A woman sits at a bank counter, trying to sort out her elderly father's account. He can no longer manage his own affairs. Her father had made clear, while he still could, that she was to handle these matters. The family recognises it. She has acted in that role for years. The clerk asks for documents, then more documents. She has some of them. What she doesn't have is the one thing the screen is really asking for: evidence, in a form the system recognises, of the authority she is trying to exercise.

The authority exists. The system has no place to put it.

Moments like this are not unusual.

Every encounter involves a selection of what becomes visible.

Sometimes we make that selection ourselves, and often not.

At a border, an official decides what we must show. A bank decides what it needs before it will move our money, just as a court decides what counts as evidence. Online platforms decide which details we must hand over before we can go any further. Sometimes what is brought forward is agreed between the people involved, shaped by custom, or established through relationship and trust. Sometimes not.

In every case, there is far more behind what is shown. What enters the encounter is never the whole person, relationship, community or world from which it comes. Something particular, a bounded expression, is brought forward because this encounter calls for it.

SILT is a framework for helping people, communities and institutions operating under different rules, customs and relationships understand enough of each other to interact digitally, without one having to become like the other.

Standing is the position from which someone enters an encounter. It doesn't appear from nowhere. It may arise through genealogy, kinship, family or community recognition, an agreement, a role, law, custom or some other Source. Standing is relational.

Presentation is how Standing is brought into view, but only as far as this encounter requires. It doesn't create Standing. It makes what is relevant here visible.

Digital identity systems have tended to go the other way. Their administrative instinct is to make the subject increasingly knowable: more details collected, more credentials requested, more databases checked, more assurances accumulated. The thinking is understandable. More knowledge appears to mean more certainty. But the two are not the same.

A credential may provide evidence of a relationship or position without being the Source from which that relationship or position arises. You can pile up evidence about someone and still not answer the real question: do they have Standing to act here?

More visibility answers the wrong question more thoroughly.

There is a deeper problem too. Being understood shouldn't require being completely exposed.

Édouard Glissant called for a right to opacity: a refusal of the demand that people must become completely transparent to another system before relationship becomes possible. Mutual recognition need not require complete comprehension. Difference doesn't have to be translated away.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos approaches a related problem through the ecology of knowledges: the idea that different ways of knowing and ordering the world can encounter one another without any one of them becoming the universal measure of the others. Translation across worlds is possible without requiring those worlds to become equivalent.

This matters when different worlds meet. A custom doesn't have to become a credential, a kinship relation a database entry, or community recognition an institutional certificate before it can matter. Different Sources can stay different and still be intelligible at the boundary.

This is the mosaic of the in-between.

Each piece keeps its own shape, colour and history. Nothing is melted down into a single material. What appears is not inside any one piece but in the way they sit beside one another. The spaces between the pieces are not flaws in the picture. They are part of it. And the picture is never finished: each encounter brings different pieces into relation, for a particular purpose, in a particular place.

The same idea applies to digital systems. Why should a cooperative have to reveal its internal deliberations and relationships just to establish that someone can act on its behalf?

Legibility doesn't require exposure.

That is what Presentation makes possible. It lets something relevant cross from one world to another while leaving the rest where it belongs.

Go back to the counter. Imagine she could bring forward something narrow instead: a statement that she has authority on this matter, that it is current, and that it covers what she is asking for. The bank could evaluate it against whatever evidence and trusted sources are appropriate to that encounter: a registry, an attestation, an instrument, a recognised trust network, or another source it has reason to rely upon. Her father's health, the family's arrangements and the years of care stay where they are. She does what she came to do, having shown no more than the moment required.

Now multiply that across a border, a clinic, a land title office, or a community deciding whether to recognise a stranger's representative. The shape of a different kind of infrastructure comes into view: one where different kinds of authority can meet without first being turned into the same thing.

Some of this is already technically possible. Selective-disclosure credentials and zero-knowledge proofs can establish something without revealing all the information behind it. A person can, for example, prove that they satisfy an age requirement without revealing their date of birth. That matters. But notice what these tools do.

They make the answer smaller. They don't question the question.

What should anyone have to reveal in the first place?

Privacy engineering and data minimisation start from the system's question and ask how little can be revealed in answering it. The claim here starts earlier. Was it the right question? Does the information matter to this encounter? Does the party asking have good reason to want it? Is the community or organisation behind it willing to have that knowledge expressed at all? Those are questions about meaning and relationships. They come before any question of verification.

None of this means that nothing should be asked. Banks are obliged to know who they are dealing with. Courts have to test evidence. Opacity can shelter harm as easily as it protects dignity, and no serious system can accept "trust me" at the boundary. The question is not whether to ask, but whether what is being asked is justified by this encounter, and whether the basis for asking can itself be made visible.

Evidence still matters. Credentials, registries and attestations help the receiving side check what it has been shown. They support a Presentation; they are not necessarily the Source of the Standing behind it.

This is why Presentation has to stay distinct from Standing. Standing can come from very different Sources. Presentation's job is narrower: to make enough of it intelligible for this encounter, without claiming to capture the relationships it came from. And the receiving side doesn't create Standing by accepting a Presentation. Its decision matters here. It doesn't reach backwards and change the relationships the Standing came from.

The encounter doesn't take on the world the Presentation came from. It receives only what has been brought to it, and whatever meaning forms, forms in between.

Some questions remain open. What happens when someone chooses not to present? When something cannot, or should not, be expressed at all? When the receiving side asks for more than the situation calls for?

So if Presentation tells us what is brought forward, what determines what the receiving side requires before it can act?

That brings us to the other side of the encounter.

Until then, a question to carry: the last time you were asked to prove something, how much of what you gave was actually needed?

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SILT is an open standards and research project exploring how different systems of identity, authority and legitimacy can become mutually legible without being collapsed into a single model.