Four Pillars of an SSI Network

Governance

Governance is critical to universal interoperability in an identity metasystem because all participants must be able to make their own decisions about who and what to trust. Governance gives assurances by providing process and accountability.

Network Operations

Supporting effective network operations is one of the key operational functions of the Sovrin Foundation . This includes coordinating code releases and supporting Stewards. The Foundation Ops Team monitors the nodes which run the Sovrin Network to ensure they operate in accordance with the Governance Framework and the network meets important requirements, like censorship resistance.

Community Engagement

Creating the internet’s identity layer has never been done before, and in order to be done right, it requires a great amount of coordination between individuals and organizations from all around the world. Some of these players include standards bodies, governments, enterprises, developers, NGOs, and regulators. As a nonprofit organization, the Sovrin Foundation acts as the unbiased, nonpartisan support, bringing together all of these voices to build a global public utility for self-sovereign identity.

Advocacy

The fourth key function of the Sovrin Foundation is evangelizing self-sovereign identity (SSI) and bringing people and organizations together to spur adoption. This includes building awareness of and affinity for self-sovereign identity, channeling marketing efforts around the individual projects and their own respective value propositions, highlight, promote, and research and promote awareness around individual use cases and what Sovrin-enabled systems can do for customers across many industry verticals.

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A digital identity system needs more than just technical standards. We often hear that the internet is a product of standards, and while that’s true, it also only exists because people strung cable, wrote code, created rules, built organizations, and formed alliances. SSI has similar needs and meeting them won’t happen just because we define nice protocols and write some open source code.

A functioning network for an identity metasystem is a social system, and building it requires a means of building coherence to align the actions of people and organizations. We created the Sovrin Foundation to do that. Over time its role may change, but right now, there are important tasks that must be done to create coherence.

Building a functional SSI network requires that, in addition to the technical standards, we work on several core areas: governance, community, operations, and adoption.