#SSI101: An Introductory Course on Self-Sovereign Identity
The Spherity Way
Most of the time when someone first hears about “self-sovereign identity,” “decentralized identity,” or “blockchain identity,” they naturally assume the terms refer to some esoteric topic far enough away from their domain of experience and expertise that they can safely leave it to the experts. “Identity,” after all, is an important, hotly debated, and nearly undefinable core concept of human life. Outside of a few philosophers, social scientists, and a tiny minority of specialized technologists, however, most people feel uncomfortable making any definitive or authoritative statements about identity. Who would volunteer to express opinions about something that can so easily offend, and which we rarely think about when it is working well for us? As for the adjectives “self-sovereign,” “decentralized,” and “blockchain,” these are no less controversial, no less stable, and no less likely to intimidate, to offend, or to confuse.
I do not believe, however, that most people can safely leave it to the experts, even though I am one of those experts. On the contrary, I believe “SSI” is worth learning about, worth getting familiar with, and worth getting excited about. For this reason, I have tried to outline a quick tour through the basic “building blocks” needed to understand what SSI is, how SSI is different from other “regimes” or systems of organizing identity, and what Spherity does with SSI. Half as a fun way to structure these essays, and half out of habit, I will refer to this series of writing as a “curriculum,” and I will use North-American-style course numbers of the kind that were standard in my former life as a college professor.
Here, then, is an overview of the topics that will be covered in the coming weeks in our “SSI 101” series:
- Identities & Identifiers
- An Overview of Non-Human Identities
- Self-Sovereignty and Autonomy
- Attest, Identify, Authenticate, and Verify
- What Exactly Gets Written on a Blockchain?
- Verifiable Credentials & Data Portability
- Encryption & Correlation
- How Open Standards Get Made
To facilitate your and our sharing of these links and cross-linking back to them from other writings, I will structure each “glossary entry” listed above as a distinct Medium post with a permanent URL. Full disclosure, they might get more detailed (or illustrated) at some point in the future. They can be read in any order, although they are easiest understood by the true beginner in the linear sequence conveyed in the “previous”/“next” links at the top of each entry.
For the reader who is already comfortable with the 101 topics, members from across the Spherity team will be collaboratively writing articles for the rest of 2019 that walk you through the specific data needs of various industries we have studied closely with partners and clients, and even in our past lives pre-Spherity. These longer articles comprise the “special topics” in the 200-level sequence of our SSI curriculum. Having read two or three of those, hopefully at least one of the 300-level will be of interest and accessible: there, we will cover speculative economics, machine futures, the data needs of an increasingly circular economy, data marketplaces, and other “advanced topics” in SSI. At this level, things get a little academic and we stand on the shoulders of many giants, mostly deep thinkers within the SSI community or the software sector generally.
So let’s start at the beginning, then, with identities and identifiers, the smallest indivisible unit of SSI.
