Posts by Year

Musings of a Trust Architect: The Case for an International Right to Freedom to Transact

I recently wrote about “How My Values Inform Design”. There I discussed the issue of autonomy and how it can be supported by progressive trust, proof against...

Musings of a Trust Architect: How My Values Inform Design

ABSTRACT: By grounding technical decisions in ethical values, we can create compassionate digital architectures. This article examines how core human valu...

Musings of a Trust Architect: Building Trust in Gradients

Progressive Trust—it sounds a bit like something from a relationship advice column, right? But in the world of digital interactions, it’s actually a revoluti...

Musings of a Trust Architect: Has our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt?

This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024. My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the Unit...

Blockchain Commons in 2024

I regularly post all of my “Musings of a Trust Architect” to both here and Blockchain Commons, but other posts at Blockchain Commons may be of interest as we...

Musings of a Trust Architect: Open & Fuzzy Cliques

Digital communities are collections of individual entities that are connected together. They can be modeled as graphs, with the individuals being nodes and t...

Musings of a Trust Architect: Edge Identifiers & Cliques

Since the mid-1990s, I’ve been advocating for the creation of secure digital infrastructures that protect human rights, civil liberties, and human dignity on...

Musings of a Trust Architect: Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA)

ABSTRACT: Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA) is an alternative to the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach, emphasizing the importance of a robust, scalable,...

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...

A Spectrum of Consent

Speaking at Consensus 2015

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”.

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 ...

Kathy Sierra of Serious Pony on Trolls

I don’t like forwarding negative topics on social networks such as Facebook, largely because of an internal intuition that has since been confirmed scientifi...

Deep Context Shared Languages

I consider one of my missions in life to be to “create tools that allow people to communicate about complexity”. There are many problems to address and many...

Freedom to Fail & Freakonomics podcast “Failure is Your Friend”

I often speak about “Freedom to Fail” as an essential element of success for all sizes of systems and processes such as a hackathons, ecosystems, corporate c...

“Look Up” Your Strong Ties, Connect to Your Weak Ties

One of my “Digital Influence” students at Pinchot.edu asked me about my thoughts regarding this video.

Underestimating the Long Term

I recently ran into a quote that rang true to me. It is from Bill Gates in “The Road Ahead”, but is wise enough that it may have older origins than that:

Playshop 5/10:Introduction to Group Works and the Group Pattern Language

I am hosting on Saturday May 10th a 6-hour “Playshop” as an introduction to the Group Works Deck and the Group Pattern Language. This will be on Saturday o...

“The Really Big Questions” Podcast Asks “Why Do We Share?”

On the topic of the #sharingeconomy, these audio podcast and video entries from “The Really Big Questions” that ask the question “Why Do People Share” are ...

Is the Sharing Economy Changing Our Culture of Trust?

I like this meme. I hope that positive changes to attitudes about trust is a true cultural shift.

“Harmonic” on Pantheon Steel XXD Halo Hand Pan at BGIedu Intensive

For the second time, I was asked to play a hand pan solo on stage at the BGIedu intensive. This time I was better prepared to make a better quality recording.

Some History of SSL Security Reviews

Regarding the Heartbleed bug, SSL and TLS vendors used to require code security reviews before CAs would accept certificate requests from that implementation.

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

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...

Manage the Environment, Not the People

Matt Taylor Photo In the late 80’s I met Matt Taylor at a Mac user group event, and we became friends. We eventually became reciprocal apprentices — he learn...

BGIedu Students Post for Blog Action Day on Food

Today is Blog Action Day, where each year a topic is chosen and bloggers and activists worldwide write about that topic in their blogs or post about it on T...

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.

Persuasion, Influence, Bias, Intuitive Errors

Motivated reasoning, social influence: simplicity, perceived self-interest, incongruity, confidence, empathy

Paying for Favors

One of the common practices in the independent movie industry is to share favors to keep production costs low. I loan you use of a camera and you later do so...

Compensating the Creators

I was going through my first blog posts, and rediscovered a quote from 2003 Game Designer and Pundit Greg Costikyan from his blog Games * Design * Art * Cult...

Blog Action Day on Climate Change

Late this evening while catching up on my feeds, I saw for the first time that this year’s Blog Action Day is on the topic of Climate Change. This event is s...

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...

Teaching “Using the Social Web for Social Change” at BGI.edu

Starting next week I will be teaching a course at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute on the topic of “Using the Social Web for Social Change”.

Creative Commons Posts “Defining Noncommercial” Report

Last year I participated in a survey followed up by a focus group on the topic of Noncommercial Use, in particular around the context that about 2/3rds of t...

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...

New Blog for Ephemera

This blog has been quiet lately as I’ve been doing a lot of work in the last year on the iPhone. I’ve been speaking at conferences like eComm 2008 (presentat...

Cultural Dimensions

Geert Hofstede™ Cultural Dimensions

In Seoul for the Social Web

iPhoneDevCamp and Hack-a-Thon

Getting Ready for the iPhone

Collective Choice: Experimenting with Ratings

By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline

Speaking about Synchro Edit at Wiki Wednesday

I will be speaking tonight at WikiWednesday on the topic of Same Time, Different Place Editing, and will be demonstrating SynchroEdit integration with MediaW...

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...

Dunbar Number Presentation at MeshForum 2006

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...

BayChi Talk Next Tuesday

I will be speaking next Tuesday (July 11th) at the monthly meeting of BayCHI, the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI (Computer Human Interface Spe...

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...

SynchroEdit: Simultaneous Editing for the Web

For the last several months I’ve been working on a new open source project that I’ve been calling SynchroEdit. SynchroEdit is a browser-based simultaneous mu...

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...

Cheers: Belongingness and Para-Social Relationships

In yesterday’s All Things Considered, NPR commentator Jake Halpern questions why you feel like you have a relationship with the characters in your favorite T...

Extrapolative Hostility in the Online Medium

Extrapolate To infer an unknown from something that is known; conjecture. -- The Random House College Dictionary

Apple, AirVideo, and Immersive vs Ambient Media

I was reading on Slashdot a discussion about iTune 4.8 and its new capability to purchase videos from the iTunes Music Store, when I read two things that jus...

New Sidebar: Recent Bookmarks

If you read my blog through an aggregator, you may not have noticed my new sidebar “Recent Bookmarks”. It is a list of web pages that I’ve found interesting ...

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...

User Content, Social Software & Online Games

Shannon Appelcline, my colleague at Skotos (an online game company that I founded in 1999), has been writing for several years a sometimes weekly, sometimes ...

Voluntary Health Associations & Social Software

I’m a keynote speaker for the FVHA (Future of Voluntary Health Associations) Conference in Atlanta today. My job is to give to this community a gentle introd...

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...

Google Suggest Dissected

As a former Macintosh developer, I’ve always been disappointed with the user-interface of web pages. The state of the art of UI design moved backwards with t...

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 ...

JotSpot: Application Wiki

Joe Kraus, one of the co-founders of Excite, and new blogger has long been rumored to be working on a new wiki tool. Today at the Web 2.0 conference Joe fin...

Map Mashup

I’m a sucker for great user-interface design ideas, especially if they succeed with what typically has poor UI design – web pages.

TiddlyWiki

I keep an eye out for new ideas in Wiki technology (see my post from February Looking at Wiki), and I recently became fascinated by TiddlyWiki. It is sort of...

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...

Politics with Respect

This is not a political blog, but like most bloggers I’ve been indundated with various discussions about the Bush Administration, Michael Moore, Red vs. Blue...

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...

Circus Contraption in SF during August

In my review last January of the amazing Seven Fingers of the Hand Circus I talk about why I like circuses that are more raw and intimate, i.e. more “human” ...

Too High a Standard

I have for some time told people that one way that my blog was different was because I was focused on offering a high signal-to-noise ratio. I told them that...

Simple Yet Sophisticated Group Page Editing

I have been leading the design of a new Open Source collaboration tool called EditThisPagePHP, which started six months ago and now is in beta.

Four Kinds of Privacy

I’ve been thinking about the nature of privacy a lot lately.

Annoyed by Zero Degrees

As I’m studying social network software right now, I consider it my job to try many of the hundred some odd social networks out there right now.

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.

Post RSA Conference Wrapup

I spent most of last week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

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...

Sexism, Social Software & the Blogospher

A fascinating series of blog entries shows the promise and peril of social software and Blogs as a medium in a male-dominated technocracy:

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...

Confirmed Email Privacy Hole at Orkut

Another Orkut user and I have confirmed a privacy hole in Orkut whenever you send a message to someone via Orkut.

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...

Too Many Social Network Services

In the last few weeks I’ve gotten more invitations to friends via Orkut then I have from all the other social networks I’ve tried out. I currently have 61 fr...

Converting to TypePad Complete

For the last few weeks I’ve been moving my blog from Blogger Pro over to the TypePad service, after a frustrating try to get WordPress to work. While I was a...

Holiday Over

I had a nice relaxing five day holiday – good to get the creative juices flowing again.

Robots Dancing in the Uncanny Valley, Knowledge Navigator and UI Design

At a recent unofficial gathering of Future Salon’ers, there was a discussion about a demonstration of four robots doing a japanese fan dance to music (I thin...

Seven Fingers of the Hand

Yesterday I watched the amazing Seven Fingers of the Hand Circus. There were parts of it that were so beautiful and meaningful that I cried.

Working on Wiki Design Patterns

I’ve been working today on understand the Design Pattern Language behind the Wiki concept. I’ve been making some postings at the Meatball Wiki site on this t...

Joi on Identity and Size of Networks

Joi Ito’s Web: Blogger’s block, collapsing facets and the number 150 offers some insights on two different topics:

Socialization in Online Games

I’ve been playing around with a number of so-called Social Software/Social Networking sites for about six months.

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:

Enterprise Social Networking

InfoWorld has an article by Ephraim Schwartz called “Social Networking Targets the Enterprise” that says that corporations are looking to use social networki...

Chinese Social Network

The Social Software Weblog discusses DragonVenture Invests in Social Networking Platform in China:

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,...

Skotos and Social Software

I’ve been interested for several years in the ability of “player-generated content” to create niche or small multiplayer online games, at a company I’ve inve...

eVentor – an eBay for Events

I have been working the last couple of weeks on a business plan idea for a company tenatively called eVentor:

Conserving Social Capital

A followup to my post yesterday Social Software – Problems & the Definition of “Friends”, I saw in Scott Lofteness’ blog a reference to David Hornick’s V...

Committing to Vonage

In September I signed up for Vonage, a VoIP (Voice-over-IP) service that using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) that allows you to connect using the net to ...

Social Software – Problems & the Definition of “Friends”

I’ve been playing around with a number of so-called Social Software/Social Networking sites for about six months.

Political Action and Visual Media

I’ve been playing around with a number of so-called Social Software/Social Networking sites for about six months. I’m currently on Ryze with supposedly 13 ‘...

w.Bloggar

Stuart Henshal recommended that I try out w.Bloggar for creating blog posts. I’m giving it a try here. So far seems interesting – in addition to spell check...

Reinventing Email

As a user-interface designer in the 80’s for companies like Apple Computer, and as old ‘groupware’ professional in the early 90’s, I’ve been quite disappoint...

Fascinated by Melding of Ethnic Music Styles

I’m fascinated by the melding of various ethic music styles with contemporary music, in particular, when the mix includes some middle-eastern or central-euro...

Music and Double Moral Hazard

A very interesting article that has a different take on why the tussle of people who file share vs. the Music Industry. What I like is that it is taking a “b...

eLance Success

I have been experimenting with eLance, which is a source of contractors for various web, graphic, and business related projects. So far I’ve put out bids for...

EditThisPagePHP – Lightweight Experimental Wiki

I have been working on some code for experimenting with some of my ideas regarding the future of wiki’s, at EditThisPagePHP which is hosted at SourceForge.

RSS & Blogger

RSS is finally available to Blogger members, so as soon as I’ve figured it out I’ll be adding it here.

Perspective on Capital to Market

Game Designer and Pundit Greg Costikyan: wrote in his blog a thought I can’t believe that I’ve not heard of before, it makes so much sense. But it is new to ...

“Teleseminars”?

Stuart Henshall has been investigating for a while the use of converencing software (iChat, Skype, etc.) for use with business. I thought this advertisement ...

Blogger Pro Free, but Where is RSS Syndication?

I have been hesitating on committing to Blogger because ever time I check into availability of Blogger Pro, it was not available. Apparently now Blogger Pro ...

Comics, The Right Number, Bit Pass, and the Future of Micropayments

Scott McCloud, a very smart comic book artist and author of the fantastic book “Understanding Comics” has been trying for a number of years to both reinvent ...

“Life With Alacrity” Blog, using Blogger

I decided after years of reading blogs that it was time to start blogging.