Kaliya YoungIdentity Woman | Co-Lead, Project WeaveBeyond Wallets: Decentralized Trust Graphs and the Fourth Generation of Digital Identity
Digital identity is entering a third generation of protocols. The first, OpenID and OAuth, let people log in across websites. The second, Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials, put credentials issued by institutions into people's wallets. The third, the decentralized trust graph, lets people and communities vouch for each other directly, peer to peer, without the state in the middle.
The higher education identity community already knows how to do a hard part of this: building registries, and directories of trust registries, so that institutions can recognize one another. That expertise translates to civil society.
Kaliya will explore what becomes possible when identity runs sideways instead of top-down: re-weaving a relational fabric rooted in place, where people and communities hold their own trust and use it for local deliberation, sense-making and democracy.
Picture a watershed where food co-ops, tool libraries, mutual aid groups and land trusts each vouch for their own members. A bioregional registry, kept by those same groups through peer referral, lists whose vouches the others accept. Members are recognized across all of them and can deliberate and decide together, with no state ID and no platform in between.