I am fascinated by the art and craft of collaboration, and have its practice and the study of how and why collaboration works at the center of my professional career as an entrepreneur, a software architect, as well as a creator, producer & publisher. I have been working on open web architectures since the early ’90s, with a focus on security, privacy, cryptography, and open standards. I collaborated with Netscape to develop SSL and co-authored the first IETF TLS internet-draft standard that is now at the heart of secure commerce and internet traffic on the web. My recent focus is on engines of trust, specifically blockchains, digital assets, smart contracts, smart signatures, and decentralized self-sovereign identity. All of my work centers on digital civil liberties and human rights, and they are offered as open source leveraging open development processes. I share about these topics on Twitter as @ChristopherA, sometimes address larger topics on my Life With Alacrity blog.
Want to know what I'm up to? What I'm doing elsewhere?
Do you have ideas, suggestions, or constructive criticism for me? Want to collaborating with me?
This the best place to learn how to best communicate with me, or propose a collaboration.
Use Issues here in this repository.
I am active & proficient on a variety of professional and creative topics. One thing that helps me remain productive is to compartmentalize the various aspects of them in ways so that I can concentrate on one topic at a time. Thus I request that you use the appropriate email.
My personal professional email is best for topics associated with my professional blog, academic books & papers, Bitcoin & blockchain technology, and my advocacy on self-sovereign identity, human-rights privacy, etc.: ChristopherA@LifeWithAlacrity.com
I am Executive Producer at Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC so for all of game design, creative media, and non-professional game play topics please use: ChristopherA@DyversHands.comt
Though I am the owner/publisher of RPG.net, please direct any questions regarding the management of that online community to it's editor-in-chief via ce@RPG.net. If you feel it is important to CC me, use: ChristopherA@RPG.net
I am amateur handpan player, and the best email for me on this topic is: ChristopherA@SpiralRhapsody.com
My personal email is for friends, family, and local non-professional acquaintances: ChristopherA@gmail.com
I have been active on Twitter as @ChristopherA since 2007, and my Facebook profile is public and you don't need to be my friend to view it.
Reading through my Twitter history is one of the best ways to get to know what I am currently thinking about. I don't post regularly on my blog Life With Alacrity, saving it for my longer-form work.
I do accept direct messages on various social media and chat platforms from people I follow, but email is more reliable.
(During Covid-19): I largely work from my home in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area, and I am carefully practicing safe social-distancing. I am in the Pacific Time Zone (PST in winter & PDT in summer). My schedule is typically biziest with conference calls and video calls in the AM hours until 11am PT with Europe, and again with Asia calls after 4pm PT. This means the best time to schedule a call for me is usually right after my lunch hour, starting around 1pm or 2pm PDT. Best way to be sure to schedule with me is discuss schedule via my email address or as a GitHub issue, followed by a calendar invite once we have confirmed. I prefer to use Signal for voice and Zoom for video.
(Pre Covid-19): I live in Lafayette, CA, in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area past Berkeley and Oakland. When I'm not traveling for various conferences and meetings, I BART into San Francisco regularly (I try to avoid commute traffic so typically head to SF at 10am, and try to leave by 3pm before peak or at 8pm after peak). I occasionally drive down to San Jose or the Peninsula for longer meetings, otherwise I typically do my intellectual work from my home office. Based on that typical schedule, I usually schedule my face-to-face meetings in Lafayette (closest to me), Walnut Creek (nice co-working space there), or in downtown SF, with my online meetings or calls focused on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
My name is Christopher Allen, and the shortest summary of my bio is:
Blockchain & Decentralized Identity Architect—Internet Cryptography Pioneer—Co-author TLS Security Standard—Collaborative Tools & Patterns
My current short bio paragraph is:
Christopher is a pioneer in internet cryptography and co-author of the TLS security standard, the cryptographic protocol that secures mat the heart of internet’s traffic today. He is an entrepreneur and technologist who specializes in collaboration, security, and trust. Christopher’s recent emphasis has been on engines of trust such as blockchain, smart contracts, and smart signatures, in particular decentralized self-sovereign identity. Christopher is founder of Blockchain Commons, former co-chair of the W3C Credentials Community Group incubating specifications for decentralized identity, incuding co-authorship of the new W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) specification. Christopher was former CTO at Certicom, VP Developer Relations at Blackphone, and principal architect at Blockstream. He is currently principal architect & executive director of Blockchain Commons, founder of chairman of the board of the Rebooting the Web Of Trust design workshops, and an advisor to Avanti Bank. He is an invited expert to legislators and regulators in the US and internationally on digital human-rights.
Until last 2018 I was at Blockstream, and my short bio paragraph there was:
Christopher Allen is a veteran of the Crypto Wars with a wealth of knowledge about the history of internet cryptography, including both successes and paths not taken. That dates back to his founding of Consensus Development, where he co-authored the IETF TLS 1.0 standard and produced the first commercial SSL and TLS toolkits. After Consensus merged with elliptic-curve pioneer Certicom, Christopher worked on early smart contract technology as the company’s CTO. Though he detoured into creating internet communities, teaching technological leadership, and producing mobile apps, the lure of enabling trust drew Christopher back to the field. Recently, Christopher was VP of Developer Relations for the secure smartphone company Silent Circle. He has also taught at Blockchain University, advised multiple organizations on privacy and security, and produced a design workshop on the Web of Trust. Now at Blockstream, he is Principal Architect, working especially on blockchain standards, decentralized identity and new engines of trust. Christopher also plays the handpan and enjoys eurogames and noir films.
My full professional bio is on LinkedIn.
I am fascinated by the art and craft of collaboration, and have its practice and the study of how and why collaboration works at the center of my professional career as an entrepreneur, a software architect, as well as a creator, producer & publisher.
I am co-author with Shannon Appelcline of “Meeples Together: How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work”, a book on the practice, design and theory of cooperative games, best exemplified by games like Pandemic, Hanabi, Arkham Horror, and Gloomhaven. We had a successful Kickstarter in late 2018 and the book is available from GamePlayWright and at many book sites like Amazon since March of 2019. We are working on a sequel on the topic of collaborative play for possible publication in 2021, with a third on collaborative work in 2023.
I have been writing about collaboration for several decades. My Life with Alacrity blog talks about the principles of cooperation, collaboration, and governance while my Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops imagine the future of collaboration on the internet.
I am also involved as a semi-professional in entertainment media, tabletop board & role-playing game, and the computer game industries. I have served variously as a publisher, producer, collaborator, designer or author of a number of creative works. My full bio when I wear that hat is:
I am Executive Producer at Dyvers Hands Productions, LLC, a Wyoming series corporation. In that role I steward a number of creative collaborative projects for myself, collegues and friends.
Dyvers Hands is an archaic phrase used to refer to a project that has been contributed to by many different people. Dyvers [pronounced di-vurs, dɪˈvɜrs] is a word of Latin origin (diversus) that is still commonly used in modern French language; it literally means “many and varied”. This usage of the word divers can be found in the Bible and other older texts, but it is not commonly used in modern English. The phrase is still used today to refer to the authorship of plays, essay collections, and short story collections, but in particular those related to the shared mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft and other authors since the 1920s.
To create stories today requires many and various kinds of talents, working together to create a greater whole, so it is an appropriate term to use for our shared collaborations and endeavors.
Dyvers Hands Productions is an independent cross-media producer of collaborative creative projects, ranging from print (comic books, graphic novels, shared worlds), cinema (movies, television, shorts ), interactive (computer games. TTRPGs, board & card games), and social media (online communities, podcasts, webisodes). As a team, we have a wide diversity of experience and creative talent, allowing us to tackle these many and varied media forms.
We are currently focused on developing cross-media brands that allow us to leverage audiences in one form of media to give us critical mass in another.
Some of the more notable creative projects that I have been a part of:
In the Tabletop Role Playing Game industry I have been owner/publisher/patron/steward for almost two decades (since 2001) of the largest independent TTRPG online community RPGnet. As a creative collaborator I most notably produced Chaosium’s Beyond the Mountains of Madness role-playing game, which won the Origin’s Award for “Best Roleplaying Adventure” in 1999.
In the Table Top Board Game industry I resurrected the original 1987 edition of Arkham Horror and licensed it in 2005 to Fantasy Flight for its best-selling 2nd edition of this board game series. My free "one-page" game Monster Smash, written in 1994 and revised in 2001 continues to be popular 25 years later at West Coast game conventions like DunDraCon.
I am co-author with Shannon Appelcline of “Meeples Together: How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work”, a book on the practice, design and theory of cooperative games, best exemplified by games like Pandemic, Hanabi, Arkham Horror, and Gloomhaven. We had a successful Kickstarter in late 2018 and the book is available from GamePlayWright and at many book sites like Amazon. We are working on a sequel on the topic of collaborative play for possible publication in 2021, with a third on collaborative work in 2023.
In the Computer Games industry, I was the founder of Skotos Tech, an online game company where I was lead for the onlne social RPG Castle Marrach (wikipedia) and Lovecraft Country: Arkham by Night online games, and produced Grendel’s Revenge. We are in the process of closing Skotos Tech over 2020, and as steward of these long-time game communities we are in process of passing control of each these games to their players.
With my long-time co-author Shannon Appelcline, I am also the creator & co-author of an upcoming graphic novel Touched, as well as producer of two previous comics associated with our online games: Lovecraft Country: Return to Arkham & Castle Marrach: Awakenings.
As a player, game master, and designer, the last few years I increasingly have been moving away from traditional forms of role-playing such as Call of Cthulhu or Runequest, to forms that are more story-centric and allow for more player control of the game. In these I attempt to share some of the lessons learned from my recent experiences in the intersection of role-playing, improv, and collaboration.
I am an avid supporter of other games designers on Kickstarter and Patreon, and have some of my own story games and other creative works that I have Kickstarted myselve that are now available through Dyvers Hands Productions or on itch.io.
Since 2003 I have been sharing about my professional life in my blog Life With Alacrity, where I discuss on a variety of topics including entrepreneurship, the social web, identity & privacy, internet security and collaboration.
Many of my more recent public collaborations (not only about code) are on GitHub. My goal over the next couple of years is to move many of my prior collaborations into GitHub under permissive sharing licenses.
I am co-author with Shannon Appelcline of “Meeples Together: How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work”, a book on the practice, design and theory of cooperative games, best exemplified by games like Pandemic, Hanabi, Arkham Horror, and Gloomhaven. We had a successful Kickstarter in late 2018 and the book is available from GamePlayWright and many book sites like Amazon since March of 2019. We are working on a sequel on the topic of collaborative play for possible publication in 2021, with a third on collaborative work in 2023.
I was also co-author with Shannon on some of the first books on iOS Development, which now are out-of-date. They were “iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web and SDK Development”, “iPhone and iPad in Action”, and ”iOS4 in Action“. We were not involved in the 2015 version of the book “iOS 7 in Action” though much of the book was derived from our earlier works. As we are now at iOS version 12 I can't currently recommend any of these editions.
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I am founder and host of #RebootingWebOfTrust, a decentralized digital identity community that also meets F2F twice a year. It uses extensively https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo for documents collaboratively created by its members.
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I am an active member of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and was I Blockstream representative to the W3C's AC (Advisory Committee). I am now participating as a member of Spec-Ops. In particular, I am co-chair of the W3C Credentials WG, which uses GitHub for projects like Decentralized Identifiers Spec 0.11 (and use cases). I am also involved in related W3C work such as the W3C Verifiable Claims WG, which will shortly be releasing a CR (Candidate Recommenation) for Verifiable Credentials (and their use cases).
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I have a passion about collaborative & participatory organizations, and have tried to create a community on this topic at https://github.com/participatoryorgs — however, at this time I'm the only active contributor.
My common PGP key is:
Personal: ChristopherA@LifeWithAlacrity.com (357405ED.asc) (all of my updates to this repository are signed with this key)
Blockstream: ChristopherA@blockstream.com (FDA6C78E.asc)
My miniLock public key (an EdDSA key using the 25519 curve):
7rXYBKi1Xf9g9nupb9f8u6MHbobEJCMK3r3sChjN5RmGN
[As published on Twitter 1:47 PM - 20 Aug 2015]
The minilock website has expired or has been pouched: ARCHIVE.ORG 2018-09-15 https://minilock.io/ as has the Minilock Chrome extension, but the GitHub source is still available github:@kaepora though hasn't been updated since 2015. There is a compatible command-line implementation MikroLock with code at gitlab@saalen as well as some useful utilities and visual overview of the MiniLock file format at github@45678.
My Minisign public key is RWStkgO/axPbYJCsbfTjhLbC2Pi4/7p+jX3If0tm27VcP4KIcLVJZ4Ec and my self-signed attestation for this key is in my GitHub in a commit signed by my PGP key (357405ED).
[As published on Twitter 11:20 AM · Nov 28, 2018]