Mini Resume Card for Conference Season
Between the business of the March/April conference season and leaving Blackphone, I’ve run out of business cards. Rather than rush to print a bunch of new ...
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Echoes from History II
This article, like “Echoes from History: Designing Self-Sovereign Identity with Care”, is drawn from a book I have in process called FOREMEMBRANCE, which c...
Echoes from History
This article was originally published as an advance reading for RWOT12 in Köln, Germany on August 9, 2023. It has been slightly edited for this reprint. ...
Musings of a Trust Architect: A Layperson’s Intro to Schnorr
ABSTRACT: Schnorr signatures have been a long time coming, but now that they’re finally here, they open up broad new cryptographic frontiers, including the i...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Least & Necessary Design Patterns
ABSTRACT: The principles of least privilege and least authority are core computer security principles that can minimize attacks. Not only can they be exte...
Self-Sovereign Computing
ABSTRACT: Self-Sovereign Computing is a transformative paradigm designed to empower individuals to take command of their digital journey and to uphold t...
Musings of a Trust Architect: The Origins of Self-Sovereign Identity
ABSTRACT: The idea of Self-Sovereign Identity emerged in 2016, but it has inspirations dating back centuries. This article explores the historic evolution...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Open Silicon
ABSTRACT: Drawing inspiration from Ken Thompson’s seminal work, Reflections on Trusting Trust, there are deep-rooted challenges in establishing trust in c...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Problems of Cryptographic Agility
ABSTRACT: Cryptographic agility was once seen as a desirable goal for computer security, but increasingly problems such as high costs, bad interactions, a...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Data Minimization & Selective Disclosure
I have been struggling for a while to communicate my framing of definitions for Data Minimization and Selective Disclosure, which are privacy-focused data-pr...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Progressive Trust
A New Approach to Building Trust in Decentralized Systems Musings of a Trust Architect is a series of articles by Life with Alacrity author and Blockchain C...
Private Key Disclosure: A Needless Threat to Rights and Assets
UPDATE 2023-02-16: This bill has passed the Wyoming Assembly 41-13, a day after the Wyoming Senate passed it by a vote of 31-0. If Wyoming Governor Mark Gord...
Principal Authority: A New Perspective on Self-Sovereign Identity
This summer, we’ve been iterating through an article intended to talk about the success that Blockchain Commons has had working with the Wyoming legislature ...
Self-Sovereign Identity: 5 Years On
ABSTRACT: On April 26, 2016, Christopher released “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, a foundational article on SSI. Five years on, self-sovereign iden...
Smarter Signatures: Experiments in Verifications
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline ABSTRACT Technologies like the Web of Trust and PKI lay the foundation for identity on the internet: they ma...
The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity
Today I head out to a month-long series of events associated with identity: I’m starting with the 22st (!) Internet Identity Workshop next week; then I’m sp...
Defining “Participatory Ecosystem” — Grow the Pie, Not Slice It!
A blog on social software, collaboration, trust, security, privacy, and internet tools by Christopher Allen. Defining “Participatory Ecosystem” — Grow the P...
A Revised “Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Governance of the Commons
A Revised “Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Governance of the Commons” The traditional economic definition of “the commons” are those resources th...
The Four Kinds of Privacy
(This article has been cross-posted in Medium) Ssh by Katie Tegtmeyer CC-BY (crop2)
10 Design Principles for Governing the Commons
In 2009, Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in Economics for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”.
Dyads & Triads — The Smallest Teams
(By Christopher Allen with Elyn Andersson and Shannon Appelcline) Two years ago, the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (www.BGI.edu) faculty gathered to radic...
Introduction to the Social Web (Reading List#SW4SX)
These are the initial required readings for the first two weeks of my Using the Social Web for Social Change class (hashtag #SW4SX) that I teach in the MBA i...
Using the Social Web for Social Change (Syllabus#SW4SX)
This fall with be the 4th year, and the 5th time that I’ve taught the class Using the Social Web for Social Change (hashtag #SW4SX) in the MBA in Sustainable...
Tools for Ignition & HyperCard’s 25th Anniversary
Over my lifetime I have encountered a number of “tools for ignition” — a phrase which I use to describe innovative products that have empowered people and cr...
A Relationship With Work
I am a lifetime entrepreneur. Even when working for large organizations I find my approach to be entrepreneurial (what my mentor Gifford Pinchot would call I...
Managing your Social Graph with Google+ [Google Plus]
With Google+ almost two weeks into its test phase, conversation about this new social network service seems to be going in circles.
Facilitating Small Gatherings Using “The Braid”
I was musing as I was preparing for next week’s Intensive at BGI that I have 21 students in my class, an uncomfortable size. That’s because it lies between...
Password Best Practices
Passwords are very important for maintaining your online identity, because they ensure that no one else can access your accounts and do things that you would...
Creating Shared Language and Shared Artifacts
We live in a world of conversation, of language; all full of words. Mastery of language requires learning the meanings of thousands of words. The average na...
Community by the Numbers, Part III: Power Laws
In my first article in this series I talked about community numbers: how the sizes of groups ultimately affect their success (or failure). However what I dis...
Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles
In my previous post, I talked about the limits on sizes of tightly-knit communities. These group limits are closely related to a number of interesting person...
Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds
We often think of communities as organic creatures, which come into existence and grow on their own. However, the truth is they are fragile blossoms. Althou...
Collective Choice: Experimenting with Ratings
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline
Ratings: Who Do You Trust?
My colleague, Shannon Appelcline, has been working on a game rating system for RPGnet. This has resulted in real-world application of the principles for desi...
Using 5-Star Rating Systems
In Collective Choice: Rating Systems I discuss ratings scales of various sorts, from eBay’s 3-point scale to RPGnet’s double 5-point scale, and BoardGame Gee...
Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text
I’ve been a moderator/host/forum leader for various bulletin boards and other online communities since the early 1980s; first on CompuServe, later on GEnie...
On Being an Angel
In the last month or so I’ve received a number of links to Life With Alacrity as a venture capital blog, and to myself as a venture capitalist.
Collective Choice: Competitive Ranking Systems
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline
Systems for Collective Choice
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline
Dunbar Number & Group Cohesion
There is some more excellent research this week by Nick Yee and Nicolas Ducheneaut in the PlayOn blog. Again, their research provides good insight into socia...
Dunbar & World of Warcraft
In my initial blog entry on the Dunbar Number I presented some statistics on group sizes based on the online game Ultimata Online. In it you could clearly se...
Collective Choice: Rating Systems
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline [This is the second of a series of articles on collective choice, co-written by my collegue Shannon Appelclin...
Future Topics
I’ve been working on an ambitious list of topics that I’d like to cover over the next year. I offer them to you here so you can have some idea the areas that...
Dunbar, Altruistic Punishment, and Meta-Moderation
In my post about the Dunbar Number I offered some evidence on the levels of satisfaction of various group sizes based on some empirical data from online game...
Dunbar Triage: Too Many Connections
As someone who now has over 171 professional “connections” in my LinkedIn Profile, 198 “friends” on Orkut, many more non-intersecting friends and acquaintan...
Tracing the Evolution of Social Software
The term ‘social software’, which is now used to define software that supports group interaction, has only become relatively popular within the last two or ...
Intimacy Gradient and Other Lessons from Architecture
A number of my posts have been about integrating different domains of knowledge in order to better understand how human behavior should be incorporated in th...
Progressive Trust
I believe that as we evolve social software to better serve our needs and the needs of the groups that we are involved in, we need to figure out how to apply...
Four Kinds of Privacy
I’ve been thinking about the nature of privacy a lot lately.
Great Social Networking Posts
While I’ve been out attending the SXSW Music, Movie and Interactive Conference there has been a flurry of high-quality postings about Social Networking.
The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
Lately I’ve been noticing the spread of a meme regarding “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 that I believe is misunderstanding of his ideas.
Security & Cryptography:The Bad Business of Fear
As I head out next week to the RSA Conference I realized that it has been 13 years since I attended the first one. I remember fondly the potential and power ...
Hand-Crafting My FOAF
While at eTech, I attended a number of “social software” sessions. One thing I heard was a persistent call from folk like Marc Canter for all the vendors to ...
Looking at Wiki
I’ve not just been spending time looking at social networking services, I’ve also been digging deeper into wiki. I’ve still got more to go, but some of these...
My Advice to Social Networking Services
I have now had CEOs of three different social networks send me emails asking me to compare Orkut to their service. I’ve not had a chance to dig deeply into g...
Followup on Orkut
I’ve read of emails, Orkut messages, and blog postings since my post yesterday, so I thought I would share some with you.
Insecurity at Orkut
Like many others, I’ve been paying attention to Orkut in the last couple of weeks. I’ve answered more requests to be “friends” on Orkut then I have of any of...
Followup to “Evaluating Social Network Services”
I’ve received a number of replies and pointers after posting my Evaluating Social Network Services here last Tuesday. Here are a few:
Evaluating Social Network Services
After a week where I met a number of bloggers and social network / social software people, I decided to try to update my various networks at Ryze, Tribe.Net,...
socialmedia
General Advice about the Heartbleed Bug in SSL
Advice to SysAdmins & Managers about Heartbleed Bug in SSL
Danah Boyd asks “Is Oculis Rift Sexist”?
To be persuasive, you need to understand “Identity Protective Cognition”
World Backup Day
Good Advice from “A Modern Designer’s Canvas”
How to Hold an Unpopular Opinion
Justine Musk says “If you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you.”
Countries Learning to Manipulate Social Media
Washington Post says US tried to create a “Cuban Twitter”
Seattle’s Reaction to Sharing Economy Should Be Better
A Story of a Great Teacher
Second Gov & The Consensus Project
“Forward Casting” Trust Services from 1988