Philip Sheldrake - AKASHA Blog

Philip Sheldrake

An engineer obsessed with the beautiful union of digital technology and humanity. And that’s what I do.

Digitalizing human identity

Digitalizing human identity

Human identity is conceived slightly differently by each discipline in their varied attempts to explain the world and how our species survives and thrives. While they may have differences, they have one thing in common — none looks anything like digital identity. Or perhaps I should write — digital identity looks nothing

AKASHA Conversations #6 — Monster Island and the Ethics of Moderating

AKASHA Conversations #6 — Monster Island and the Ethics of Moderating

This month’s conversation was with Aaron Rabinowitz! 🎙️ Aaron is a secular moral philosophy educator with 10+ years of experience helping students develop their capacities for flourishing and value-centered community organizing. He’s currently working on a PhD in education at Rutgers University, with a focus on developing a new

AKASHA Conversations #5 — Intentional Culture Design for Moderating

AKASHA Conversations #5 — Intentional Culture Design for Moderating

What is the culture of your workplace? Your education establishment? Your neighbourhood? If we adopt the definition of culture as the way things are done around here (Drennan, 1992), then how might we begin to articulate the answer? Are you drawn to making absolute or relative observations? Are some ways

We need to talk about the social graph

We need to talk about the social graph

Who doesn’t love a good concept?! Concepts are the fundamental building blocks of thinking, of designing. While there are plenty of things in the mix when it comes to contemplating system design, if the primary concepts remain unchallenged and unchanged from what came before, then the outcome will likely

$AKASHA Conversations #3 — an idea called fractal localism$

AKASHA Conversations #3 — an idea called fractal localism

ur monthly AKASHA Conversations explore critical facets of decentralized social networking, with a focus this quarter at least on all things moderating. Yesterday we welcomed Murat Ayfer as our expert speaker. Murat is our kind of guy. Having experienced the lows, highs, and more lows of moderating a 60k+ member

AKASHA Conversations #2 — Lessons from moderating web2 social networks

AKASHA Conversations #2 — Lessons from moderating web2 social networks

Here’s how we set up the second AKASHA Conversation ... Where does #web3 go after #DeFi? It gets social! 💫 And the difference between social and antisocial = new designs for moderating. You can read about the first Conversation in this series on moderating here FYI, and I will just borrow the

AKASHA Conversations #1 — Designing for moderating decentralized social networks

AKASHA Conversations #1 — Designing for moderating decentralized social networks

AKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations informing and inspiring open dialogue and action. To put it another way, AKASHA Conversations is designed to foster the collective design of decentralized conversation. Decentralized social networking is, effectively, the design for decentralized

Self-Sovereign Identity — the book, the dystopia

Self-Sovereign Identity — the book, the dystopia

Manning Publications has just published "Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized digital identity and verifiable credentials". ISBN-13: 978-1617296598 / ISBN-10: 1617296597 Congratulations to the co-editors, Alex Preukschat and Drummond Reed, for getting 24 chapters, 5 appendices, and a further 11 online-only chapters out the door. No mean feat. My copy will drop

Two Concepts of Liberty and Infinite Permutations of Moderating

Two Concepts of Liberty and Infinite Permutations of Moderating

tl;dr * Social networking without moderating is impossible * For-profit social networks might do their best at moderating, but their best is not good enough * If your particular community considers sacrosanct the freedom to put anything in front of anyone else, then where is the viewer’s freedom? * Moderating is like

Ethereum World from the Viewpoint of Ostrom's Principles

Ethereum World from the Viewpoint of Ostrom's Principles

Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on economic governance. "While others wrote gloomily of the tragedy of the commons, seeing only overfishing and over farming in a free-for-all of greed, Mrs. Ostrom, with her loud laugh and louder tops,

Community Moderating — Bringing Our Best

Moderating Featured

Community Moderating — Bringing Our Best

Dispelling some common myths about moderation, and presenting our own moderation approach for Ethereum World.

Community Moderating — Bringing Our Best

Community Moderating — Bringing Our Best

In light of the Trump ban, far right hate speech, and the plainly weird QAnon conspiracy theories, the world's attention is increasingly focused on the moderation of and by social media platforms. Our work at AKASHA is founded on the belief that humans are not problems waiting to

Let

The Internet Identity Workshop convened its 31st biannual gathering this week. Being a Zoom-based affair (under the pandemic circumstances), I was able to 'tune in' from London for several sessions. Thanks to Doc Searls, Joyce Searls, and Drummond Reed for the invitation to join in and specifically to

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 2

Thoughts & Ideas

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 2

Part 2 of 2. In the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity's primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient 'sociotechnological primitives'. First I'd like to qualify pre-architectural. It&

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 2

Thoughts & Ideas

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 2

Part 2 of 2. In the first of this two-part blog post I described why cooperating-at-scale is humanity's primary challenge. Here I outline some candidate concepts and pre-architectural principles to inform the necessary and sufficient 'sociotechnological primitives'. First I'd like to qualify pre-architectural. It&

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 1

Thoughts & Ideas

The Number 1 Challenge for Humanity - Cooperating at Scale, Part 1

Part 1 of 2 Despite the over-emphasis of competition in Darwin's theory of evolution, the great man himself sensed the importance of cooperation. I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another ... [On

A call for interdisciplinarity — generative identity and the Internet Identity Workshop

A call for interdisciplinarity — generative identity and the Internet Identity Workshop

The post Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty (2nd September) has spawned a lot of conversation in private channels and on the ProjectVRM Harvard mailing list ... some 15,000 words in exchanges with more than a dozen people active in ‘digital identity’. This post is dedicated to the most salient parts by

Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty

Generative identity — beyond self-sovereignty

With thanks to those who commented on draft versions: Matthew Schutte, Jonathan Donner, Martin Etzrodt, Andrei Sambra, Mihai Alisie. Hero image generated from the original image by Ryan Alexander. I'm going to outline three ways to think about digital identity to help move the conversation forward in line

Verifying identity as a social intersection

Verifying identity as a social intersection

Co-author of Radical Markets Glen Weyl invited me to review Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection, co-authored with his colleague at Microsoft, Dr. Nicole Immorlica, and Stanford University's Professor Matthew Jackson. The topic is so-called digital identity, a term that could be mistaken for how personal and group

SSI Meetup webinar — on interpersonal data, identity, and collective minds

Thoughts & Ideas

SSI Meetup webinar — on interpersonal data, identity, and collective minds

In an insightful introduction to self-sovereign identity (SSI) from 2016, Christopher Allen notes that online identity has progressed through four broad stages: 1. Centralized identity — administrative control by a single authority or hierarchy 2. Federated identity — administrative control by multiple, federated authorities 3. User-centric identity — individual or administrative control across

At RadicalxChange in Detroit

Interpersonal data

At RadicalxChange in Detroit

The building in this photo has a fascinating history. The A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education in Detroit accommodates the College for Creative Studies and Shinola, and for this weekend, the RadicalxChange conference — which is why I'm here. Formerly owned by General Motors and known then as

Rebooting the Web of Trust, Barcelona

Rebooting the Web of Trust, Barcelona

In her book, A Question of Trust, Onora O’Neill writes: Each of us and every profession and every institution needs trust. We need it because we have to be able to rely on others acting as they say that they will, and because we need others to accept that

The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets

Interpersonal data

The interpersonal data at the heart of all human digital systems, including markets

In light of the Radical Markets book chapter entitled Data as Labor, its co-author Glen Weyl invited me to write this post for the RadicalxChange blog, published 9 Feb 2019. The RadicalxChange mission dedicates the community to "using dramatically expanded competitive, free and open market mechanisms to reduce inequality,

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data" — part 3 of 3

Interpersonal data

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data" — part 3 of 3

In the first post of this series I asserted that data is data. In other words, it's not like anything else. The second post explored and dismissed conceptualizations of data-as-property and data-as-labour. This, the last post in this series, explores data-as-reputation, data-as-public-good, and data-as-me, and then points to

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data" — part 2 of 3

Interpersonal data

The misleading name, metaphor defiance, and awesome potential of "personal data" — part 2 of 3

In the preceding post I proposed that reframing personal data as interpersonal data is much more appropriate, more useful, more valuable. I also asserted that data is data — i.e. not like anything else. To support these points, this post explores and dismisses the dominant conceptualisation of personal data as