The people building Weave have spent twenty-four years building toward this vision.

Kaliya Young — Co-Chair

Inspired by a vision. Twenty-four years building toward it. Instrumental in every generation of the infrastructure it requires.

In 2002, Kaliya encountered Planetwork, who had just done the intellectual work behind the Augmented Social Network paper (2003) — a vision for building identity and trust into the next-generation internet, so that communities could coordinate, self-organize, and govern at every scale without depending on centralized platforms. That vision has driven her work for twenty-four years.

Twice she built projects directly inspired by this vision — first weaving a distributed activist network through social technology, then envisioning community-scale local economic empowerment and social coordination. Both were ahead of the infrastructure. The identity protocols they needed didn't exist yet.

That experience shaped a fundamental insight: the trust layer is not one product. It is a set of protocols that must be woven together across many projects, many communities, many standards bodies. The work is convergence, not construction. That is the origin of Weave's design.

Three generations of digital identity — instrumental in all three

Kaliya has been part of leading three generations of digital identity infrastructure:

Generation 1 — OpenID and OAuth. In 2005, Kaliya co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop — and has co-produced it twice yearly for twenty years. IIW is the forum where OpenID and OAuth were incubated: the "Log in with Google / Apple / Microsoft" technology now used between ten and fifteen billion times every day across nearly every app and website on earth. Generation 1 gave people portable login. It is the most widely adopted identity protocol in history.

Generation 2 — Verifiable Credentials. Governments, universities, and employers issuing cryptographically verifiable digital credentials — driver's licenses, diplomas, professional certifications, employment records. This generation is going to market now, with millions of credentials already issued. Kaliya has spent the last several years building this ecosystem — not just the standards work (W3C, Trust over IP, DIF, IETF), but the harder problem of market adoption: listening to what developers struggle with, what institutions actually need, what communities can use. Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers took shape at IIW alongside Generation 1.

Generation 3 — Community trust. The generation Weave builds. Personhood credentials, groups as first-class protocol objects, portable trust across community boundaries, secure coordination that doesn't depend on platforms. Generations 1 and 2 gave individuals portable identity and verifiable credentials. Generation 3 gives communities protocol-level standing — the trust layer that makes community coordination, governance, and collective action possible without platforms.

Kaliya has been instrumental in all three generations. That continuity matters: she understands not just what the protocols do but how they got there, where they get stuck, and what it takes to move from specification to adoption at scale.

Deep knowledge of the standards process in relationship to market adoption

Over the past decade, Kaliya has developed a rare and specific expertise: understanding how protocol standards relate to market adoption — and why the two so often fail to connect.

The standards side. How protocols move through IETF, W3C, Trust over IP, DIF. Where they get stuck. What makes them converge versus endlessly fragment. Kaliya has been in these rooms for twenty years — not observing, participating. Co-chairing working groups, bridging competing implementations, driving multi-vendor convergence under time pressure.

The market side. Standards that don't meet real needs don't get adopted. The last decade of building the verifiable credentials ecosystem has made this viscerally clear: technically excellent protocols can sit unused if no one listens to what developers struggle with, what institutions actually need, what communities can use. Kaliya's work has been specifically about closing the gap between what standards bodies produce and what the world is ready to adopt — translating between protocol engineers and the people who build products and communities on top of protocols.

This dual knowledge — standards process AND market adoption — is what shaped Weave's design. Contracts for deliverables, interoperability testing, UX investment, cohort collaboration — every element comes from watching what works and what doesn't when protocols try to become infrastructure. It is a plan built by someone who has spent a decade learning both sides.

The twenty-four-year arc

• 2000 Planetwork and the Augmented Social Network: the vision that started everything
• 2003 Integrative Activism: first attempt to build the vision — too early
• 2005 Internet Identity Workshop: co-founded the forum where Gen 1 (OAuth/OpenID) was born
• 2011 A hundred-page governance blueprint for a national identity ecosystem
• 2013–14 IDA: second attempt to build the vision — still too early
• 2017 A DHS-funded systems-leadership framework for identity-ecosystem change
• 2019–pres. Gen 2 ecosystem building: verifiable credentials from standards to market adoption
• 2024 Summer of Protocols fellow; studying how the internet's own protocol community regenerates
• 2025 Project Weave: Gen 3 — the community trust layer, finally ready. And the lesson: weave projects together, don't try to build it alone.

Bridging capacity

The consistent differentiator across all of it: bridging. Technical and non-technical. Government and private sector and civil society. US and global. Protocol engineers and funders and policymakers and communities — in their own languages, with translation between them. A coordinating backbone for digital trust needs exactly this capacity. It has been Kaliya's role for two decades.

Credentials

World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. Author of Domains of Identity (Anthem Press). Summer of Protocols Fellow. New America India-US Public Interest Technology Fellow. Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education. California legislation passed (AB 786, Vital Records / Verifiable Credentials). DHS Science & Technology-funded systems-leadership research. Two decades producing the longest-running identity-innovation forum in the world.

Kevin Triplett — Co-Chair & Founding Funder

For more than two years, Kevin has been funding and building relationships across a network of values-aligned projects working on community-owned technology, data sovereignty, and regenerative infrastructure. He saw the value in this network — the projects were real, the builders were talented, the communities were engaged. What was missing was a strategy to weave them together: to fund adoption of shared protocols, commission the missing pieces, and turn a network of aligned projects into shared infrastructure.

When Kevin met Kaliya, that strategy came into focus. Her twenty-four years of protocol-diffusion experience — and her hard-won insight that the work is convergence, not construction — gave the network the strategic architecture it needed. Kevin funded it. Every piece of groundwork described on this site — the baseline interviews, the team, the strategy development, the travel — happened because Kevin put his own capital behind it before asking anyone else to.

That matters for prospective funders: you are not being asked to take the first bet. Kevin already took it. The invitation is to join him.

A technology funder and democratic innovation coordinator, Kevin is fluent in flow funding models, regenerative capital structures, data sovereignty infrastructure, and community-owned technology systems. He has deep relationships across the builder, activist, and funder networks that Weave connects.

His documentary filmmaking background (including Duct Tape Messiah) gives him a storyteller's instinct for making complex systems legible to non-technical audiences. Where Kaliya's strength is protocol-diffusion craft and standards-body fluency, Kevin's is the connective tissue between builders, capital, and the communities where adoption actually happens. The co-chair structure reflects this complementarity: neither role substitutes for the other.

Kevin is connected to Megan Smith, former US Chief Technology Officer under President Obama, who provides project management bridging between funders and NGOs.

Marah Rosenberg — Program Manager & Systems Builder

Marah brings fifteen years of building governance infrastructure for distributed communities at scale — and the rare combination of deep project management discipline with deep domain expertise in exactly the identity and trust infrastructure Weave coordinates.

Currently a Senior Program Manager leading IAM governance for a major telecommunications merger integration (Auth0, Ping Identity, OAuth 2.0), Marah speaks the technical language of the protocol cohort. This is not a generalist PM managing engineers they don't understand — this is a domain-expert operator who has built identity governance systems and knows what interoperability actually requires at the implementation level.

Their track record in scaling distributed organizations is directly relevant:

• Built a PMO from scratch at Girl Scouts of the USA, creating governance frameworks adopted across 300+ regional councils and training 70+ staff in Agile methodologies with 85% adoption.
• Coordinated Hurricane Sandy relief across 50,000+ affected individuals, 15+ vendors, delivering 50% faster than traditional approaches through multi-stakeholder crisis coordination.
• Currently advising pro bono on an open-source Data Integrity Toolkit for digital provenance verification at the Inclusive Design Institute.

PMP certified. ICAgile coaching credentials. Harvard Extension School ALM in Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship.

Marah's role ensures the Co-Chairs operate at strategic level rather than absorbed in operational coordination. In a contracts-heavy organization that depends on coordination craft across a distributed cohort, this function is load-bearing.

Sheldon Regular — Test Infrastructure & Interoperability

Sheldon is the person who makes "verified interoperability" real rather than claimed.

A senior QA strategist with deep experience in government-scale digital identity systems and verifiable credentials, Sheldon builds and maintains the test infrastructure that proves protocol implementations actually work together — across the wire, independently verifiable, not just on a diagram.

His prior work with the Open Wallet Foundation produced test harnesses recognized in the field for their depth and rigor. Recommended to Weave by Drummond Reed, co-editor of the W3C DID specification and one of the most respected figures in decentralized identity.

Sheldon's role is structurally critical: Weave's entire funding model — contracts for deliverables with final payment conditional on interoperability — depends on a test harness that can objectively verify whether implementations pass. Without that infrastructure, "interoperability" is a claim. With it, interoperability is a demonstrated, testable fact.

Andrew Hasse — Knowledge Architecture & Storytelling

Andrew is the knowledge architect underneath Project Weave — responsible for the synthesis layer that turns hundreds of research documents, session logs, and strategy artifacts into coherent, actionable intelligence. In a project that coordinates across dozens of protocol developers, community builders, funders, and standards bodies, the ability to hold the whole picture and produce synthesis that others can act on is not a support function. It is a core capability.

Andrew works closely with Jay Cousins on the narrative and storytelling layer — combining deep structural knowledge of the project's intellectual architecture with the storytelling craft that makes it land with audiences outside the project.

Jay Cousins — Storytelling & Narrative

The systemic investing field's own research identifies narrative as infrastructure — not a communications afterthought, but a core structural capacity equal in importance to financial mechanisms. Jay Cousins is where that principle becomes operational at Weave.

Jay works with Andrew Hasse on the narrative layer — turning the project's deep research, competitive analysis, theory of change, and strategy into stories that land with funders, builders, policymakers, and communities. This includes the story architecture that frames Weave for different audiences, the content production pipeline that makes the project's knowledge base legible to the outside world, and the event-specific narrative work that prepares Weave for funder conversations and public demonstrations.

The wider team

Beyond the core team, Weave's working layer includes a cohort of fellowship-funded builders already doing the protocol development, community integration, and standards engagement. Working group stewards maintain per-group continuity across the protocol working groups. And an advisory body brings protocol governance, systemic investing, philanthropy infrastructure, and bioregional grounding.

Weave is not a small team asking for large resources. It is a coordination layer with a named builder cohort, a steward layer, and an advisory body. The fellowship is how the cohort forms. The cohort is how the work gets done.