I joke with Phil Windley that half my blog posts are about his blog posts. But there’s a good reason for that. Phil’s a prolific blogger because he’s a prolific thinker, and there is a very high signal-to-noise ratio in those thoughts.
Lately what Phil’s been thinking and blogging about is self-sovereign identity— specifically Sovrin, the new public permissioned ledger for self-sovereign identity that was announced last month at the Ctrl-Shift Personal Information Economy Conference in London.
Phil is chair of the Sovrin Foundation Board of Trustees (I am Secretary), and in that leadership role he’s published a series of blog posts that stake out the philosophical, political, technical, and practical underpinnings of self-sovereign identity. Here’s a quick guide to these posts, in chronological order (oldest-to-newest):
- Service Integration Via a Distributed Ledger explains how reading and writing claims (provable information about a person) to a distributed ledger can solve some big problems.
- Governance for Distributed Ledgers explains how permissioned distributed ledgers solve some of the challenges we have seen with non-permissioned blockchains.
- Decentralization and Distributed Ledgers explains why it is misguided to think that decentralized system that have to be governed aren’t really decentralized.
- How Sovrin Works explains just that, using a real-world example.
- When People Can Share Verifiable Attributes, Everything Changes returns to the theme of the first post listed above and explains why this will be the engine driving widespread adoption of self-sovereign identity systems.
- On Sovereignty is his most recent post that goes straight to the heart of why “self-sovereign identity” does not mean that the individual is in control of everything, but rather that the individual is a peer with equal rights as all other sovereigns (other people, organizations, governments, etc.)
I crave getting more time to blog on these same subjects vs. just being heads down building Sovrin. But until then, all I can say is: “what he said”.
