WELCOME TO
The Self Project
I’ve been thinking about identity-related topics for many years. It has been a pet project of mine. It’s so important to computing. We use emails, user names, handles, accounts, etc. for everything. And with social media, our identities become entwined with this reality that is much less virtual than we think.
Many years ago, as a young engineer I worked on a project called Digital Me while working at Novell, Inc, we believed that we were building the future of identity, where a person was in control of their own information and used the concept of cards (like a business card) to decide what to share with whom. Of course, at that time, the idea was to win the Directory wars with a ubiquitous technology play, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, with a decentralized spin, I imagine many opportunities to leverage those concepts. I’m particularly intrigued by the application of self-sovereign identities in the world of web3. I’ve been following with great interest the work the boys at sovrin have been doing.
Rapid Growth In
IN the WEB3 world.
Fast forward some 10 years or so and as we were building a cloud-based marketplace, we started working on being able to identify people more precisely to avoid fraudulent behavior towards the person, or from the person (company, or “thing” in the IoT sense of things). This led us to start using Social Media as an informative source of data to calculate a person’s character and reputation. Were these people authority figures? did they tend to be frivolous? And what about their influence? Did people read their posts (Reach)? Did people interact with them (engagement)? Were people likely to forward or share their posts, take action (influencers)? All these metrics were tied to individual gestures and actions.
Although the marketplace did not materialize, Many years later as I started to work on Artificial Emotional Intelligence I was faced again with solving a similar problem, although by this time I had worked on many digital identity systems, had more life experience, and trying to “teach” a software machine to think and feel more like a human made me think about the problem from a much deeper perspective. The idea that an individual has many self identities, many ways that we see ourselves was a bit of a new realization for me. The question “Who am I?” Is really hard to answer as we can see from this famous scene.
The reality is that we have a hard time identifying ourselves without some context, i.e. our work, our friends, our roles, in essence, we identify ourselves through our relationships.
The Rise of the
Machines
Then another idea started with the question of a digital automaton (say a software agent) representing a human being. A virtual reality avatar of sorts. A software machine somewhere in the cloud, that never slept and represented me, much like the idea of the digitalMe. And now with much more advanced technologies and methodologies could we actually create the first of many technologies that could capture to some degree the notion of virtual “me”?
This now moves to sociology, I started working on the idea of emotional intelligence where the first tenet is self-awareness. Knowing ourselves is so key to our relationships. Even in the crude social models of reputation management in use today: people and software use the number of “likes”, mentions, and forwards (and followers among others) to calculate some quantitative measure of how the world around me sees “me”. But still, somehow we missed the mark of finding the “me” in the jumble. That company tried to build a social marketplace.
In the “real” world, a lot of my reputation depends on what I choose to say and do, and certainly there is some of that in the digital world, however, many times others can drive the perception of “me” without any choice of mine. And this is not a simple matter of some social misunderstanding, a few years ago, I received notice from my bank that my accounts were being shut down. When I went to the bank they asked me for my information and proceeded to tell me that I wasn’t “me”! Well then who am I? “We don’t know, but your Social doesn’t match your name.” The bank manager knew me, she actually lived in the same neighborhood as I did, so I begged her to let me know the name of the person who had stolen my SSN. Despite the fact that she had known me 10 years, she was not just reticent, she was suspicious … maybe I had stolen the social security number from someone else in the past. I went to the social security office, they told me the same thing, you’re not you. When I showed them my social security card, my driver’s license and other documentation they told me, how do we know you didn’t steal the social security number? It took me almost 3 weeks to get my bank accounts restored, and 6 months to get my social security number recovered. The problem had to do with someone dying and a system bug somehow assigning my social security number to the dead person, at least that’s what they explained. Since this was a legal authority, the system, meaning the banks and everyone using the number as the source of identity, had no problem accepting the deceased’s name as the right name for that social security number, after all what dead person is going to complain?
Decentralized
Identity and trust
To me, web3 really prescribes decentralization to become true to its etho, and in my opinion this all really spells peer-to-peer much more than typical client-server or even cloud-centric models. And because of this belief has lead me to create a project around the idea of a project to create a self-sovereign identity model for trust. And this means OURUPCOMING EVENTS
Degen Wallet
A web3 wallet built to support the demands of the scale and security of the decentralized masses. In this series of lectures we will uncover the significance and importance of security and scale to web3.
The Ether
In this series of lectures we dive into Etherum and what we believe needs to happen to solve some of the challenges it faces.
Thank you
We want to thank our sponsors, P2P Tech, Inc., the P2P Cash DAO, The Monsoon Blockchain Corporation, and all the individuals who are contributing and will continue to contribute to our effort: