Celebrating two years of experimentation
Two years ago, we launched an atypical foundation with a societal mission to create synergies, exposing the formidable challenges of inclusiveness and privacy in digital transformation. Nevertheless, the core design of the Human Colossus Foundation is about experimentation, progressive development, and testing.
We want to thank our early supporters in the private and public sectors for providing nearly CHF 0.5 Mio of seed funding for prototyping core components to support data harmonisation, digital event authentication and distributed ecosystem governance
Our focus now shifts from experimentation to progressive development. Funded by the EU Horizon 2020 eSSIF-Lab initiative, the closing of our DKMS-4-SSIproject marks that transition as we hit the road of no return in our journey. Here we present our path to inclusiveness and privacy in digital transformation.
0. Today
Every day more private and public services are available online. Users receive the digital benefits of increased availability and mobility. Digital services are available everywhere all the time. But the advantages come at a price: accessibility to the platform delivering the services. Moreover, with the current economic incentive that values data over the purpose of usage, platforms collect more data than they need for the intended purposes of the service. Furthermore, data are kept behind a walled garden, forcing users to share too much data with too many institutions.
Therefore services are restricted to users with the technological capacity to access the platform. Unfortunately, the same platforms too often force a form of consent, allowing them a secondary usage of user's information outside the initial purpose.
As a result, we evolve towards a two-tier society, excluding individuals that can not access the platform or are not willing to open their private sphere for an unclear rationale.
1. Inclusiveness Needs Interoperability
Early in the 20th century, Georges Orwell introduced the "Big Brother" concept in his novel "1984". Although, at the time caricatural, it recognised early that no single over-centralised system could cope with the diversity and complexity of society.
When it comes to digital transformation, there is a direct technological corollary: digital platforms can not scale beyond a specific limit. If they grow outside their intended purpose, societal friction appears as they can not cope with the complexity of society as a whole. The diversity of our daily activities as individuals, of our customers as businesses or citizen's needs as a government requires digital services to focus on a clear purpose. Interoperability between services tailored to their user base is the natural solution to include every specific case in our digitalised society. Interoperability should be to services what cooperation is to humans; a natural core capacity enabling growth as a group.
This interoperability of services requires first machines to talk together (the unfortunately too narrow technological definition of interoperability) while the ultimate exchange of information remains under the user's control. Thus we started with the essential element: the tooling for a decentralised cryptographic key management infrastructure (DKMS). Then, within the creativity nest provided by the eSSIF-Lab, we started building libraries allowing developers to begin their journey into the most advanced decentralised authentication architecture: KERI, the brainchild of the prolific veteran of network security, Samuel Smith. Designed for secure authentication, KERI provides the grounds for an alternative form of interoperability. The user and platform authentication does not rely on an administrative intermediary. Instead, an ambient infrastructure under the separate control of each party lets them choose an adequate level of security according to the context. Security is distributed, and interoperability can follow.
Michal, a core team member of the DKMS-4-SSI project states:
"Distribute the responsibility and decision making for authentication and authorisation among network participants and let them decide. No more castles with giant walls but a synergistic approach where network participants interact and make decisions based upon other participants' reputations. The foundations for our alternative are very similar to what the US National Institute of Standards (NIST) proposes with the "Zero-trust concept" -- distribute".
Michal Pietrus -Senior Developer & Co-Founder of ArgonAUTHs
2. Privacy Needs Cybersecurity + Information Security = Human Governance
Interoperability requires more than secure authentication; it requires trust between participants. The user naturally becomes the central point of overall control of his digital experience. And trust requires meaning, not faith in technology providers.
The Human Colossus Foundation sees privacy as a fundamental factor enabling human cooperation at all levels. If cybersecurity protects data, privacy protection is at a higher level where data acquires meaning. A text string becomes a name only when the data model unambiguously links it to an attribute. Our equation is simple, Data plus Meaning equals Information. It is information usage that must be governed to protect privacy.
Like authentication, to be effective at the complexity scale of the Internet, a peer-to-peer mechanism to define the meaning of data has to supplement available standards. This requirement is the motivation behind the decentralised semantics domain. As a result, we elevate privacy protection to the governance of information. In other words, securing privacy requires more than data protection regulation. It requires adherence to the complete existing legal framework of an ecosystem.
3. The ambition: valuing information usage, not data itself.
In conclusion, to address the challenges of inclusiveness and privacy, the journey starts by solving thorny technological questions in the domains of authentication and semantics. Then, digital communication channels and the fantastic potential of digital technologies to enrich information can be included case-by-case in the existing trust frameworks (legal, ethical, cultural). This is our roadmap towards accurate information for decision-making.
Once reached, our ambition loops back to the origins of the foundation as captured by Robert Mitwicki as co-founder:
"Data has value when it flows. It is costly when it stagnates"
Robert Mitwicki, Head of the Technology Council of the Human Colossus Foundation
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DKMS-4-SSI
The project has received funding from the European Unions’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme within the framework of the ESSIF-Lab under the agreement No: 871932
