Thread by @ChristopherA

Here are the summaries for the remaining topic papers submitted to this week's #RWOT9 in Prague. We hope that the community has had an opportunity to scan all of the papers & read in detail the ones related to their own work, before we set our collaborative choices on Tuesday.

The complete list of the suggested topics and advance readings for #RWPT9, as well as summary Primer documents are listed at: github.com/WebOfTrustInfo…

TOPIC Reimagining "global": Programmable incentivization and implications for personal governance KEY CONCEPT "how could self-sovereign identities and smart contracts offer new opportunities for personal self-governance?" github.com/weboftrustinfo…

…"As the world globalizes, long-held understandings about the nature and role of government and the individual are being challenged. The concept of governance has been expanding to include the processes of decision-making…(all)…actors"

…"To govern is to make decisions, to aggregate and allocate resources in accordance with the needs of the governed. Mechanisms of governance often use the granting and revocation of access to resources - goods, services, information or access - to incentivize…the system"

…"each individual person engages in self-governance in some form. Ultimately we are all governing ourselves - we control (consciously or less so) the actions of our minds and our bodies within our individual awarenesses…"

…"…We each make decisions about the resources under our control and decide the boundaries of acceptable behavior, as well as consequences for crossing those boundaries."

…"It is at this level - the private, individual level - that blockchains may offer an opportunity to formalize those personal processes of governance into a personal structure of government."

…"Self-sovereign identities put the user in control of their informational resources - personal data and financial assets - by decentralizing responsibility of maintaining custody of the private keys required to prove identity and access personal information."

…"Alice could create a payable smart contract that, upon reception of funds, diverts a portion of the income to a wallet address that Alice has budgeted for her health and exercise - or to a smart contract instance that she has sole access to."

…"If the gyms and exercise studios she frequented accepted payment within such a system, this contract could have a fixed list of approved addresses where contract funds could be sent. With this, Alice has to spend that money at gyms"

…"While a small example, these ideas illustrate the potential for enable self sovereign individuals to shape their own behavior by programming their own incentives. They also raise questions about the ethics and risks of such a system."

TOPIC NVC for Standards Working Groups KEY CONCEPT Use non-violent communications (NVC) & cognitive behavioral (CBT) methodologies to create a collaboration toolkit for Internet standards working groups. github.com/WebOfTrustInfo…

…"We believe that a carefully designed combination of NVC and CBT would empower working groups and their facilitators to be more effective, by learning how to perceive the emotional reactions and tacit needs of participants in a working group,…"

…"…and to learn the art of making more effective requests. If the facilitator can teach these techniques, it can create a shared basis for connection, cooperation, and effectiveness in the discussion."

…"The combination of these approaches may provide a simplified approach to conflict resolution skills training, to help working group participants and facilitators to learn how to redirect conflict without emotional detouring and incorporate enhanced communication techniques"

…"Observations are what we see or hear that we identify as the stimulus to our reactions. Our aim is to describe what we are reacting to concretely, specifically and neutrally, much as a video camera might capture…This helps create a shared reality with the other person."

…"Feelings represent our emotional experience and physical sensations associated with our needs that have been met or that remain unmet (see below). Our aim is to identify, name and connect with those feelings…"

…"…The key to identifying and expressing feelings is to focus on words that describe our inner experience rather than words that describe our interpretations of people’s actions."

…"Needs are an expression of our shared humanity. All human beings share key needs for survival. We also share many other needs, though we may experience them to varying degrees and…"

…"…may experience them more or less intensely at various times. In the context of NVC, needs refer to what is most alive in us: our core values and human desires."

…"Requests are a technique that can be used to help get cooperation for particular strategies to enable more cohesive collaboration…"

…"…Learning to make clear requests and shifting our consciousness to making requests in place of demands are very challenging skills for most people, but could be the key to transforming negative situations encountered in standards development work"

…"Finally, this working group could return the favor, by helping to drive the adoption of NVC through the design and development of decentralized technologies to support the usage and viral promotion of NVC…"

…"The concept is simple: by creating a verifiable claim/credential for moderation and facilitation training, using NVC as a pilot training system, users could be verified for facilitation and moderation roles in online communities."

TOPIC Publicly verifiable split-key schemes for hybrid secret sharing and multi-sig authorization KEY CONCEPT In social key recovery, rather than splitting keys it is possible to create a hybrid approach for the social shares to be used as signatures. github.com/WebOfTrustInfo…

…"Social key recovery schemes allow users to specify groups of individuals that acting together possess the ability to recover the root secret of the user."

…"The most popular social key recovery schemes, such as Shamir Secret Sharing, combine shares to reconstruct the original secret on a single machine, where it can then be used for signing authorization or other purposes."

…"Multi-signature schemes, such as MuSig over Schnorr, allow groups of individuals acting together to create signatures for a combined private key that is never materialized as part of the signing process."

…"Threshold multi-signature schemes extend this core capability to create k-of-n signing thresholds for some set of key holders"

…"There is a deep connection between social key recovery and threshold multi-signature schemes, as the same mathematics underly both"

…"In principle this commonality allows for the specification of a protocols that combine both approaches, allowing users to choose whether to initialize by splitting a secret or multi-party compute, or to recover the master secret or create signatures without revealing shares."

…"Performing threshold secret sharing of an asymmetric secret over the same group as the signature scheme has one further advantage: the scheme is (publicly) verifiable secret sharing, or VSS."

…" A VSS permits arbitrary third parties that did not partake in the secret split to nevertheless verify that the distributed shares are sufficient to reconstruct the secret or generate a signature."

…"This use case is of particular interest as a self-sovereign alternative in situations where key escrow has been traditionally required by regulators: a public auditor could…"

…"…ensure that sufficient shares to reconstruct a secret have been dutifully backed up, e.g. by encrypting them to a set of functionaries for that purpose."

…This paper only explores some of the beginning of the possibilities offered by VSS, as it can also be used for group authorization, group credentials (both as issuer and subject), and interesting governance possibilities.

I believe that I have summarized all the papers submitted to #RWOT9, but some were added last minute over the week. If I've missed your topic paper, please double-check that you are properly listed in the README and reply to this thread so others can read it.

If you are interested in these topics but will not be in Prague for #RWOT9, keep an eye on the new @RWoTEvents account, which will be a group account for us to share details during and between events. We'll announce at end of week the collaborative draft projects we selected.