KERI MOOC

Goal is to facilitate self-education culminating in KERI knowlegde. Level: starters, novices, beginners and alike.

Why

KERI is ground-breaking technology. It has the potential to truly distribute and decentralize the anchoring of public digital identifiers and maintain verifiable attribution to their root of trust. It's mankind's path to personal digital freedom by keeping control over your digital self and still comply with rules of domains you live in.

What

The content of the Massive Online Opensource Course (MOOC) should be

1. Universal Cryptography theory
2. Universal Identifier theory
3. General Key management
4. KERI
5. Specific KERI issues: CESR, KELs, TELs, KAACE, SAID, ACDC
6. Roots of trust and Wallet software
7. Delegation and Agency
8. Revocation, (Pre)Rotation
9. DIDs
10. Governance and Credentials

KERI solves...

Source: Sam Smith 2021, KERI.one

What is not specifically KERI

• Keeping your private keys private
• Network Security, Security related to social behavior
• Veracity; we need governance for this KERI solves the public secure attribution problem.

For Who

My goal is to reach out for the smart young people in third world countries who own a smart phone. I focus on personal development and learning to empower individuals. The MOOC is aimed at them. If we can seduce young people to learn the fundamentals of digital key management and true autonomic identifiers while they are learning English at the same time, we might

1. train fundamental key management skills*
2. spread KERI knowledge
3. expand KERI programming capacity Be aware that in this MOOC, that is individually focussed, we skip the more team-oriented topics, like multisig schemes, network security, verifiable credentials and governance and alike.

*including keeping your priv keys private

By Who: The creators

• Content
  • Current team members are busy programming. We should not disturb them too much. We might call on non-programming volunteers that have advanced fudamental knowledge.
• e-Learning Management System (LMS)
  • Moodle

Use of English

For Central Europeans a non-native proficient use of English could be satisfactory.

Personally I think it is not a good idea to have KERI theory translated into Spanish, Mandarin, etc. KERI theory sounds like English, but it's not and we'll create even more hurdles to overcome when we translate to another foreign language.

Native speaking

Maybe a non-native speaker is better than native speakers from the UK, Canada or the US because native speakers in a complex technology field tend to use hard to grasp constructions?

For US, Canada and UK, we might need to record a native speaker to come across more convincingly. But in that case we need to be careful that the wording is simple and understandable for laymen.

How it's done

• e-learning with vids.
  • Presentation skills of the creators will certainly help to bring the message across smoothly.
• Incentive program
• On mobile phone
  • offline
• Asynchronous learning
  • practise on prototypes and test environments
• Synchronous learning and participation
  • AMA sessions
• Test and graduation / certification

Pre-recorded video play and text chat

AMA 1

First we play a video for first timers, and in the meanwhile we'll be available on the chat for guidance and first answers and after this prerecorded video with text-chat option we'll go over to interactive Q&A.

AMA 2 Full-swing Zoom Q&A and text chat

We could open up on Zoom with other interested Newbies who join in later (because they've already seen the pre-recorded stuff)

for live discussion and Q&A, of course with a host that repeats questions posed in the chat and gives the person that has sent in the question the opportunity to repeat the question with voice & vid. We've tested this concept in the Netherlands and it went well.

Example program bi-weekly

So the example program could be:

Wednesday 4 PM CEST Pre-recorded video play and text chat

Wednesday 4:30 PM CEST Zoom Q&A and text chat, **this week's topics only!** 

Repetition every 8 weeks

The whole series will be repeated and revised every 8 weeks. New tutors can be trained (train the teacher) and within 2 month play a role in teaching others.

Topic	Wk	Date	Pre	Post
You get to decide	1	date	general knowledge of identity systems and identifiers	know three types of identifier systems and why they are important
Practise Self Sov	2	date	Awareness of status of algoritmic and autonomic identifier systems	Knowledge and practise of pseudonymous self determining identifiers in social media: creation, binding and removal.
Universal IDs	3	date	Knows where to draw the line between administrative identifiers and self-sovereign identifiers	Fundamental knowledge about the pre-requisites and features of a truly universal identifier
Basic cryptographical one way functions	4	date	Cryptography: hiding, encryption and decryption minimal knowledge	Hashing, Signing, Public Private keys
KERI why and basics	5	date	Universal identifiers, basic Internet technology expertise, "https:" and certificates, decentralization in general, basic cryptographical one way functions	KERI thin layers, KERI's unique universal objective, self-certifying and self-admin identifiers, key event logs, primairy and secondary roots of trust.
Key event logs, KERI duplicity game	6	date	KERI basics, basic crypography, gamification: eavesdropping, hostile behaviour, etc	Fully grasp what KERI is about and what it isn't. What KERI cares about and what not. Understand the set bounderies of KERI core and its expandable thin layering.
KERI and DIDs	7	date	Knowledgeable about what KERI is, and what DIDs comprise of	Similarities, Differences, mutual positioning, combination, challenges
Key rotation and key delegation, Consensus protocols for secondary roots of trust	8	date	Legal identifiers in general	Understanding of the new concepts introduced by KERI and their impact on the internet and self-sovereign public identifiers

Supportive resources

When students find our 'KERI MOOC" in the middle of an ongoing series, then there are two options:

1. work backwards in high speed
2. wait until the next series

Backward learning

We will have more than one video of half an hour pre-recording of which the text-chat will also be recorded. And the Q&A will also be recorded.

To facilitate catching up for students that want to hop on the bandwagon the latest series will be available publicly as Zoom recording.

Further reading

Every lesson will have sufficient links to Keri.one resources, but the level of abstraction should increase step by step.

Legal setting

We can only re-use or create Open Source course material, e.g. CC by SA

Example video

Future Internet Identity

This example is a general introduction about the why of autonomic IDs and tries to put listeners to work at the end. We could also focus more specific on KERI in future recordings or even the relationship between KERI and DIDs, KERI and other algorithmic and autonomic ID systems.

Henk van Cann's presentation about (the why of) autonomic identifiers called: "You control, therefore you are, and you get to decide" https://vimeo.com/552459966/2586f0e23c.

It is a first-time, one-take presentation based on this article: https://medium.com/happy-blockchains/you-control-therefore-you-are-and-you-get-to-decide-2e2e615714a9.

How

Moodle expert Peter Haasdijk, working from the Netherlands thinks along with us. His first recommendations:

• don't depend too heavily on the off-line capacities of the Moodle e-learning system
• two VP servers needed, one for Moodle (e-learning), one for BigBluebutton ( online video conferencing )
• Forget about HSP content (too heavy)
• It's going to be a flat MOOC, no java, no graphical highlights
• How's the KERI specific content currently served, like video's, articles, etc.

For a first set-up he needs these parameters:

• participants

• concurrent participants

• content
• mobile adaptive content

Henk's prediction

We're going to fail. To do continuous development and deployment in a Moodle stack and also alter content in a 24x7 available system that needs to serve mobile phones and authenticate users is doomed to fail. But let's fail fast and let's fail often. From what we learn by failure, we'll adjust the solution every MOOC cycle.

When?

As soon as possible, but it's done when it's done.

First steps to take:

1. Select an e-LMS (Moodle is a good candidate)
2. Find experts to create the MOOC
3. Gather open source course material to reference for further reading
4. Write high abstraction level articles which have a narative flow
5. Practise presenting the content of the articles
6. Professionally record the first three half hour pre-recorded vids
7. Get the series started and see where we get