In it, I evaluate the British state’s successive national digital identity systems using the tools of liberal political philosophy – for the first time.

I’ll brave the rain, lightning and hail, he thought. It doesn’t look that bad!

This morning, l'm delighted to announce we've pre-released the much-anticipated gamma (0.4) publication of the trust framework on GOV.UK.

Yes—just three days after my viva. It's been a busy few weeks!

enablingdigitalidentity.blog.gov.uk/2024/11/25/a...

So many more people—too many to list here—have supported me along the way, so please do read the full Acknowledgements below.

While 'Dr Smith' admittedly doesn't narrow things down an awful lot, at least there's now one more attribute for the matching algorithms... I still can't quite believe it but, on Friday, I passed my DPhil viva—with no corrections! 👨🏼‍🎓

Submitted yesterday! Still can’t quite believe it…

Some of you are putting me to shame!

Got to the front, finally, to be told I’m a bot and lost my spot. Was worth a try! Where are those pesky #notabot credentials @dgwbirch.bsky.social has been promising for years?

Finally, it was a great pleasure presenting a draft of the paper last year at The University of Bern. Georg Brun, Tanja Rechnitzer, Gregor Betz, Wibren van der Burg, and all the other attendees gave me fantastic feedback. I owe them, my mum, and Laurel Boxall my very deep thanks 🥰

These apps have features that uniquely support RE's non-linear, coherentist model for justification.

Citation support! Bidirectional linking! Hashtags! And even Graph Visualisation features!

Much better than struggling with pen and paper, Word docs, or reams of paper notes...