When technologists discuss online identity, they usually begin with fraud. How do we know that the user of a website or application is a real person? How can we stop one person pretending to be thousands of different people? How can someone prove that they are genuinely qualified or entitled to receive something?

These are important questions, but they come from a narrow and often technical perspective. Current digital identity systems are largely concerned with proving who somebody is, establishing particular attributes about them, and confirming that they have the right to do something. The UK Digital Verification Services Trust Framework, for example, is designed to help individuals prove their identity, information about themselves, or their eligibility. Similarly, emerging technologies for decentralised identifiers and verifiable credentials allow claims to be attached securely to people, organisations and other entities.

In his survey of such technologies, Vitalik Buterin defines biometric proof of personhood as a system that creates a list of public keys while guaranteeing that each key is controlled by a unique human being. A person should be able to register once, a bot should not be able to register at all, and one individual should not be able to create thousands of apparently independent identities. This addresses real technical problems in systems for healthcare, taxation, e-voting, and so on.

Unfortunately, none of this gives you the means to establish trust. The question is not merely whether the user is a person (or organisation), and if so, which person (or organisation). It is whether the user is a person (or organisation) that you want to deal with.

A system might establish that I am the same person who used an online service yesterday. It might confirm my age, address, qualifications, or right to act on behalf of a company. It cannot tell you what values I adhere to, what responsibilities I have accepted, whether I keep my promises, or what effect my past actions have had on others. At best (and technical challenges mean that even this is dubious at present), mainstream online identity technologies and standards provide proof of continuity, control, and credentials. They does not provide proof of commitment to outcomes that you can respect.

Identity is about who you really are

In everyday life, identity has never consisted solely of what officialdom says about you. Within a functioning community (geographical or other), we gradually learn about other people from what they contribute. We know who helps when somebody is in difficulty, who can organise an event, who looks after a shared space, who keeps their word, and who disappears when the real work begins.

The same applies to organisations. A business may be on every procurement framework and compliant with every relevant check, yet be regarded by people who have used its products and services as extractive or unreliable. By contrast, another business may operate in a somewhat ad-hoc manner but be deeply trusted because it employs local people, supports community organisations, develops its suppliers, and remains committed when circumstances become difficult.

Legal identity is different from social identity, and this matters because the problems that arise when dealing with others are not typically caused by an inability to identify who they are. Rather, they stem from the inability to establish trustworthy relationships with them. Current efforts to verify online identity focus on the first and overlook the second.

The Internet of Communities

I have previously described the Internet of Communities we are building at Dedoctive as the technology enabler for Supercommunities: communities that develop the ability to restructure themselves in response to external challenges and, in doing so, become increasingly capable of protecting the interests of their members, their environment and their descendants. As well as helping community stakeholders explore information, reason over it, and coordinate action, the Internet of Communities can enable individuals and organisations to share the commitments they make to communities. Those commitments provide a believable form of identity that is a practical basis for trust.

The underlying idea is simple. Instead of attempting to prove the veracity of online assertions about ourselves (think of a LinkedIn profile page), we can present a structured account of the responsibilities we have chosen to accept, how we delivered on them, and the resulting outcomes. For example:

• A business might commit to creating apprenticeships, purchasing from local suppliers, and / or reducing the environmental impact of a development;
• A university might commit research expertise, facilities, or student placements to a regional initiative;
• A charity might undertake to coordinate volunteers, share evidence, or support a particular group;
• A resident might contribute to flood monitoring, community transport, habitat restoration, or caring for vulnerable neighbours.

Each can then show evidence of having done these things, and what the effects were:

1. The community or communities supported;
2. The type of actions taken;
3. The timescale and resources committed;
4. The outcomes delivered – for example, by providing feedback from those involved and indicators of the resulting social value.

This provides a form of identity that is much more than who you claim to be. It describes what you have committed to do and how that contributed to society.

Making evidence accessible

How is this different from what already happens? Organisations already publish environmental, social and governance reports. Suppliers make social-value promises in public procurement exercises. Charities report their impact. Professionals collect references and recommendations. Volunteers describe the causes they support.

The UK Government’s Social Value Model already expects suppliers to make commitments that are specific, measurable and time-bound. It also asks how commitments and performance will be published, what metrics will be used, how progress will be monitored and what governance and improvement processes will be put in place.

However, this information is usually scattered across tender documents, annual reports, social media posts, project websites, spreadsheets, and databases. It is difficult to compare, difficult to verify, and often disconnected from the communities supposedly benefiting. The Internet of Communities turns these disconnected claims into structured and evidence-linked social identities, by providing a shared infrastructure through which commitments can remain connected to delivery, evidence, community feedback and resulting value.

This makes social value more than a paragraph in a bid that few people ever see again. It makes it part of the continuing identity of the organisation that made the promise.

Lowering the cost of identity

The biometric and social-graph approaches to identity on which technologists focus also bring difficult trade-offs, which for now are mostly unresolved. There are privacy, accessibility, centralisation, governance and coercion risks. Biometric systems may depend on specialist hardware and proprietary algorithms. Social-graph systems may exclude people who do not already know somebody within the network. Public graphs can also reveal relationships that participants would prefer to keep private.

Technical attempts to mitigate these risks through decentralisation, encryption and zero-knowledge proofs face difficulties partly because the biometric recognition used to identify somebody involves particularly sensitive personal information and consequently demands strong legal, technical and governance safeguards. The UK Information Commissioner identifies the complex risks associated with biometric data breaches, false acceptance or rejection, discrimination and systematic monitoring.

The Internet of Communities does not need to solve that problem. It does not require every human being to join a global register. It does not need universal agreement about a single identity mechanism. It does not depend on the manufacture and distribution of specialist biometric hardware. It can begin with one community, one programme, or one shared challenge. In this context, participants need only establish sufficient identity for their commitments to be recognised and verified by other community members. The approach is fundamentally Agile and low-cost, since it depends not on technology but on established human relationships.

Building meaningful trust

In the Internet of Communities approach, identity is verified specifically and locally. This is more meaningful because trust is also specific and local. We do not trust any person or organisation to do anything, anywhere. We trust them to do a particular something in particular circumstances. Our town might trust a contractor to repair roads but not to design housing. My neighbours and I might work together on local traffic calming without any expectation that we would help care for each other’s aged parents.

Attempts to bolster online mechanisms for global identity with associated scores for universal reputation would flatten these distinctions, allow for the underpinning algorithms to be gamed, and probably end up creating new forms of exclusion. Trust must be contextual and transparent so that it remains open to interpretation and challenge by real humans.

The Internet of Communities basis in recognition and engagement has the further advantage of leading almost automatically to more of the same. A small business will gain more work from local authorities, major contractors, and potential employees discovering its contributions to the area. A volunteer working towards a goal will find others with the same aims. A university looking for participants in research might want communities to understand the practical value it can generate. A responsible housing developer that makes social commitments will gain useful evidence if people find out about, then use, the new services they provide.

In cases like these, visibility creates opportunities for new relationships, which then lead to partnerships, contracts, employment, investment, volunteering, referrals, and shared projects. This is more than establishing a reputation for marketing purposes. It is making offers and commitments discoverable so that other people can respond to them, and create virtuous circles. Identity based on contribution becomes a mechanism for further contribution.

There is inevitably less privacy

A challenge to this approach will come from the cypherpunks. A system that publishes commitments, relationships, activities and outcomes must inevitably provide less privacy than one designed to reveal the minimum possible information.

Technology-based proof-of-personhood designers generally seek to let somebody demonstrate that they are a unique human while revealing as little as possible about who they are. Privacy-preserving digital identity systems similarly allow people to disclose only the attributes needed for a transaction — for example, proving that they are over 18 without revealing their full date of birth or address. The aim is to eliminate government access to personal information. Many cypherpunks would like to eliminate government per se.

The Internet of Communities comes from the opposite perspective – that there is nothing inherently wrong with government. The problem is when responsibilities to assigned to government at the wrong level. International, national, regional, local, and hyperlocal government all have their purposes, which should be different from one another. A town cannot be expected to organise the military defence of territorial waters. However, it should have influence on (and possibly control over) local housing, while respecting national needs and priorities.

People and organisations in Supercommunities do not seek anonymity. Rather, they hope to be recognised, discovered, and engaged with. They want others to know that they care about a place, profession, cause, or group. It matters to them that their commitments are visible, because visibility allows other people to participate, support, question, or collaborate with them.

This is the opposite of indiscriminate exposure and surveillance capitalism. It is the ability to make voluntary self-disclosure in a controlled, useful manner. Participants can choose the communities in which they appear, the commitments they publish, and the evidence they make available. Personal information irrelevant to the commitment remains private. Different standards apply to individuals and organisations. Vulnerable people are not pressured to disclose information merely to gain access to essential services.

Privacy is the right to control how your information is shared. It is unhelpful for society at large to aim for invisibility.

The opposite of social credit

Another challenge that might be levelled at this approach is the risk of creating the kind of social credit system depicted by the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”, in which conformity is rewarded, dissent is penalised, and established institutions define what counts as virtue.

In reality, this risk is nonexistent, because community-based identities are inherently contextual, rather than being collapsed into a universal score that can be compared with others. The aim is not to be contribute “more” than others, whatever that might possibly mean. Rather, it is to demonstrate who you really are, in a meaningful way. You cannot compare different forms of contribution on a single scale.

A conventional reputation platform usually produces a score, a star rating, or a collection of unstructured testimonials. The reader is expected either to accept the result or ignore it. Community identity works totally differently. A commitment by an employer to creating ten local apprenticeships is supported by information including a definition of “local”, the organisations involved, the relevant dates, the evidence of participation, and any feedback from the apprentices themselves. Similarly, a commitment by a developer to improving local biodiversity links to details of the area in question, the original baseline, agreed interventions, subsequent surveys, responsible experts, and any areas of disagreement.

Community-based identity cannot ever be treated a score. It is contextual information that comes with a navigable audit trail. A tool such as Dedoctive helps make that possible by connecting complex evidence so that commitments, actions, outcomes, and feedback are easily visible and checkable. This approach changes trust from a green tick produced by a black box to a body of evidence that demonstrates how it is being earned.

The kind of identity we need

Biometric proof of personhood asks whether there is one unique human behind this key. Transactional digital identity asks whether this person can prove a particular attribute or entitlement. The Internet of Communities shows the relationships that a person or organisation is choosing to have, and the outcomes that have resulted from those choices. There is value in all three, but only the third begins where social trust actually lives: in responsibility, reciprocity, and action over time.

To move from treating identity as a standard dossier of access privileges, with the associated risk of inventing a global score to measure your worth, each person and organisation can use the Internet of Communities to create a contextual, evidence-linked account of the commitments they make. This is inevitably less private because it is intended for people and organisations who want to be seen – not as account holders, consumers, or legal entities, but as willing participants in a shared, valued endeavour.

Proof of personhood might, one day, help keep bots apart from us. Proof of commitment helps bring us together.

Author

Keith Harrison-Broninski is an author, researcher, and keynote speaker specialising in cross-boundary collaboration, community antifragility, and technology for good. Keith’s awards include from Gartner for social enterprise and from the NHS for technology to replicate healthcare innovations.

Keith’s first book “Human Interactions” (2005) was described by Information Age as “the overarching framework for 21st century business technology”. Keith’s other books include two for Springer and three for the Workflow Management coalition. Keith’s most recent book “Supercommunities” (2021) was described by the Chief Executive of the RSA in his foreword as “Ranging from ancient history to economics to psychology to public policy ‘Supercommunities’ is both authoritative and highly readable. It puts our current challenges in context, shows why change is necessary and provides a trove of practical ideas for change makers.”

Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, in a second foreword, wrote “Supercommunities offers a path away from social and economic meltdown … We will need to replace short-term thinking with long term planning and execution if we are to regain upward motion towards common benefit for everyone on Spaceship Earth. To begin, read this book!”

Keith currently focuses on creating the Internet of Communities via his company’s revolutionary technology “Dedoctive” – a fundamental AI innovation, academically-validated for the MoD as fully trustworthy, that empowers reliable access to complex information for all.

Keith is also a jazz pianist, traditional folk musician, and classical composer. He has released 9 albums and performs regularly with a wide range of other musicians.

More information

Email Keith Harrison-Broninski: khb@dedoctive.ai