Sideways Verifiable Community
Specifications Document v 1.2 (active version)
Document history:
v1.0 author Grace Rachmany, Sept 2024
v1.1, Grace Rachmany, October 30 2024
Integrating comments from the team on this document, plus Bernhard Frey’s initial comments (link redacted, available on request).
Many comments were left in for further team discussion. partners
Decision was made to create a “White Paper” / Business Plan for outside consumption
v1.2 Grace Rachmany, July 1, 2025
Includes updates from Use Cases developed with team (Geoff Turk, Oli Sylvester-Bradley, Kaliya Young)
Moved from private repository to the public Sideways Repository
Added cute diagrams and sketchy mockups
Executive Summary
Challenge: how to create trust in a decentralized system
Hypothesis: by having certifying entities that vouch for individuals, and take on group responsibility for the individuals’ behavior. Vouching entities can impose consequences on individuals and therefore can vouch for their good standing.
Introduction: Verifiable Community
What is a network of networks and how do you know you belong to one?
Verifiable Credentials system allows people to prove their belonging to a particular group, and it allows groups to freely associate with one another.
This specification is the result of more than 100 interviews and discussions with people coordinating or participating in “networks of networks”, coalitions, “ecosystems”, consortia, and other types of groups of groups. The main finding was that there is no tooling for networks to identify member organizations and members of member organizations.
As a result, these organizations have no clear membranes and they trust one another only through long-term relationships. Furthermore, there is no real way to know whether an organization or individual adheres to the values they claim to espouse. People generally have to keep this information in their personal memories, and it leads to the inability for networks and movements to effectively collaborate and grow.
Most organizations use some form of word of mouth, but a few use either blockchain-based identifiers, such as tokens or NFTs. Others use proprietary databases or paid memberships.
Problems cited by organizations:
Difficulty in scaling = inability to do movement building to address planetary problems because identifying aligned partners is completely manual
Leaders of organizations need to keep information “in their head” about which partner organizations and individuals are reliable (or not).
Leaders burn out
Accountability always falls on a very small handful of people
Knowledge disappears either because of memory or transmission problems
History of partnerships among organizations is lost, so each relationship needs to be restarted
Wasted time assessing potential partner organizations which were already known to be inappropriate / unreliable
Difficulty in addressing people who don’t adhere to code of conduct
Immature or bad actors jumping from one community to another
Grabbing and blabbing (information leaks, inappropriate behavior)
Rugging and thugging (theft, collusion for antisocial outcomes)
Verifiable Community
This proposal starts from the point of addressing the need for a commonly used “Extranational” digital identification to span across different types of emergent communities addressing the polycrisis. Furthermore, the solution is designed to be flexible enough to enable people who cannot attain national documents to have a reliable and unique identification document that can prove their eligibility for services provided by different NGOs and communities, as well as their rights to participate in governance or economic institutions relevant based on their eligibility.
This document is the result of research with leaders of groups of groups: consortia, networks-of-networks, umbrella organizations, etc. The Sideways team formally interviewed approximately 30 different organizers who had different approaches to networks-of-networks to assess their needs. We also conducted dozens of informal discussions and interviews on the topic. It also incorporates research with the Self-Sovereign Identity community who have been working on these problems for decades, and who are well versed in the tradeoffs of different technologies as they may be applied to this problem space. The report is publicly available here.
Terminology
In this document, we use the word “identification” rather than identity. Identity can be many things. The system described in this documentation is a form of identification or certification that allows a person to prove they are who they say they are, and show something about the context in which they are making a request for access to services. (Similar to a driver’s license.)
**Vouching and certification **in this document refer to certifications that are validated by the group who issues them. Individuals could use the system to issue certifications, but the primary use is to create certificates that are “backed” by a group which attests the individual meets certain criteria. (Similar to a university degree.)
Issuers are entities that provide credentials to individuals. Verifiers are entities that provide services. Often, groups will fill both roles, for example, if two villages have an agreement to host one another’s members. They both Issue credentials to their members and verify credentials from the other village.
For context: While Sideways is mainly concerned with IRL human interactions and physical world resources, the solution is a digital solution and therefore can be used across both online and physical world contexts.