Diaspora (Definition): Being dispersed and displaced; negotiating old and new identities practically and emotionally; oscillating between the strange and the familiar; having both a sense of belonging and a sense of being alien.
The diaspora project is a community project led by Dataswyft and the HAT Community Foundation to widen the understanding of, and access to, digital identity.
The DIASPORA PROJECT is a SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP in the studio working on an Open Innovation Network Project led by the HAT Community Foundation and Dataswyft.
The Diaspora project consist of 4 components:
Digital Identity today is dominated by the functional need to participate in the digital economy. From just logging in in using Facebook or Google, to KYC credentials to get a bank account, these identities are critical to be part of the Internet.
However, current digital identities are rigid. As such, they can result in labelling. For many people in the world, having an identity is a risk. It becomes a label that discriminates against them. As such, they do not feel safe to reveal themselves and are therefore excluded from society.
Giving Digital Identity can also create unreasonable expectations. Human beings are by nature multi-faceted and inconsistent. Our identity is often negotiated within ourselves. Digital Identity that is a narrow version of who we are often boxes us in and set a narrow expectations that could make us uncomfortable. As more digital identities are created, the “twin” of ourselves emerge and depending on whether they are rigid or fluid, we become bound to the expectations around those behaviours.
Identity can be used to monitor us. Any app that has identity information can creep to becoming a monitoring service.
The diaspora project seeks to enable a community of academic institutions, industry and government bodies to collaborate on identity research and development within the HATLAB Studio.
For more about digital identity, read some articles here
Irene’s blogpost on digital identity here
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Join the Community for the development of identity solutions that are inclusive and privacy preserving.