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Identity: What's new? What's next?

| Tags: identity · en | 4 minutes

TLDR;

what's new?

From a technical standpoint? Nothing.

Even though technical development stalled 9 months ago, I've spoken about Identity with more than forty people since then. Everyone had a different background, a different story, a different reason for being interested in Identity... but most of them wanted to make Identity the best project possible.

Not all feedback was positive, some were challenging the idea and core beliefs of Identity, but all feedback has helped shape and improve what Identity will become.

That blury vision that I had a few months ago about what Identity should and could become is much clearer now.

You can read more about Identity and the story behind it in the following interview: https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20250107-01.en.html

what's next?

I am happy to announce that thanks to all the feedback I've received, I'm ready to keep moving forward with the rewrite! This rewrite will bring the level of scalability, interoperability, and security that is expected from a project like this. This rewrite has been heavily influenced by all of these people who shared their thoughts and ideas with me during these past months.

I can't provide a specific timeline for when the rewrite will be ready for public release, but I’m hopeful it will be soon.

I am still collecting ideas and feedback to help shape the future of Identity. Feel free to share your own here: Identity: Ideas!

Identity's identity

Lately, aside from the rewrite, I've been reflecting on the identity of Identity. While I've grown fond of its current form, something about it feels a bit too basic — it's just a common English word with a purple theme.

I would like to create a website that I can easily share to tell people what is Identity, why is it relevant, and how can they contribute. But that requires acquiring a domain, and there aren't many affordable identity.tld out there!

I've done some brainstorming, but nothing has really stood out to me yet. If you have any ideas, feel free to share them through the form above!

There's a few links that I have used to point people to different sites and documents related to Identity. As part of this update, most of them will point to https://sofi.to/identity instead.

https://sofi.to/identity will be updated to point to the new Codeberg organization (for now, until the aforementioned website and domain are ready). Most of the content from those various links will be publicly available there in the following weeks.

If you hold an Identity-related link (or any link that is related to any of my projects) and it breaks, let me know!

core team? governance?

Now that more people are interested in Identity and in order to build trust in Identity, some form of governance should be established to ensure that Identity is a sustainable and community-driven project.

Currently, there's around four people who are proactively and recurrently contributing to Identity. These individuals come from different backgrounds, but they’re all close to the issues Identity focuses on. Having such a mix of experiences has been really helpful when talking through design choices and potential features.

So far, they have efectively been Identity's core team. I still need to decide what are the obligations and expectations of core team members. Once this is done, I will establish a formal core team responsible for the development of Identity.

Aside from this, I would like to establish some kind of group of experts (GoE). This group would be formed by people from various backgrounds (tech people, teachers, palliative care, psychology, dementia care, general medicine...) and would be part of the discussion when any change is proposed.

Do you think that you would be a good fit for the Group of Experts? You can show your interest here: Group of Experts: Expression of Interest

I’m still figuring out the best way to set up governance for a project like Identity, since my experience has mostly been with projects that are pretty different. If you’ve got any ideas or thoughts on how to approach it, I’d love to hear them!

afterword

I would like to thank everyone who has supported me through this journey so far. Identity started as a small idea almost a year ago during a 3 A.M. talk with my mother. Identity is now becoming something that can change the world for the better!

Thank you to everyone who helped me design Identity, thank you to everyone who has listened to my talks, thank you to everyone who has gone out of their way to thank me for my work, thank you to everyone who has stopped by and told me their thoughts. Thank you all!

And last but not least, thank you for reading this update :)