Exploring InterPersonal Data
An RWoT9 Pre-read document.
By Kaliya Young
People’s identities are informed by other people. One of the authors (Kaliya) created this diagram to summarize the recursive loop that happens between people and their contexts to shape and form identity.
Domains of Identity Figure 1.
Ultimately our identities do not come from “governments” who have issued us credentials about some fact that we or our delegates register with them. (parents register the births of their children with the state and a birth certificate for the child is issued).
Meg Wheatly has been an inspiration to me since I first read Meg’s book Leadership and the New Sciences in 1995 a year after it came out.
In several of Meg’s works she articulates these three conditions for self organizing I will use for sake of example a conference within the community that leverages open space technology to organize itself.
Identity is defined by Meg as the sense-making capacity of the organization. This understands itself and is relative to other things. The Identity of IIW is to gather those working on user-centric digital identity. Meg also talks about identity as being about boundaries and identity happens when there are distinctions between inside and outside.
Informationis the medium of organization - which is about how entities within the organization share to make sense of themselves. Within organic organisms this happens with chemical signaling. Within human and organizational system this is done with language and other signaling mechanisms. At IIW the community leverages the opening circle and the market place / large board of session topics to figure out where to gather. It also has in place a system to collect notes from the various sessions.
Relationships are the pathways of the organization. That is information flows via relationships. At the internet identity workshop space is created for people to share information about what is ongoing in the community and they are able to do so via temporary and
I recently collaborated with Glen Weyl on a series of blog posts about Intermediated Social Data.
Motivating the Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One
Motivating the Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part Two
Motivating the Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part Three
While writing these the work of Philip Sheldrake was brought to my attention where in a recent SSI meetup he articulated the difference between “Personal data” and “Interpersonal data”. The former being largely between individuals and institutions and the latter between individuals and each other or more informal clusters or groups of people.
Personal Data relative to Interpersonal Data
Legal Natural
Data subjects Humans +
Node-centric Edge-Centric
Control Agency
Tree-like rhizomatic
Facsimile cashe
Privacy Privacy + Collective Intelligence
This distinction is interesting. A significant portion of the work around verifiable credentials is specifically related to Personal Data.
It is not clear to me how the difference between personal data and interpersonal data is bridged and how we build sufficient institutional confidence in the latter but we believe it is worth exploration.
Also at Decentralized Web Camp I became aware of the work of [Trust Graph] (https://github.com/trustgraph/trustgraph)
And IETF [Reputons] (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7071)