The aim of this 60min workshop is to collectively explore this idea:

Can we build low cost infrastructure for local municipal application that allow to maintain a regular schedule of events that approximate ‘city wide physical pseudonym parties’, which are highlighted in [1] as a method capable of supporting the four pillars of emancipatory digital participation/democracy:

• Inclusiveness: all human beings can participate, regardless of citizenship status, wealth, race, gender, etc
• Equality: everyone is treated equally for democratic deliberation and decision-making purposes
• Privacy: everyone is free from coercion and able to express their true intent
• Security: the democratic collective is protected from compromise (digital and physical domain)

These components/primitives will be prepared and presented to work with during the workshop:

• Generic methods to generate ‘proofs of local cooperation’, derived from mutual attestations/receipts of all periodic local radio broadcast transmissions from neighbouring nodes within the local vicinity

• Generic methods to delegate transmissions to node operators, enabling local denizens to register a DID without personally controlling a node, thereby achieving inclusivity beyond personal capacity of operating a node

• Generic method to derive voting privileges from each nodes individual capacity to provide (independently verifiable) evidence of having contributed to the maintenance of local rough consensus on the common history of locally observable broadcast events, thereby achieving robustness against maliciously acting nodes (e.g. sybil attackers)

The goal of this workshop is to draft concepts for a broadcast protocol that enable an open group of locally cooperating node operators (embedded in a dense population area) to form a network that is able to maintain rough consensus on a ledger containing decentralised identities (DIDs) that can be verified independently to be ‘publicly known to have been registered locally’ by the vast majority of participating node operators.

In other words, we aim to conceptualise a public infrastructure that is able to unambiguously answer resolution requests via public IP in the following from: “has DID: <local coordinate> : <public key string> been registered during a given time window - and if so - what service endpoints (e.g. local ATproto PDSs or local community labellers) are currently associated with that DID?”

This project is based on the idea of ‘local permissionlessness’ which is derived from concepts that have already been successfully applied in community operated wireless mesh networks: transparency, unlicensed transmission modes and local cooperation (as formalised in the PicoPeering Agreement https://www.picopeer.net).

[1] Bryan Ford, “Identity and Personhood in Digital Democracy: Evaluating Inclusion, Equality,
Security, and Privacy in Pseudonym Parties and Other Proofs of Personhood”, arXiv preprint,
2020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.02412.pdf

About Me:

Background in wireless mesh networking (published on interference models within IEEE802.11 networks), co-organizer of https://battlemesh.org since 2017 and active in the SSI movement (W3C DIDs) since 2018. Currently pursuing a PhD around the topics covered in this workshop at University of Vienna, faculty of computer science: https://cosy.cs.univie.ac.at

Description of latest talk at atmosphereconf in Vancouver contains more context info about my current work:
https://atmosphereconf.org/event/jaAWVRY