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

Hello,

I tried to compress this but it's still long, so here's a TLDR: I fear that the way these principles are worded leans too heavily on an individualist view of society and not enough on a collectivist view of society. I would like to ask how some of my concerns around the need for accountability and enforcement in digital systems are addressed by this set of principles, and ensure that they offer a balanced view of the tension between individual rights and collective rights.



I fear I might come across as adversarial to the spirit of these principles. I don't know how to dissipate or manage that while saying what I want to say. Or rather, asking what I want to ask. I am fully in tune with the spirit of these principles (I think what I'm asking about is more what is missing from them, or how they might be applied to certain situations), and I also echo some of the mentioned concerns, particularly about real world applicability. But I also understand principles happen before application. I see, like most of us do, that concentrated power accumulates even more power and captures well intended structures to perpetuate and make "injustices" worse. However, I think some of those are also enabled by philosophical oversimplifications that allow bad and chaotic actors to use systems in unjust ways. I am paying attention to this community because I care about getting this right, but I am still inexperienced in it. Think of the rest of my email as me asking you to tell me where I'm wrong.

I am talking about the tension between individualism and collectivism. These principles, to me, come more heavily from an individualist perspective than a collectivist one. I don't claim that they or Christopher are saying this, but if I squint a little, it almost feels like the document is saying "if everyone has total individual freedom, the world will be a good place". I don't think that is true.

If I witness a murder, I expect to be able to go to the police about the incident, they'd investigate it and, hopefully, put the murderer in prison. Normally, this will be against the murderer's will. I fear that a direct application of the individualist view of these principles can effectively make this impossible in the digital world. My main question is: How do you balance the self-sovereign principles protecting individuals with collective needs? A few points:


  *
I understand that authority entities (e.g. police or government) can become corrupt and a vector for concentrated power; and that this is one of the issues that self-sovereign identity is trying to address. This is a good and critical goal, and I am not advocating for large centralized power necessarily. Authorities are tools that collectives use. It is the collective that holds the actual right to hold individuals accountable. But the tension between the right of the collective to accountability (through whatever means necessary, it does not have to be central authorities necessarily), and the right of individuals to protect themselves and make choices, need to be carefully balanced. Full individualism leads to no accountability. Full collectivism leads to repression.
  *
This is a real issue in the world right now. This is a philosophical argument but it is grounded in real things that happen now which are also huge problems. To give just one example, cryptocurrency technologies are great theoretical tools that have a lot of really valuable uses, but they have also been used by bad and chaotic actors to avoid accountability. Paying for criminal services, tax avoidance, insider trading, manipulative pyramid schemes, and more, harm the collective by exploiting a lack of accountability, and ironically ultimately allow some of those individuals to capture the centralized authorities that do exist.
  *
I am not advocating for centralization necessarily, I am advocating for accountability. Or at least, that the principles should allow for systems to enforce that accountability, rather than demonize them. I believe this can be achieved with reduced centralization, making it harder to capture power. Also, not all systems that fall within these principles need to care about accountability and enforcement, but it needs to be at least possible to do so.
  *
This issue doesn't go away just by having better individual rights. Enforcement is necessary, and enforcement requires and depends on systems that have accountability mechanisms. We can make it harder for people to murder, steal, manipulate, or coerce, but we cannot fully eliminate it. Avoiding the discussions about failure modes and how to deal with them would make any set of principles awfully incomplete and not functional.
  *
I understand that a balance must be struck. The same way you can't guarantee total individual freedom, you can't guarantee total collective safety either. I am not advocating for strict guarantees, but I want to make sure that the principles at least acknowledge the tension.
  *
I honestly believe that being more explicit about this tension in the community might actually reduce the power of destructive bad faith arguments. To put a very concrete example, classic "but what about the children?" arguments that back abominations like the UK's Online Safety Act would be weaker if we acknowledged the concerns they are weaponizing more clearly and addressed them more sensibly.

At this point I want to defuse my tone once more. I am a newcomer to this community and an inexperienced person in this world as a whole. Some things in this email may be easily debunkable and/or factually incorrect. If so, please point them out to me. I genuinely would be happy to come out of this with a reading of these principles where I can actually see how what I am saying is being taken into account or why some of my arguments are not really that strong. It's just hard for me to phrase things in a different way than I have because I don't have all that language and experience. I am here to learn, I promise. I just currently feel that this seems missing or actually in opposition to the strong and almost absolute wording of some of the principles as they are right now, and I hope that's just a lack of understanding on my part.

Very sincerely,


Juan Casanova Jaquete

Assistant Professor – School of Engineering and Physical Sciences – Data Science GA Programme

j.casanova@hw.ac.uk<mailto:j.casanova@hw.ac.uk> – Earl Mountbatten Building 1.31 (Heriot Watt Edinburgh campus)



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________________________________
From: Michael Herman (Trusted Digital Web) <mwherman@parallelspace.net>
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2026 16:54
To: steve capell <steve.capell@gmail.com>; Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com>
Cc: Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Revisiting SSI at Ten -- Preliminary Revised Principles Open for Review

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Continued...human curiosity...

P4: Expand to 7-8 principles

R4: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69ef85fe3b8081919f21065cc6ea33d9



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________________________________
From: Michael Herman (Trusted Digital Web) <mwherman@parallelspace.net>
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2026 9:41:43 AM
To: steve capell <steve.capell@gmail.com>; Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com>
Cc: Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Revisiting SSI at Ten -- Preliminary Revised Principles Open for Review

Human Context: Whenever I see a set of categories, dimensions, principles, etc., my First Principles mindset asks:

  *
How well does the proposed set represent an **orthogonal spanning set** covering the particular subject area?

ChatGPT Verification-First Analysis

Acknowledgement: None of this analysis would have been possible without the 1000s of person-hours of human effort that were invested in creation of the text of the 16 Principles of SSI.

P1: How orthogonal and complete is this spanning set of 16 Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity?https://revisitingssi.com/library/ssi-principles-2026-redline/


R1. https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69ef7d9403048191b8be54a58f49d72b


Acknowledgement: Orthogonality may not have been one of the original goals; I believe completeness is.

Note: These responses are long.


P2. Reduce the 16 principles into a truly orthogonal minimal basis

R2: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69ef7d9403048191b8be54a58f49d72b



P3: Derive a testable scoring framework for real SSI systems against these 6 axes

R3: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69ef811ac290819197f97b5f0c6eb285



Human Summary to follow...

Michael Herman

Decentralized Dissident

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________________________________
From: steve capell <steve.capell@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2026 7:33:46 PM
To: Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com>
Cc: Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: 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

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