Identity is an Outcome of Community
Discussion
Ian Grigg:
"The Chama (which is how I will term it from now on, although there are many other names around the world) is a small community based on existing local trust and a strong need to save. A typical chama is a group of women running a market place; at the end of the day they come together to sort out their day’s takings, pay off their loans, pool the results, and make new loans for tomorrow’s working capital.
Of course all their takings could be stolen by an endless list of attackers, corruption coming in many and diverse forms. By placing their takings into their chama it is now defended by the group as a whole. No longer is one member on her own; a theft from one is a theft from them all, and the thief must now deal with a tribe of angry women.
Likewise, insider attacks are dealt with by the process of careful selection of members and consistent meetings. Every member has skin in the game; for every member the success of the chama is not only an aspiration, it’s their very life savings.
It is out of this process that we find that not only are these women in charge of their savings, their destiny and their economy, there is unstated power in their belongership. As they trust each other in savings, they trust each other in life. And when you trust your peers in life, you share your identity with them, because they are trusted to protect you.
In reverse, the fact that a person is a member of a certain chama can be a very strong statement of identity. It is stronger than say an identity card or a bank account or an employment contract, because those statements are of compliance not trust. Potentially, it can be even stronger than a family connection, an educational degree, or a professional resume or curriculum vitae.
In contrast, on the Internet, gurus often talk about “solutions” to the problem of Identity. PKI certificates, which failed to roll out; scans of ID cards, which are easy to spoof or buy; smart cards which require everyone to have a reader; mobile phones which require trust in the vendors; and finally reputation, which is numerology - a futile attempt to turn some person’s entire life into a single number. For much of China, the social credit score is being utilised for reasons good and bad, but it’s still just a number. The USA inspired credit score is much the same - what can we say about someone who is 200 versus another who is 220? Has humanity really strived for 10,000 years of recorded history to reduce each of us to a number?
This notion of belongership brings a powerful alternative to a numbers-obsessed world: “I am a member of my chama” is a much more powerful statement because it brings in all the richness of the chama, to which we know the member belongs because it makes her life better. My fellow members and I have skin in a joint game; they guard me, as I guard them. We are bound in a common enterprise, a consensual goal for an aspirational and financially beneficial future.
You can’t put that into a number - but you can put that into a simple statement, “I am from the Dragon chapter of the Bitcoin Association.” My identity is established as being someone from a group with some tangibly real reputation.
And it turns out that not only is this a good thing, it is more closely aligned to the notion of useful identity than other known systems. As we conclude in Part I, your digitally useful identity is what people say of you, and what more powerful statement is there than your group saying you are one of us?
Identity is an outcome of community - which leaves us a much more refined goal in the search."
(https://www.iang.org/identity_cycle/identity_cycle-3-20211118.pdf)
More information
* Book: The Identity Cycle. Ian Grigg.
URL = https://www.iang.org/identity_cycle/identity_cycle-3-20211118.pdf