ARC Regenerative Communities is about outcome-driven civilizational design. To achieve this we attend closely to what works and what does not work when forming, growing, evolving, forking, propagating a community… or letting it die a natural death when its purpose is fulfilled. We can apply prosocial patterns to a conscious process of community formation only when we have a clear pattern language and set of protocols for that process.

This summer we are studying a particular existing regenerative community that specializes in the development of internet protocols – the IETF. This institution is not kept alive by money and staff (like the IEEE), it is not kept alive by charismatic leaders people “follow” (like TBL), it is not kept alive by international treaties that have mandates for an organization to exist (like the ITU). The IETF is kept alive by the energy of people and their decision to actively contribute their energy to the creation of the protocols they develop there. They also actively develop and participate in protocols that are generative forming the “community protocols” . It literally is a recursive organization using its protocol processes to develop protocol processes for protocols. The technical protocols it generates are also available for voluntary adoption.

For the past 20 years, Kaliya has led a global community of developers and business supporters to create and adopt a layer of identity for people based on open standards. She co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) to bring together technologists who want to develop and deploy user-centric identity protocols. In the past 15 years, our community has created widely adopted internet standards, including OpenID Connect, OAuth(IETF), Verifiable Credentials(W3C), Decentralized Identifiers(W3C) amongst others.

She is the author of two books: the Domains of Identity (2020) and A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity (2018) and papers on topics related to digital identity. In 2017, she was awarded an M.S. in Identity Management and Security from UT, Austin. In 2019, she traveled to India for two months as a New America India-US Public Interest Technology fellow to study Aadhaar, the national ID system for India. She consults with governments, NGOs, startups, and enterprises on decentralized identity technologies. In addition, she teaches Computer Information Systems at Merritt College in Oakland, California.

She helped define the term unconference and pioneered using Open Space Technology to organize collaborative events in which the participants themselves create an agenda and define their goals. Events she founded or co-founded include She’s Geeky, the FediForum UnMoney Convergence, Digital Death Day, Open Government Playbook, and The Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop.

What gives my life meaning is to serve and protect the living earth and her people. My mission is to equip the regenerative movement at scale at the pace of the polycrisis, connecting place-based systems change initiatives with trust-based funding, and empowering a global network of networks with tools for coordination. I truly believe that for our species to thrive we need to maximize the number of us who are fully prepared and resourced to contribute collaboratively to co-create a regenerative unfolding. I don’t think of this as political, but rather the rational pursuit of my aspirations on behalf of humanity and the greater blossoming of consciousness in the cosmos.