Flashy, jokey title for a boring, ugly, uncomfortable topic-- community service and adjudication. Who watchers the watchers? Who presides over the inherently vague claims made by the marketing departments of decentralized enterprises?
The conversation around decentralization that took place since RWOT8 has been a fruitful, which makes abundantly clear an uncomfortable truth-- "decentralization" is an almost impossible term to standardize across all its domains, and yet it is freighted with so much ideological and marketing baggage that not even attempting to standardize it, contingently and contextually, will reward the worst behavior from all involved. So what do we do? We create a rubric, we tweak it and adjust it and evolve it over time, and give ratings to different products or projects. But who is the "we" in that sentence? How do we keep the results of those ratings from being influenced unduly by the business interests and personal loyalties of the "I"s in that "we"?
Perhaps it would be easier to start with a slightly more verifiable, objective claim-- interoperability. It also feels to me, given the stakes for fundraising and government buy-in, to be a lot more urgent than decentralization ratings for the development of the SSI ecosystem. Maybe we should start there, and set up structures of neutrality (and funding!) to certify and rate interoperability, before expanding the scope of that agency or adhoc whatever-it-is to weigh in on the Great Decentralization Debates of 2019?
Let's take a simple example: can we see each other's DIDs and initiate communication. The resolution of DIDs (qua addressing system) between platforms could be graded just by filling out a simple "scorecard" grid: broadly speaking, "yes/no/it's complicated". Fundamentally, this is more about creating an interoperability sandbox (and/or "authority"), where everyone delivers a stable beta and hands off a modicum of testing to a trusted neutral party. Who pays? Who is neutral enough (and yet knowledgeable enough) to do the testing? Freelancers? Aficionados? People who receive no $$ (or less than X $$/yr, including equity) from any companies involved?