FAQ Category: Archived

Archived

  • This the “Sam Foundation”?!

    The chairman and Sam could decide independently of anybody else. To gain something, you also have to give. It would not find the support of a larger community.

    It’s the community foundation supported by KERI’s inventor Dr. Samuel M. Smith. Any qualified majority in the board makes decisions on all but a few topics. These topics are reserved for the technical manager with a few veto rights for the original inventor, which conforms to the well-established BDFL model.
    Having stated this, we will always strive for consensus, but by all means, avoid takeovers or stalemates.

    Thus, we wish to protect the original inventor’s work and future role. Furthermore, we wish to gradually develop the Foundation into a business-like, not-for-profit, open-source foundation where takeovers by narrow interest groups are impossible.

    We can do this via:
    A. Statutes and organizational regulations
    B. Board composition

    Ad A.

    Statutes tend to be rigid. We create them, put them in a drawer, respect them, and only take them out when something happens. We will flexibly adjust the organization along the lines we lay out. We’ve used a standard Utah template, “Muli-Member L3C, Manager-Managed Organization Agreement”, for that.
    And that’s where anyone donating and participating in the roles, tasks, and deliverables laid out has to trust what we do for the community.

    Ad B.
    See the organizational chart, the competence profiles, and the Memorandum of Understanding (Start 2025: status concept)

    Who do you trust more to guide this process: the KERI team, including the original inventor, or some local interest group with an urgent agenda?

    We aim for the more considerable support that we expect to be given to the proof of work team, the original KERI team.

    History

    Initially, the idea was to give all parties a voice and bring them together in one forum: the Advisory Board. The founders have reserved a seat on the board with decision-making authority for the leader of that Advisory Board.

    This concession isn’t necessary for the current state of affairs, nor would it be the first choice to expand the board, but the founders expressed their appreciation by bundling advice in this board vote.
    It constitutes the Best of Both Worlds: A small team can act fast and finish the work (5Ws). All stakeholders get a voice, and based on consensus in the advisory board, their chairman/leader has a seat with voting rights on the board of directors to represent the common interests of the stakeholders without slowing down the operations through endless discussions and individual interests.

  • How can we be sure that the domicile authorities will accept a not-for-profit organization as small as this?

    The proposal is a minimal, sufficient, practical, and simple means to a minimal enough end to meet the regulatory requirements in the domicile. Of course, our proposal will comply with the authorities and not-for-profit foundation’s requirements.

  • What shaped the communication about the foundation?

    Some people didn’t like the way the KERI team group took over the initiative to design a KERI foundation.

    The feeling of being surpassed without being heard is not a nice one. The European group may not have noticed that donation-based funding has been on the agenda of the KERI team for quite a while. What follows is a historical perspective on the communication.

    Blockchainbird made its first donation to KERI development via GitHub in 2020. The KERI team wasn’t involved in the Swiss initiative, so we tried to unify both initiatives when we heard of it. We’re happy that this effort was received well.

    When the first meeting was planned just after DICE 2024 by a European group that did not frequent the weekly KERI Zoom meetings of WebofTrust or TrustoverIP, the inventor of KERI clearly stated at this first meeting that the initiative to set up a KERI foundation is for those who put real money on the table.

    You could argue about the talents and abilities needed to get KERI adopted by large companies and organizations, but here’s a significant fact:
    KERI’s tooling hasn’t matured yet (status 2024), so selling it to larger companies makes no sense. The implementation will diverge from the reference implementation, which still needs to be completed, and the customers will abandon it with an incompatible codebase that must be maintained in an isolated manner.

    We consider KERI’s inventor a hard-working multi-talent and should be supported in what he thinks it takes to keep KERI healthy and what the next steps in this process are: open-source foundations set up with the inventor’s blessing have been far more successful in the past than those that bypassed the inventor.

    To confirm, the feeling of being surpassed without being heard is unfortunate. As this elaborate answer explains, we believe the experience is mutual. To work together, the KERI team has taken the lead because Blockchainbird (the donation vehicle of Henk van Cann) committed to initially donating 100K US$ to set up a foundation with the design principles mentioned here.

  • How will the KERI foundation eventually become independent of individuals?

    We invented a role-based organizational chart. So, yes, the foundation is already independent of individuals, except that the BDFL role is reserved for Dr. Samuel M. Smith.

    Trying to become independent of the original inventor too early would be a significant error, especially in the KERI case and because of our stage. Not to mention the apparent lack of respect for the work done, which oozes from an approach to try and outnumber the critical roles with voting power, this setup has failed before (and will again), not only in KERI’s history but in numerous other open-source projects.

  • Your proposal is very complex. Isn’t this concept difficult to “sell?”

    We’re keeping the leadership team small. Moreover, we don’t think that we make it complex. On the contrary, we avoid organizational complexity and focus on accelerating the urgently required development processes.


    With the confirmed support for this setup by KERI’s inventor, we are ready to go and can focus on finishing the job (5Ws) starting today.

    Please, do not to mix complexity with elaboration in details. It’s true we have a thoughtful and comprehensive setup.

  • How did the design relate to the European/Swiss group?

    The foundation’s design is aligned with and partly inspired by the Swiss initiatives, for which we are very thankful!
    A Swiss foundation, as proposed by the group’s initiator in mid-2024, may work well for the CH cases. However, it needs to be expanded.

    Not thoroughly combining the design with the Swiss group may result in a more difficult start in terms of funding and the loss of a currently unknown number of supporters.

    Still, we need a more practical, broader, long-term approach that keeps the KERI inventor’s vision intact. Any local group can have more urgent plans and a directed agenda.

    We’ve foreseen a direct funding method within the foundation to accommodate the needs of the Swiss user group and businesses.

  • What is the domicile of the foundation?

    The domicile is the state of Utah, US.

    History

    A short list of options for domicile stemming from selection criteria and design principles existed. The design process resulted in a uniform request-for-proposal layout, and local service providers’ responses were considered.

    Links:
    Design principles
    Domicile selection criteria

    We looked for a domicile that could grow with what the KERI foundation should become in the long run and with a broad scope.