Systemic approaches to the design of digital identity and trust network for a co-operative ecosystem.
Democratically-governed and collectively-owned co-operatives and modern digital platform co-operatives have been unable to access the plentiful capital investment available to established powerful platforms such as Amazon, AirBnB, Uber and Spotify. Through ‘Principle 6’1, co-operatives are ‘wired to co-operate, not compete’ with each other, but in practice, this advantageous co-operation between co-operatives has been difficult to realise or fund. Despite the good intent, ‘silos’ have persisted.
To grow the co-operative sector as a whole, the connections between co-operatives need to be efficient and focused on mutual value-creation. Connections cannot flourish without identification, discovery and trusted, safe interaction. Co-op credentials is a project from a consortium of co-operatives seeking to provide such an infrastructure of identity and trust for co-operatives and their members.
In this RWoT pre-read paper we explain the project as a story of collaboration within a complex ecosystem and propose an alternative approach to co-design for a community of co-operatives. We're asking: "Is this a good way to explore our identity ecosystem needs?"
The most important metric of growth “is not the increase in the number of users but the growth of the number of interactions between them.” (A.Hirel). Therefore, we have framed a very broad question for our action research:
“How can co-operatives co-operate better in order to improve their co-operative experience?”
We have kept the question as open as possible so that in discussion we can uncover more of the hidden, implicit opportunities for valuable interaction between co-operatives. We believe co-ownership and community participation is essential to the co-design process and that an adaptive, evolutionary approach to co-design is the way forward.
We will complement traditional problem definition and solving approaches seen in Agile and in modern business consulting practice with a more 'systemic' perspective in the research and design of our co-operative ecosystem. We expect the work of Bateson (Aphanipoiesis and Warm Data Labs) (Bateson, N. 2021)2 to be informative in our work. In particular, we will consider coalescence and the merging, mixing and fusing of context across diverse co-operatives from a variety of industrial, social and economic sectors.
Keywords: identity, trust, community, platform co-operatives, ecosystems, systemic design
At least 12% of people on earth are ‘co-operators' - members of any of the 3 million cooperatives on earth. Cooperatives provide jobs or work opportunities to 10% of the employed population. The three hundred largest cooperatives or mutuals generate 2,146 billion USD in turnover while providing the services and infrastructure society needs to thrive.3
Platform cooperatives represent a growing ecosystem in consolidation. The PCC4 alone has mapped 506 cooperative platforms in 33 countries across multiple industries like tourism, mobility, delivery, local marketplaces, health and many more.
The world has changed after Covid. 66%5 of consumers are willing to pay more for environmental care, social responsibility and good governance. 82%6 will shop more locally, some out of choice, and some out of necessity, from food banks. These new consumers are good timing for co-ops - organisations that follow a co-operative code of caring and democratic ownership. And they are overwhelmingly local, with community roots.
Unfortunately, co-ops have been unable to access the level of capital investment available to powerful platforms such as Amazon, AirBnB, Uber or Spotify. Even new and risky platform capital ventures such as the troubled 7 WeWork have found it easy to attract investment in capital markets. The democratically-governed and collectively-owned platform co-operative alternatives are small by comparison and disadvantaged in scale and growth because they are effectively not ‘for sale’ to venture capital.
Without the vast sums typically spent on platform launch and promotion by the platform capital competition, the challenge is for the new consumers to find the co-ops they are likely to love and trust and for co-ops to work better together to reach and serve these new digital consumers better.
Co-operatives are generally bound by the ICA8 ‘Principle 6’ from their statement on the cooperative identity9: “Cooperatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the cooperative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.”
Our hypothesis is that to make Principle 6 a reality, and to grow the co-operative sector as a whole, the connections between co-operatives need to be efficient and focused on mutual value-creation. Co-operatives and their apex organisations (such as PCC and ICA) lack the underlying identity and trust infrastructure to do so. In particular, despite good intent, ‘silos’ in identity management solutions have persisted across cooperatives.
The project is a collaboration or micro-consortium, and to date has won support from the EU Horizon Next Generation Internet eSSIF-Lab programme. Our project has four key pillars of success:
- Community-driven: Use of a community forum to welcome anyone interested in the project, and invite all to participate. Use of business research activities (survey, community calls, interviews) to help bring new stakeholders into our community.
- Legitimacy: we partner with the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC), an internationally recognized organisation hub that helps start, grow, or convert to platform co-ops. We will reach out to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) and other bodies that maintain the co-operative 'brand'.
- Standards-based: We have established a work item with strong support from the W3C technical community and are able to learn from parallel standardisation efforts in Education Credentials (VC-EDU, Openbadges).
- Open Source: The open source community is an important part of our 'meta' community of platform shapers: An action-focused, agile culture, which favours delivery and 'show' before 'tell'.
We aim to offer an infrastructure of identity and trust for common co-operative membership with privacy-respecting single-sign-on so that new consumers can more easily find, connect with and buy from local co-operative services, while protecting their privacy and personal information. We suggest this will be convenient for the consumers: They don't need to enter personal information and provide proof documents again and again - they can 'tell the co-ops once'.
The infrastructure also benefits co-ops, allowing them to collaborate to reach and cross-sell to the new consumers and members - a 'market commons' of digital and authentic consumer membership. This must respect the privacy of members, sharing by consent only what is necessary to transact - ethical cross-selling.
Identity systems and ecosystems are in themselves complex: “Identity is a “Wicked” problem”10. There are many possible interactions between the different co-operatives and their members and there are many potential risks and pitfalls in digital identity. This project takes a sociocentric view of identity, something that is essentially human and rooted in the relationships between humans, not an individualistic, internalised identity, mapped crudely to a 'digital self'. 11 "Digital identity today isn’t really human at all." 12. It also acknowledges the importance of dialogue and 'storytelling' as an anchor of identity 13. Reductionist attempts to create a 'digital identity' can even be dangerous, with risk of serious individual harm in some socio-political contexts. 14"Put starkly, many millions of people have been excluded, persecuted, and murdered with the assistance of prior identity architectures, and no other facet of information technology smashes into the human condition in quite the same way as digital identity" 12
Some platform cooperatives simply build trust-based communities in silos, which often require users and members to crudely share personal documents and credentials in order to collaborate across co-operative entities. Too much information is shared and scattered across the ecosystem. Many fall back on mainstream solutions (“sign in with..” Apple, Google, Facebook etc) from big tech companies that are easier to use, implement and support, but which may use ‘federated’ identity and sign-on to aggregate and systematically exploit user data.
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is an alternative approach in which users hold and control their ‘verifiable credentials’ which they may consent to present to verifiers, who should ask for only what they need in order to interact or transact. For example, in a trading or supply chain, aggregation of users' personal data by dominant traders ‘relying parties’ can lead to worker exploitation or systemic risk of failure in the ecosystem. A less centralised approach can help to both increase supply chain resilience (less dependence on a dominant platform) and reduce worker vulnerability (more privacy and 'portability' of worker identity). See Hickman 15.
Unfortunately, few 'Self-Sovereign Identity' (SSI)16 technologies have been tried in the Platform Cooperative ecosystem, and none have been adopted at scale. There are many privacy-respecting technical innovations in the area of self-sovereign identity (SSI) and active standards development at W3C, but they have not been widely adopted, lacking network growth as a consequence of a ‘chicken and egg’ problem, or Metcalfe’s Law17: “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users”. However, the most important metric of growth “is not the increase in the number of users but the growth of the number of interactions between them.” (A.Hirel 17) What is it that will act as a 'magnet' 18 or 'catalyst' 19 to draw in and retain more people to actively participate in the ecosystem? One of our community members succinctly asked: "Where's the sizzle?"
Understanding the detail of what these interactions are, or could be, and how they are valuable is often overlooked in the optimistic world of platform cooperativism: "Ultimately, if platform coops are to have any success at all they will need a solid value proposition for its entire ecosystem, including non-member stakeholders such as regulatory entities and consumers of whatever product or service is marketed." 20 According to Saskia Sassen, platform co-ops also need a broader focus on overcoming barriers such as "lack of resources, lack of motivation, lack of interest in low-income households, individuals, and localities, and so on. Important, and too often overlooked, is that the types of applications that are being developed mostly do not address the needs and limited resources of low-income workers, their households, and their neighborhoods." The requirements analysis for such applications was not inclusive or empathetic towards these communities and segments. They solved the wrong problems.
We do not know if initial use-case hypotheses floated in the Coop Creds community address the 'right' problems. Are they sufficiently relevant or representative to form a viable ecosystem? 21. Therefore, we have framed a very broad question for our action research among our community of participating co-operatives:
“How can co-operatives co-operate better in order to improve the co-operative experience?”
We have kept the question as open as possible so that in discussion we can empathise better and uncover more of the hidden, implicit opportunities for valuable interaction between co-operatives, their members and stakeholders. We believe co-ownership and community participation is essential to the co-design process.
The typology and taxonomy of identity systems has been refined through the efforts of many in the field to elevate the importance of a governance 'dimension', and to elaborate it as part of a technical 'stack' (eg within the ToIP stack). The ToIP Ecosystem Foundry Working Group 22 is a valuable community of (emerging) practice. Co-operative governance mechanisms typically involve participative and collective democratic decisions made by member-stakeholders. Rieks Joosten et al observe that "...trust and assurance work best in a community of parties that have some common objectives, and because of that, find it more beneficial to work together in some areas than having to do all the work themselves. They do not seek to provide rules/standards that should be followed world-wide, but rather they consent to a set of rules that they can all work with, for the particular purposes that they share and the concerns they collectively want to address. They will often allow others to join if they find that beneficial." 23 The corollary of this is the proposition that co-operative business models and mechanisms may be useful and relevant in the governance of an identity ecosystem.
Assertions of data 'ownership', individual sovereignty and consent can become complex where multilateral information exchange is involved. Co-operative constructs such as a 'data commons' are proposed as an opportunity for simplification and mutual benefit.
According to Mehta, Dawande and Mookerjee, 21 a data cooperative is an organisation that collects data from its members, processes and monetises the pooled data, and compensates the members for their individual contributions. These cooperatives establish an ecosystem of trust which brings the benefit of collective control over the quality as well as the quantity of data, coupled with better bargaining power through aggregation and better potential monetary compensation. A privacy-first approach combined with co-operative governance provides a firm foundation.
There are opportunities to inform the development and growth of the ecosystem through privacy-respecting transparency of the ecosystem data for participants, following open data principles 24. A value flow matrix could be shared among participants. Informative visualisations could be plotted as a chord diagram for our target ecosystem to highlight the potential for network effects and cross-selling:
The outer arcs in the chord diagram show the relative economic proportions of sectors in a consumer addressable market, while the inner chords show the value flows between the sectors. Although only a synthetic / sample dataset, the chart shows how coops may benefit from access to the consumer bases of other coops and how consumers can find value from common membership. Many other visualisations of similar graph data are possible.
We will use an iterative, adaptive and collaborative design process to discover the social and economic interactions of greatest overall value to the ecosystem and try to focus the design on features that propagate and sustain these and other, related interactions.
We refer to N Bateson's term "aphanipoiesis" - "the way in which life coalesces toward vitality in unseen ways" and "coalescence" - the merging, mixing and fusing of context (Bateson, N. 2021)2 in our research and in the design of our co-operative ecosystem alongside the more overt economics of a design for value exchange. In particular, we hope our requirements dialogue will provide space to consider this coalescence and the merging, mixing and fusing of context across diverse co-operatives from a variety of industrial and economic sectors. We also hope that taking the time for dialogue and iteration will lead to a more inclusive and empathetic approach to community needs. P. Sheldrake has been highly critical of a lack of "discussion of autopoiesis and cognition amongst the identity digerati" 12 and I. Beeson 25 has pointed to similar deficiencies in the entire discipline and practice in information systems when faced with complex, community systems. Beeson helpfully suggests we "shift focus from abstraction, representation and design toward cooperation and use" and "develop a much richer approach to the design of IS..." "..to build systems that support, reflect and project their users' inward assimilation of their lived experiences".
We have scheduled Co-Design Workshops to co-create and co-design the future of what an initial ‘cooperative credential’ could be within the ecosystem. Briefly, representatives from different cooperatives will break out into pairs and in a dialogue attempt to understand and design improvements in co-operation between co-ops and the co-operative experience from each others’ perspective, in turn. They are asked to consider the question from three different aspects, or "spheres of life": work, legal and play 15. For example:
- work - how can we benefit together from this?
- legal - how can we reduce our mutual risk / meet our obligations in this?
- play - how can we have fun / enjoy doing this together?
From this contextual work we will draw what is needed to scope and structure the design of community and identity credentials and roles, patterns and potential software components, following established agile software architecture and design and open source principles.
The trust and identity system infrastructure is only a supporting component of the ecosystem, offering some potentially common features, for example:
- a common, community ID – for members / holders with across multiple coops, with exchange and verification of credentials;
- streamlined new member onboarding – for co-ops to quickly onboard new members/users by accepting 'identities' verified by other coops, eliminating username, password, and sign-up forms;
- strong, passwordless authentication / single sign on tools for higher risk transactions;
- reusable verification / KYC across the ecosystem.
The first iteration will be experimental, exploring which features are necessary and used, how they are perceived and found useful, if at all. All depends on the context.
This is changing and dynamic, but active participants in our recent ‘Show and Tell’ session introduced themselves at this event:
https://community.coopcreds.com/t/co-op-credential-community-call-3-co-op-show-and-tell/291/9
We are also in separate discussion with co-ops working at national level looking for a common, cross-border approach to co-operative identity.
Our approach began with a small group of founding co-operatives to propose candidate use-cases (or interaction scenarios or user stories) for discussion among the co-operative community. These remain candidates and hypotheses to stimulate discussion in the collaborative design process rather than pre-determined outcomes.
We began with a combination of digital surveys and interviews with these co-operatives: Responses covered more than 20 co-operative organisations, from those with thousands of members or sign-ups in the media and entertainment sector and/or tourism, through to growing networks of established agricultural co-operatives. Some are ‘co-ops of co-ops’ with a potentially large regional consumer reach. Some are small, brand new locally-based community start-ups, incubating a variety of projects.
Overall, respondents aligned strongly with the problem areas we identified. Concerns about privacy were a given - all respondents identified with the issue. Co-operation among cooperatives was the topic that generated most engagement and comment about the potential to do more. KYC featured strongly as an issue for larger, more established co-operatives and those starting up in strongly-regulated sectors like housing.
As one example of a co-operative interaction we put forward an early hypothesis for a hybrid digital / local physical event scenario in independent music festivals/touring called ‘Stay Fair / Play Fair”. Here is a visualisation:
There are multiple and varied potential collaborative use-case examples such as Stay Fair / Play Fair in the possible co-operative ecosystem. The core 'offer' of Co-op Credentials is to provide a common identity ecosystem, usable across all these use-cases, yet sufficiently adaptable to accommodate necessary differences and divergence in credential types, issuing protocols, wallets and verification.
We can learn from and use the work of TOIP as an identity reference architecture framework. 26 and also borrow more widely from the structure and terminology of enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF 27 and IAF 28.
For the economic modelling of the ecosystems we propose to use elements of the ValueFlows methodology and syntax. Valueflows (VF) is a set of common vocabularies to describe flows of economic resources of all kinds within distributed economic ecosystems. This common vocabulary also underpins the common data approach for the ecosystem, helping to provide clarity in the governance of public persistent identifiers.
The work of N. Hickman 15 is particularly helpful in considering the types of identity and appropriate levels of identity assurance in more sociocentric ecosystems, also typical of cooperatives: "In the realm of digital identity, much focus has been placed on the challenge of legal identification and national identity systems as an important route to accessing public services and engaging with the state. Yet in our digital lives, we spend more time either working or playing, where legal identification is not necessary. In fact, in many types of interaction, exposing our legal identity undermines other human rights such as the right to privacy. For this reason, it is useful in designing an identity system to consider three different spheres of life"…. legal, work and play, and to experiment/prototype accordingly. The design process will also address the well-known trade-offs between access, privacy and security.
Finally, we will look to the work of the Ecosystem Foundry Working Group for patterns and emerging thinking on operating model tools for an "assurance community". For example, a 'yellow pages service’ to help find the various credentials or catalogues of credentials of interest to participant co-ops; accreditation schemes for processes and organisation units (authorised issuer lists) and re-usable complex rules / decision trees. 23
Contact: Nick Meyne [email protected] [email protected]
Footnotes
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https://www.ica.coop/en/cooperatives/cooperative-identity#:~:text=6.,national%2C%20regional%20and%20international%20structures. ↩
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Bateson, N. (2021) Aphanipoiesis. 65th Annual Proceedings for the International Society of the Systems Sciences. https://journals.isss.org/index.php/jisss/article/view/3887 ↩ ↩2
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Source: World Cooperative Monitor https://www.ica.coop/en/cooperatives/facts-and-figures ↩
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Platform Coop Consortium http://platform.coop/ ↩
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Neilsen: https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/analysis/2015/the-sustainability-imperative-2/ ↩
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Uberall https://uberall.com/en-gb/resources/blog/new-consumer-behaviour-82-will-shop-locally-after-covid-however ↩
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International Cooperative Alliance ↩
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ICA Statement of Cooperative Identity https://www.ica.coop/en/cooperatives/cooperative-identity#:~:text=6.,national%2C%20regional%20and%20international%20structures. ↩
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W3C https://www.w3.org/2011/identity-ws/slides/Pranke-wicked.pdf ↩
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K Smith: From dividual and individual selves to porous subjects https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1757-6547.2012.00167.x ↩
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Philip Sheldrake, 2022: Digitalizing human identity, Blog: https://akasha.org/blog/2022/07/14/digitalizing-human-identity https://generative-identity.org/human-identity-the-number-one-challenge-in-computer-science/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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MacIntyre, A. 1984. After Virtue, 2nd edn. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. ↩
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How to avoid another identity tragedy - Christopher Allen https://youtu.be/isanNSDoSnE ↩
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Hickman, Nicky. (2021). A Use Case for Decentralized Identity at Work. An investigation of potential digital solutions for supply chains in the Indian apparel sector to increase supply chain resilience and reduce worker vulnerability https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362432444_A_Use_Case_for_Decentralized_Identity_at_Work a paper created as part of The Alan Turing Institute’s Trustworthy Digital Infrastructure for Identity Systems project. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Self-Sovereign Identity is a loosely-used term that lacks a normative definition since originally being coined to by Christopher Allen to summarise a set of principles (http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html ) The headline we use for SSI is "agency of individual subjects over the holding and disclosure of information about them". In the digital realm, cryptographic technologies are used, but in the physical human context, a person’s wallet or purse containing paper certificates or cards as ’proofs’ from trusted issuers could be said to be an example of SSI. Note that information property rights are not directly required or implied, and nor are the use of additional identifiers. ↩
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A Hirel: https://medium.com/@ahirel/hacking-metcalfes-law-1127a687bcd2 ↩ ↩2
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Sangeet Choudary, Platform Power, 2013: http://platformed.info ↩
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David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, 2016: Matchmakers: the new economics of multisided platforms ↩
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N. v.Doorn 2017 Analysis: Platform cooperativism and the problem of the outside https://culturedigitally.org/2017/02/platform-cooperativism-and-the-problem-of-the-outside/ ↩
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Mehta, Dawande and Mookerjee, 2021, Can data cooperatives sustain themselves? https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/08/02/can-data-cooperatives-sustain-themselves/ ↩ ↩2
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Ecosystem Foundry Working Group https://wiki.trustoverip.org/display/HOME/Ecosystem+Foundry+Working+Group ↩
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Joosten, Rieks & den Breeijen, Sterre & Reed, Drummond. (2021). Decentralized SSI Governance, the missing link in automating business decisions. 10.13140/RG.2.2.35491.68640. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348325716_Decentralized_SSI_Governance_the_missing_link_in_automating_business_decisions [^29] Manu Sporny: RWoT11 Authorized Issuer Lists https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot11-the-hague/blob/master/advance-readings/authorized-issuer-lists.md ↩ ↩2
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Open Knowledge Foundation https://okfn.org/ ↩
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Ian Beeson: Implications of the therory of autopoeisis for the discipline and practice of information systems" in Realigning Research and Practice in Information Systems Development, 2001, Volume 66 https://ifipwg82.org/sites/ifipwg82.org/files/beeson.pdf ↩
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Linux Foundation, (May 2020.) Introducing the Trust over IP Foundation Whitepaper, https://trustoverip.org/wpcontent/uploads/sites/98/2020/05/toip_introduction_050520.pdf ↩
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The Open Group Architectural Framework: https://www.opengroup.org/togaf ↩
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Capgemini Integrated Architecture Framework: http://architectureportal.org/capgemini-integrated-architecture-framework-iaf ↩