Welcome to the Revisiting Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) Principles series of online workshops.

This initiative marks the ten-year anniversary of the original SSI principles in 2016. In the decade since their publication, SSI has evolved from a provocative idea into infrastructure deployed by governments, companies, communities, and open protocols. At the same time, the sociotechnical environment around identity has been transformed by new technologies and new platform models that challenge the assumptions of 2016.

The moment is right for us to ask:

  • What has worked?
  • What has drifted?
  • What harms or risks have emerged?
  • And what must evolve for SSI’s next decade?

This project is a multi-phase, year-long effort to reassess, update, and strengthen the Ten Principles of SSI.

How to Join

Zoom links will be shared only through the following channels:

New participants must join one of these channels to receive meeting invitations. If you cannot attend either kickoff meeting, join the Signal group to connect with Working Circles forming after the meeting.

See “Join Us” for more information on participation.

Phase 1 Goals

Our goals in Phase 1 are to:

  • Map the problem space through interdisciplinary perspectives
  • Explore new lenses that reveal blind spots or opportunities
  • Develop brief scoping papers (Lens Exploration Briefs) that seed deeper research and technical work
  • Surface emerging harms, risks, and tensions in digital identity systems
  • Build shared understanding across diverse backgrounds
  • Move toward rough consensus on worthy insights about the principles
  • Inform both an updated set of SSI principles and other high-level strategies for reducing societal harms from digital identity systems

We are not writing standards, specifications, protocols, or product designs at this stage. We are instead engaging in high-level conceptual, ethical, and strategic inquiry, the groundwork on which principled SSI work must rest.

Kickoff Meetings

To accommodate global participation, Phase 1 begins with two Zoom kickoff meetings:

Kickoff Meeting 1 — EU/US time compromise

  • Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025
  • 10:00am PT / 7:00pm CET

Kickoff Meeting 2 — EU/Tokyo time compromise

  • Tuesday, December 9th, 2025 (Tokyo local)
  • 3:00pm Tokyo / 7:00am CET / (10:00pm PT Monday for the host)

Who Is Christopher Allen?

Christopher Allen is an Internet trust architect, entrepreneur, and long-time advocate for human dignity and autonomy online. He co-authored the IETF Transport Layer Security (TLS) standard, helped shape early decentralized identity ecosystems, and authored the first articulation of the Ten Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity in 2016.

Christopher is the founder and moderator of the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops and the Principal Architect at Blockchain Commons. He has spent decades convening interdisciplinary communities to explore decentralized identity, human-centered digital wallets, governance models, rights-preserving infrastructure, and open research.

Contact

For more information: ChristopherA@LifeWithAlacrity.com