Navigating Digital Identity in Political Economies

Most digital identity systems are centralized (e.g., in big government or technology organizations) or individualistic (e.g., in most blockchain projects). However, being in the world is fundamentally social and intersectional — we are all part of networks. So how might we formalize digital identity in a way that better reflects this complex reality? This panel with leading social technology and computer researchers explores more robust digital identity approaches and potential application areas in political economies.

SPEAKERS Bryan Ford leads the Decentralized/Distributed Systems (DEDIS) research laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Ford’s research focuses on decentralized systems, security and privacy, digital democracy, and blockchain technology. Since earning his Ph.D. at MIT, Ford has held faculty positions at Yale University and EPFL. His awards include the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award, the NSF CAREER award, and the AXA Research Chair. Inventions he is known for include parsing expression grammars, delegative or liquid democracy, and scalable sharded blockchains. He has advised numerous companies and governments, including serving on the US DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group and on the Swiss Federal E-voting Experts Dialog.

Shireen Mitchell is an award-winning technological woman of color, founder, author, speaker, social entrepreneur, nonprofit leader, advocate, diversity analyst, and a political, digital & social strategist. She is a native New Yorker playing video games, designing BBS boards and gopher sites prior to the Web going worldwide. As an early adopter and one of the few women of color web designers in the early '90s, she’s been involved with tech and social networks for over 30 years. She founded Digital Sisters/Sistas Inc.--the first organization to focus on women and girls of color in tech and online access. She created the first women of color web multimedia management firm (MHG). Her recent projects are Tech Media Swirl, Stopping Online Violence Against Women (SOVAW) & Human First Tech. As an author, she’s written “Gaining Daily Access to Science and Technology” in the book “50 Ways to Improve Women’s Lives” and “Access to Technology: Race, Gender, and Class Bias,” The Scholar and Feminist Online.

Kaliya Young is an expert in self-sovereign identity and identity on the blockchain. She is the co-author of a Comprehensive guide to Self-Sovereign Identity and is widely known as Identity Woman (it’s also the name of her blog and her twitter handle). She is committed her life to the development of an open standards based layer of the internet that empowers people. In 2005, Young co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop with Doc Searls and Phil Windley. Five years later she founded the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium to catalyze a network of companies working to give individuals the tools to collect, manage and gain value from their own personal data generated actively and passively as they interact with all kinds of digital systems. In 2016 she began the Identity Ecosystem Map project and collaborating in leading its development. She consults with and advises companies seeking to develop products in this ecosystem. She is the co-founder with Shireen Mitchel of HumanFirst.Tech a project focused the needs of diverse communities and building an inclusive industry. Currently she is the Chair of the Interoperability Working Group for Good Health Pass at the Trust over IP Foundation, Co-Chair of the Interoperability Working Group at the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) and Co-Chair of the Secure Data Store Working Group jointly charted by the Credentials Community Group at the W3C and DIF.

E. Glen Weyl (@glenweyl) works to collaboratively envision, design, experiment with and organize around next generation political economic institutions. He serves at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist (OCTOPEST), where he helps design and implement technology ambitious corporate social commitments. He is Founder and Chair of the RadicalxChange Foundation, a non-profit that coordinates a global social movement for social technology. Previously he was 2007 Valedictorian of Princeton University, received his PhD in economics from there in 2008, was Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Assistant Professor of Economics and Law at University of Chicago, co-author with Eric Posner of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society and co-author and technical lead of the Edmund J. Safra Center Rapid Response Task Force on Covid-19 that was a foundation of the Biden administration’s covid-19 response plan. In 2018, he was one of Bloomberg Businessweek’s 50 most influential people, WIRED’s 25 people shaping the next 25 years of technology and Coindesk’s 10 most influential people in blockchain.