Decentralized-id.com is a collaborative, participatory learning community oriented that strives to support the elaboration and adoption of a user-controlled decentralized identity layer for the internets of the future. All of this is a labor of love and a work in progress, but certain shared values undergird our work and set the terms of our engagement with the broader public. We strive to be:
\- **Educational**. Our primary motivation is always to teach people what they want to learn, collecting, promoting, and disseminating the best information we can find along the way. We believe that a well-educated populous and a better-educated labor pool for the sector are both public goods that maximize the chances of interoperable, vendor-neutral identity becoming and remaining a reality.
\- **Impartial**. We never play favorites, take sides, offer investment advice, or play into market dynamics whereby identity service vendors and platforms jockey for relative advantage. Our primary and overarching loyalty is to maximizing users' control of their data, whether that control is called “self-sovereign” or “independent” or what have you.
\- **Inclusive**. Building any (and building ginfrastructure in particular) is always a community endeavor, and community bonds are the only effective countermeasure against profit motives and ulterior motives. Everyone is welcome here until they take actions demonstrably intending to make others unwelcome, and all opinions are welcome as long as their expression does not impinge the participation of others (“your right to swing your fist around ends at my nose”). If you feel unwelcome in a way you can’t discuss directly with the participants involved, please contact our Ombudsman’s Office. We reserve the right to ban noncontributing or abusive members and remove their contributions.
\- **Entirely unmotivated by profit.** No one affiliated with our core community of facilitators, archivists and pedagogues will ever ask you for money for anything that happens on this site or for any work related to it. We accept direct donations and corporate sponsorships to cover our expenses, and individuals may do paid consulting, writing, or freelance work independent of the organization, but only where we can be confident that these activities and engagements will have no bearing on our impartiality, our writing, and our teaching.
\- **Original**. We categorically never publish or republish sponsored or commissioned content. All of our contributions are original and exclusive.
\- **Contributors to and stewards of the creative, intellectual, technological and labor Commons.** None of this material is for sale, and all original content is published according to creative commons license—any reproduction for profit is unauthorized aside from being incredibly tacky.
