Re: Revisiting SSI at Ten -- Preliminary Revised Principles Open for Review

Dear Christopher,

What an excellent set of principles.  I have a couple of thoughts but they are not easily reflected as edits to the document because they rather apply to the whole document.  So I’ll write them here for consideration.  Feel free to ignore or tell me what I might do to help reflect these in the text (or related text).

Express as model law.  My first thought is that these principles, whilst a laudable statement of what we’d all love to see, are not going to be implemented by just wishing they were true because some of them (deliberately) are opposite to what a selfish commercial interest might want.  Therefore many or all of them would become real and enforceable only when they are reflected in national law.  To that end, it’s helpful to write them as “model law” in legally defensible language that is more or less ready to selectively cut and paste into national regulations. This is what the UN often does with treaties and actual model laws like this one - https://uncitral.un.org/en/texts/ecommerce/modellaw/electronic_transferable_records.  It’s one of many model law documents from UN/CITRAL. The SSI principles aren’t quite written this way.  Not suggesting to change the principles but maybe consider an accompanying document that is written as implementable model law?  Acknowledging the high risk of hallucination and mistakes, here’s what chatGPT thinks needs to happen before these principles could become model law - https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69eeb8b7a374819190bb1337327f976f 
SSI Principles are for people not things.  My second thought is that these principles reflect how we’d like to see technologies like DIDs and VCs used with people to protect their rights and privacy and so on.  However these same technologies can be very usefully applied to inanimate things - like an ocean consignment where the consignment would have a DID and the Bill of Lading for that consignment would be a VC.  Ocean bills are negotiable instruments that are explicitly designed to allow trading of the goods while at see. So we want the tach to allow trading of goods but most certainly not the trading of people. The ocean bill is a pair document that has stubbornly resisted digitalisation because of the difficulty of finding an open and interoperable way to verify integrity (easy with VCs) and record transfer of ownership (possible with NFTs but not very interoperable - so DIDs with key event histories offer an alternative).  However the valid application of the same SSI technologies to this domain of the shipment of things would directly contravene several of the principles - with good reason.  So maybe the principles (especially if translated to model law) need to clearly scope their applicability to people and not to things?

Kind regards,

Steve Capell
UN/CEFACT Vice-Chair
steve.capell@gmail.com
+61 410437854



> On 26 Apr 2026, at 6:22 pm, Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:
> 
> On April 26, 2016, I published The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity <https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity/> and closed it with a request: "I seek your assistance in taking these principles to the next level."
> 
> Ten years to the day, I am publishing a first community draft as a major revision:
> 
>     https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P13Wy1plHWXIonErNXSG8R-n9L4fWTtUzglAcObNSXs/
> 
> A stable archival copy is mirrored:
> 
>     https://revisitingssi.com/library/ssi-principles-2026-redline/
> 
> The draft preserves the 2016 language verbatim wherever it survives, so the continuity remains visible alongside revision. It organizes the principles into four layers -- foundational, relational, technical, political -- and adds six new principles:
> 
>   * Inalienability
>   * Cognitive Liberty
>   * Relational Autonomy
>   * Stewardship
>   * Equity
>   * Anti-Coercive Design
> 
> The revisions grew out of five months of discussions at RevisitingSSI.com, with contributions from Kim Hamilton Duffy (DIF), Vinay Vasanji (EF), Georgy Ishmaev (Inria), Martina Kolpondinos, Ian Grigg, Philip Sheldrake, Matthew Schutte, and many others.
> 
> I am publishing in redline form, on this anniversary, precisely because it is unfinished. My hope is to iterate it with this community and others over the coming months and present a more mature version at the Global Digital Collaboration (GDC) event in Geneva this September.
> 
> Four ways to participate
> 
> 1. Read and comment in the Google Doc. Every clause is open for inline comment.
> 
> 2. Find me next week (April 28-30) at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) in Mountain View, CA. I will be there all three days and plan to propose at least session -- more if there is interest.
> 
> 3. Join me next week when I am a guest in the CCG call, May 5, 9:00-9:50 PDT / 12:00-12:50 EDT / 18:00-18:50 CEST (16:00 UTC).
> 
>     Event: https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/6c106024-7f5f-4297-972b-18af6432aaef/20260505T120000/
> 
> 4. Attend the dedicated Revisiting SSI community discussion on May 20 (10am PDT / 7pm CEST). Meeting access is shared on the Signal group and the announcements list: https://www.blockchaincommons.com/dispatches/ssi-invite/#-join-us
> 
> The work between now and Geneva depends on this community pushing back on what is imprecise, challenging what is wrong, and adding what is missing.
> 
> -- Christopher Allen