Public Participation Profile

Public participation profiles enable contributors to engage in projects aligned with their values while maintaining control over their personal information.

Why are Public Participation Profiles Important?

For many individuals, participating in public projects creates a fundamental tension. They want to make meaningful contributions to projects aligned with their values and skills, but they desire protection from surveillance, discrimination, retaliation, or unwanted exposure that might come if their real-world identity were revealed.

Public participation profiles resolve this tension by creating structured, verifiable, pseudonymous digital representations that allow contributors to share what’s necessary for trust and to improve trust in the profile over time through peer endorsements while protecting what needs to remain private.

How Do Public Participation Profiles Work?

Public participation profiles require stable pseudonymous identifiers that can be linked to self-attestations and peer endorsements. XIDs are built to support public participation of this type, especially as defined in the Amira use case.

1. Stable Pseudonymous Identifier

The foundation of a public participation profile is a stable, cryptographically-verifiable identifier, such as a XID, that doesn’t reveal real-world identity. It must provide consistent identity across interactions and cryptographic verification of control of that identity (via private key) without an inherent connection to real-world identity.

2. Self-Attestations

A public participation profile must have the ability for the holder to make self-attestations about themselves (or at least about how they represent themselves in the identity).

This can include valuee statements that establish alignment without revealing personal background and claims of baseline skills and experience, again without specific identity disclosure.

Effective privacy-respecting value statements:

Focus on universal principles rather than specific circumstances.
Connect to project goals rather than personal background.
Demonstrate alignment without revealing motivations.

Effective privacy-respecting self-attestations:

Highlight distinctive capabilities without uniquely identifying details.
Focus on relevant skills, not chronological history.
Provide specific technical domains rather than job titles.
Express experience in years rather than dates.

3. Self-Attestation Commitments

Some self-attestations might need to be hidden from the general public while the identity still commits to them. This can be done with evidence commitments, which allow contributors to log capabilities without revealing sensitive information and to later reveal them through selective disclosure to specific parties and/or through the development of progressive trust.

A commitment is usually created by logging a claim than hashing that claim and publishing the hash. If the claim is later revealed (either publicly or privately), it gains weight because it can be dated back to the publication date of the hash.

4. Peer Endorsements

A public participation profile must also support peer attestations, which provide independent verification of claims and improve trust for the profile while preserving pseudonymity. They will often come from peers who have only interacted with the pseudonymous public participation profile.

Effective peer attestations:

Come from other trusted community members.
Provide context about collaborative relationship.
Verify specific skills or contributions.
Include cryptographic signatures for verification.