I'm sitting in VRM day listening to Drummond Reed talk about his First Person Project. If you know Drummond or me, you know we've been interested in this idea since 2011 when we both were working on something then called a personal cloud. I've written about this idea exensively on this blog, arguing that people have no place to stand on the internet and thus our digital relationships are, as a result, anemic.

As I listened to Drummond, I realized that "first person" is a more powerful descriptor that "self-sovereign". First person describes the idea in words that most people understand and doesn't have the baggage of sovereignty. First person is "I," "me," "my," and "mine." First person describes exactly the kind of thinking that will allow people create their own oneline relationships without an intermediating administrator like a social network. Drummond's vision is, as you'd expect from someone who's been working on this for 15 years or more, much more extensive that a simple change to brnading, but still, I think it's powerful.