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Christopher Allen

Blockchain & Decentralized Identity Architect — Internet Cryptography Pioneer — Co-author TLS Security Standard — Collaborative Tools & Patterns

Alacrity, noun. From the Latin alacritas meaning promptitude. Similar in meaning to its synonyms Velocity and Celerity, all three mean quickness in action or movement. Alacrity stresses promptness in response to a suggestion or command, cheerful and eager willingness, appropriate quickness, and in general the beginning of fast movement.

Life with Alacrity is the personal blog of Christopher Allen, covering topics of community, decentralized identity, collective choice, online privacy, and more. Popular articles include “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, “The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Size”, “Dunbar & World of Warcraft”, and the Community by the Numbers series.

Christopher is available for personal consulting engagements on decentralized digital trust, online collaboration, identity management, digital assets, smart contracts, and human-rights privacy. Please email if you are interested.

Most Recent Post

2025-11-12: Announcing the 10-Year SSI Revision Project

In 2016, I published The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity (https://www.lifewithalacrity.com/article/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity/) and with it proposed ten foundational principles for digital identity systems. These principles were centered on human dignity, agency, and consent and quickly became a touchstone in the emerging world of Self-Sovereign Identity.

At the time, I asked for support in refining those principals. And, we tried: at ID2020, Rebooting the Web of Trust, IIW, and elsewhere. But for nearly a decade, the original principles have remained largely unchanged, inspirational yet sometimes misunderstood.

Now, in 2025, as the Self-Sovereign Identity movement turns ten next year, I’m renewing that invitation. And I’m asking for your participation.

📌 The 10-Year Revision Project

The 10-year SSI Revision Project is an effort to revisit and refine the original SSI principles, not as a rigid standard, but as a living framework for people designing, governing, and deploying identity infrastructure that respects and protects the people it serves.

SSI is no longer a theory. Its infrastructure has been adopted by governments, companies, communities, and protocols. As that adoption accelerates, the foundational values must evolve to meet today’s ethical, legal, and technical challenges including coercion, use of biometrics, AI agency, exclusion by design, and gamified behavioral manipulation.

The goal is ultimately to revisit old principles and to propose new ones while making a renewed call to protect the dignity of all identity holders.

📅 Join the Collaboration

To support this project, I’ll be hosting a series of open online calls over the next year to co-develop and discuss revised principles, new proposals, and system guidance. These sessions will welcome technologists, designers, researchers, regulators, and community stewards from across the SSI and identity ecosystem.

The first of these will be December 2nd, at 10am PT (7pm CET) for maximum availability from EU to West Coast. Another session friendlier to Asia/Pacific time zones is planned for the second week of December (time TBD based on participants).

The goal of these first two meetings is to discuss opportunities for different topics, with the goal of writing up some initial rough “concept papers” (ala RWOT’s “topic papers”) to scope some of ideas that people have of what needs to be done.

Hopefully you’ll join us for these initial calls. No longer commitment is required, but the intent is to investigate your participation in writing some papers on this topic by May! However, the most important thing is ultimately that your ideas and your feedback help to shape the continued development of Self-Sovereign Identity.

Please let me know that you’re interested in joining us!

🧭 Team Topics

If we get enough participation, I expect we may split up into teams, to cover some of the various topics that bear discussion as we rethink SSI.

Some early broad topics that we are considering currently are:

  1. Beyond Property: Principal Authority and the Legal Foundation of SSI. Agency law, principal authority, and revamping or expanding the SSI principles based on them.
  2. Anti-Coercive Design and Cognitive Liberty. Avoiding coercive design, which will likely include more academic discussions of philosophy and may reveal new principles.
  3. From Principles to Properties: Operationalizing SSI. A deep dive into the CSSPS 42-property framework published in IEEE Access, looking for objective design principles that might contribute to SSI. And forward from that.
  4. More Than a Digital Shadow: Rewriting Principle 1 – Existence. Reclaiming the original intent of the first principle, that every person has an identity that precedes any digital system, drawing on generative identity, Ubuntu philosophy, feminist sovereignty, decolonial theory, legal personhood guarantees, and real-world harms.

The intent is to write articles on each of these topics, and hopefully some more, by May 2026, in time for the anniversary and to use those articles to revise, revamp, and expand the original principles. But to get there from here, we need to start coordinating now!

🌱 Why This Matters

SSI has always been more than a technical spec. It’s a movement for restoring dignity, agency, and trust in a digital world that too often erodes all three. As its adoption spreads, we must ensure that the principles at its foundation still serve the people they were meant to protect.

Let’s not let another ten years pass before we act.

📙 Requested Reading

I’ve written a number of articles about SSI over the years. I think three of them are particularly important to these discussions, and I suggest that people read them as part of this process:

I am also working on an annotated syllabus of some of the most important papers and articles published the last 9 years. I’ll share my initial pass before our first meeting in December.

🤝🏼 Join Us

Some of the people that have expressed interest in joining us for this effort are Kim Hamilton Duffy (DIF), Rodolfo Costa (University of Coimbra), Georgy Ishmaev (Inria), Vinay Vasanji (EF), Ian Grigg, and Philip Sheldrake. This includes a mixture of both critics and supporters of SSI, coming from a variety of backgrounds, from academia to technology. What we are weak on so far are people from law and regulation.

You can email me directly and let me know you’d like to be involved, or sign up for an announcements-only #RevisitingSSI email list or alternatively join our Signal group, which we’ll be using to coordinate our initial calls.

If you or your organization wishes to demonstrate its support for goals of Self-Sovereign Identity, I am seeking financial sponsors for this project. Contact me about different sponsorship opportunities, or you can directly support my work on these kinds of efforts via GitHub (via a one-time donation or ongoing monthly patronage) at https://github.com/sponsors/ChristopherA.

I look forward to collaborating with you!




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