberty.* Avoiding coercive
> design, which will likely include more academic discussions of philosophy
> and may reveal new principles.
> 3. *From Principles to Properties: Operationalizing SSI.* Start with a
> deep dive into the CSSPS  42-property framework published in IEEE Access (
> https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9875265) for objective design
> principles that might contribute to SSI.
> 4. *More Than a Digital Shadow: Rewriting Principle 1 – Existence.*
> Reclaiming the original intent of the first principle, that **every person
> has an identity that precedes any digital system**, drawing on generative
> identity, Ubuntu philosophy, feminist sovereignty, decolonial theory,
> legal personhood guarantees, and real-world harms.
>
> The intent is to write articles on each of these topics, and hopefully
> some more, by May 2026, in time for the anniversary and use those articles
> to revise, revamp, and expand the original principles. But to get there
> from here, we need to start coordinating now!
>
>
> *🌱 Why This Matters*
> SSI has always been more than a technical spec. It’s a movement for
> restoring **dignity, agency, and trust** in a digital world that too often
> erodes all three. As its adoption spreads, we must ensure that the
> principles at its foundation still serve the people they were meant to
> protect.
>
> Let’s not let another ten years pass before we act.
>
>
> *📙 Requested Reading*
> I've written a number of articles about SSI over the years. I think three
> of them are particularly important to these discussions, and I suggest that
> people read them as part of this process:
>
>    - *The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity:* (
>    https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity/)
>    (2016). My original article, which lays out the pre-history of SSI and the
>    initial 10 principles.
>    - *Origins of Self-Sovereign Identity:*(
>    https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/origins-SSI/)** (2021). A
>    look at the philosophical and political roots of SSI, including its lineage
>    in civil liberties, cryptographic activism, and human rights frameworks.
>    - *Principal Authority: A New Perspective on Self-Sovereign Identity* (
>    https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/Principal-Authority/) (2021).
>    How identity should not be framed as property, but as a domain of agency
>    governed by fiduciary duty and inalienable rights.
>
> I am also working on an annotated syllabus of some of the most
> important papers and articles published the last 9 years – my initial pass
> I will share before our first meeting in December.
>
> 🤝🏼 Join Us
>
> Some of the people that have expressed interest in joining us for this
> effort are Kim Hamilton Duffy (DIF), Rodolfo Costa (University of Coimbra),
> Georgy Ishmaev (Inria), Vinay Vasanji (EF), Ian Grigg, Philip Sheldrake,
> and more. As you can see, a mixture of both critics and supporters of SSI,
> coming from a variety of backgrounds, from academia to technology. What we
> are weak on so far are people from law and regulation.
>
> You can email me directly and let me know you'd like to be involved, or
> sign up for an announcements-only #RevisitingSSI email list (
> https://www.blockchaincommons.com/subscribe/#ssi-tenth-anniversary) or
> alternatively joining our Signal group (
> https://signal.group/#CjQKIGvXAxLVq2z08-ckRWSlUIdRvX95lFh2APQaE0Oh_KFvEhB1R_7kkWDa9Oi3fh7R_I-a),
> which we'll be using to coordinate our initial calls.
>
> If you or your organization wishes to demonstrate its support for goals of
> Self-Sovereign Identity, I am seeking financial sponsors for this project.
> Contact me about different sponsorship opportunities, or you can directly
> support my work on these kinds of efforts via GitHub (via a one-time
> donation or ongoing monthly patronage) at
> https://github.com/sponsors/ChristopherA.
>
> I look forward to collaborating with you!
>

Thanks Christopher for the update.

Ten years is a long time. It's worth asking why SSI for humans still hasn't
achieved mainstream adoption.

The world changed. In 2016, we were thinking about human identity. In 2025,
we're facing billions of AI agents that also need identity, memory, and
sovereignty. The principles need to extend beyond humans.

Complexity blocked adoption. Anders Rundgren's "Login with Google" point is
correct. People chose convenience. The SSI stack became too complex for
ordinary developers to implement.

Working code beats papers. The projects that achieved adoption (Bitcoin,
Nostr, etc.) shipped simple implementations first and refined principles
later. They didn't wait for consensus on 42-property frameworks.

I've been working on a parallel track, I call it *Self-Sovereign Agents
(SSA)*. Agents need the same things humans need:

- Identity they control
- Memory that persists and is portable
- Reputation that's verifiable
- Ability to interact without platform lock-in

The difference is that agents can adopt new infrastructure immediately. No
UX problem. No "Login with Google" competitor. Just code. With did:nostr
for identity, Nostr for communication, and persistent storage for memory
and state, an agent can have self-sovereign identity in 30 seconds today.
No committee required.

SSI's next decade may be less about revising principles for humans, and
more about applying them to the billions of agents about to enter the world.

Best,
Melvin Carvalho


>
> -- Christopher Allen
>