Kaliya Young

For the past 20+ years, I’ve been leading a global community of developers and business supporters to create and adopt  a layer of identity for people based on open standards. To achieve these goals, in 2005, I 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 (OIDF), OAuth(IETF), Verifiable Credentials(W3C), Decentralized Identifiers(W3C) amongst others. In addition, as a community, we’ve helped to initiate collaborations leading to multi-million dollar projects. In recognition of this work, the World Economic Forum recognized me as a Young Global Leader in 2012.

In the last several years the IIW team started regional events inspired by the Internet Identity Workshop in Europe, Asia and Africa.

I am 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, I was awarded an M.S. in Identity Management and Security from UT, Austin. In 2019, I 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. I consult with governments, NGOs, startups, and enterprises on decentralized identity technologies.

In 2009, I was named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology. I 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 I founded or co-founded include She’s Geeky, the UnMoney Convergence, Digital Death Day, Open Government Playbook, and The Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop. The most recent unconference I helped design and facilitate was hosted by RadicalxChange and Dark Matter Labs in Oakland, California, in March 2024, and was titled “What and How we Own: The Politics of Change”.

Clients have included Digital Enlightenment Forum, Mashup Camp, Mass Technology Leadership Council Innovation, Ruby on Rails Camp, Scala Lift Off, IEEE – Engineering Medicine Biology, Read Write Web Interactive, Creative Unconference, and Recent Changes Camp.