The digital identity systems being developed now will greet you with a familiar question: who are you?

What identifier do you hold? What credential can you present? Who verified it? Did we?

But the deeper foundational question lies somewhere else.
What happens when two people, communities, institutions or systems meet, but do not derive identity, authority or legitimacy from the same place?

An Indigenous Peoples relational system encounters a government system. A private agreement meets institutional procedure. An AI agent acts through delegated authority. Two communities recognise different grounds of standing.

Each participant arrives carrying far more than whatever the machine can read: histories, relationships, named and unnamed influences, stories, narratives and symbols that shape how the world itself is understood.

The problem of proving a machine-compliant identity is only half the equation.

The second, and largely missing, element is presenting enough meaning to become legible for an encounter to proceed. Proceeding without requiring either side to become a version of the other. Without one ontology collapsing into the dominant default.

Before interaction occurs, there is already a structure in play, even if most technical architectures push it into the background:

Source → Standing → Presentation → evaluation at the encounter

Different traditions have named these edges differently: the borderlands, the threshold, the abyssal line. They are not identical concepts, but each points towards something that conventional systems architecture tends to flatten: the space where different worlds meet without necessarily becoming one.

This is the space SILT Core v0.2 is concerned with.

Are you what the machine can determine about you? Or is that only one small part of the story you bring to the encounter?

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Explore the work

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.

The v0.2 release is now being finalised. In the meantime, the wider project and current implementation work can be explored here:
https://github.com/Sugarlicks/silt-identity-core