The first Revisiting SSI meeting, on December 2, 2025, was a kickoff with a time friendly for participants in the Americas, Africa, and Europe.
Media & Slides
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Video:
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Slides:
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Also see the transcript for more.
Want to participate? You don’t need to have attended this meeting. Working circles are forming now and welcome new contributors. Learn how to join →
Overview
The main topics were:
Context: The ten-year question
It’s been ten years since “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity” and its ten principles. They’ve been widely accepted. But things have also gone wrong: as Christopher put it, “We hoped to reduce centralized power, but we became indistinguishable from the very systems we set out to disrupt.”
How can we redefine the principles of self-sovereign identity to actually reduce centralized power, as was our original intent?
What Went Wrong: A decade of learning
Christopher identified five critical failures over the past decade.
The movement focused on privacy as an end rather than as a defense against coercive behaviors. It followed the money into legitimate but compromising funding—”DID Web” emerged as decentralized in name only, diluting the term itself. Google and Apple won anyway, with more resources and centralized solutions. Governments prioritized terror, pedophilia, drugs, and money laundering—the “four horsemen”—over the real threat: autocracy and centralized control.
The result, Christopher suggested, is that the SSI movement may have increased centralized power by legitimizing systems that adopted the language but not the substance of self-sovereignty. As he put it: “If we can’t maintain the integrity of what ‘decentralized’ means in our own community, how can we fight for it in the larger world?”
Meanwhile, as Kim Hamilton Duffy noted, standards the community worked on for years are “being reapplied in contexts that don’t achieve the goals” originally intended.
Lenses: 15 ways of seeing SSI
In reviewing critiques of the original principles, we’ve decided that no viewpoint is complete. So instead we offer up 15 “lenses”, each intended to look at the issue of self-sovereign identity in different ways. These are provocations, not conclusions—and the group explicitly rejected defining “identity” upfront. As Juan Caballero argued, identity is “inherently brownfield, inherently contingent.” (For background, see “The Five Mental Models of Identity” from Rebooting Web of Trust.)
Category 1: Foundational Principles & Rights
What makes identity a right rather than a privilege?
- Irreducible Person — Existence before encoding. Dignity as a person comes first; digital identity is always a shadow.
- Anti-Property — Identity cannot be owned or sold
- Right to Transact — Digital participation as constitutional right
- Cryptographic Paradigms — Assumptions that shape possibility
Category 2: Preventing Coercion
How do systems compel behavior and how do we resist?
- Coercion Resistance — Privacy is the shield; coercion resistance is the goal.
- Self-Coercion — When control feels like your own idea
- Choice Architecture — Small choices become structural traps
- Binding Commitments — When constraint enables trust
Category 3: Relational & Contextual Identity
Identity exists in relationship: to others, to context, to scale.
- Relational Autonomy — “I am because we are.” Challenges the overemphasis on “self” in self-sovereign.
- Context Boundaries — Keeping life spheres distinct
- Multi-Scalar Sovereignty — Individual, community, nation
- Stewardship — Caring for those who cannot consent
Category 4: Compliance, Governance & Technical
How do our principles survive contact with law, standards, and power?
- Principles to Compliance — Not everything can be measured
- Regulatory Frameworks — Voluntary erodes to mandatory
- Principal Authority — Restoring accountability to agents
Working Circles: What they produce
Revisiting SSI is organizing working circles, with the intent of producing policy papers, in the style of Christopher’s Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops. To be published, lens briefs must be substantially transformed by circle work—not single-author provocations.
Activity: Breakouts and discussion
The Kickoff Meeting was a working meeting, with the main activity focused on helping people to discover their interests among the lenses and self-organize into groups around them.
Twenty-plus participants joined from Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Austria, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United States—technologists, policy experts, advocates, and academics from organizations including DIF, Blockchain Commons, Holochain, MyData, and the Bitcoin Policy Institute.
Next Steps: Two kickoffs, one community
A second kickoff will occur on December 9, at a time friendly to Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa—for those who could not attend this session. The agenda and process will be the same. Working circles may include participants from both kickoffs.
Phase 1 runs through January: working circles revise lens briefs. Phase 2 (February–April) develops full papers. On April 26, 2026—exactly ten years after the original—revised principles will be published.
Didn’t attend? You can still participate
Working circles are forming now and welcome new members. Here’s how to get involved:
- Watch the video above or skim the transcript to understand the context
- Browse the lens briefs and find one that resonates
- Join the conversation on GitHub Discussions
- Connect with a working circle via the Signal group or email list
See How to Join for participation expectations and recommended reading.
Key Quotes
Four topics generated sufficient interest for short lens breakout groups: Relational Autonomy, the Irreducible Person, Regulatory Frameworks, and Coercion. The following are drawn from group reports after the break-outs:
Relational Autonomy — join the discussion
“Technical systems accelerate a trend toward alienation, undermining the various layers of social belonging, both as internally perceived by those participants, as well as mutually held outside of formal institutional or codified structures. So if we’re not keeping that stuff in mind, it may be further eroded.”
The Irreducible Person — join the discussion
“The harm is that we may end up building systems where people are not properly and universally recognized as a person, right? And that is a fundamental human rights problem if potentially there’s a way how people may be denied their humanity, their personhood.”
“In human history, we’ve often seen atrocities and genocide and whatever as a consequence of dehumanization. So that’s a potential harm, again, if the participants in a system are not universally given this recognition as a person.”
Regulatory Frameworks — join the discussion
“One of the risks of writing this is that 10 years from now, it could look silly because it could be proven totally wrong if it gives concrete suggestions that get taken up and Google and Apple still do an end run around it.”
“If you get to the point of concrete suggestions, then you’re just giving Google and Apple a head start.”
Coercion Resistance — join the discussion
“Simply by acting online, the observations drawn and the conclusions that can be drawn lead us down that path [of coercion], especially when you have platforms controlling things.”
“When you share things online, how can you prevent that from being leveraged for those purposes?”
The Stakes
“Honor Christopher’s intent… work together positively with the goals in mind.”
Kim Hamilton Duffy provided this plea with context: Christopher tried a similar effort five years ago at a Rebooting event in Boston. That attempt failed due to unproductive methods and people talking past each other.
Digital Feudalism
“To me, digital feudalism and centralized platforms leading to surveillance capitalism is the true issue.”
Georg Greve’s closing comment captures the stakes: the Revisiting SSI initiative asks whether self-sovereign identity will become another tool of that feudalism—or a genuine alternative.