An important factor in the success of self-sovereign identity (SSI) has been the recognition that interoperability via open standards is essential. Contributors to this open ecosystem include huge players like Microsoft and IBM.

If you’re a fan of movies about the early PC wars (e.g. Pirates of Silicon Valley), it’s wonderful to see this sort of cooperation. SSI contributors/builders recognize that the stakes are extremely high with identity solutions.

Fortunately, non-tin-foil-hat wearing individuals are becoming increasingly aware of the problems caused by companies treating data irresponsibly…whether through honey-pot data leaks or 20-page EULAs that only increase opacity.

In January I…

I’m excited to join the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) steering committee on behalf of Learning Machine. To introduce myself and Learning Machine to the DIF community, I wanted to describe Learning Machine’s background/interest in decentralized identity (or, more specifically, self-sovereign identity) for ensuring an individual’s control over their data. I’ll highlight the initiatives Learning Machine is especially eager to champion at DIF, lending our experience and use cases from educational/occupational credentialing.

Learning Machine is deeply committed to recipient-centric credentialing. We incubated Blockcerts with MIT Media Lab in 2016 as an open source, open standard for creating, issuing, and verifying digital…

Written by Kim Hamilton Duffy and Natalie Smolenski and presented at ePIC 2017 in Bologna Italy.

Introduction

We are living through an historical moment in which momentum toward the unlimited collection and transferability of personal data by nation-states, industry leaders, and software providers is increasing irreversibly. Regulating this momentum from a policy standpoint will have at best limited effects so long as economic incentives and technological infrastructures collude to provide frictionless, one-way transparency into the lives of citizens, employees, customers, and learners. …