About

civic-proof is a research site collecting the civic-proof series — long-form writing on digital identity, normative political theory, engineering design, and cross-jurisdictional governance.

Author

Written by mashbean (豆泥) during a Fellowship at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation (Spring 2026). Previously: Director of digital-wallet policy at Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs (2022–2024); ICANN research fellow on DNS trust-root governance (2024–2025).

Research Question

The series takes up one animating question: can democratic societies design digital identity systems that preserve accountability without requiring citizens to identify themselves by name in advance? The answer developed across the series is conditionally affirmative — provided that the normative floor (the Public Realm Floor), the engineering bearings (wallet, agent delegation, civic receipts, selective-disclosure UX), and the governance structures (issuance legitimacy, exchange architecture, cross-jurisdictional redress) are designed conjunctively, not traded off.

Methodology — What Is and Isn't AI-Assisted

The research questions, framework choices, normative commitments, and case selections are the author's. Drafting and translation are AI-assisted using the research-publishing-pipeline (currently routed through Claude Opus 4.7), with citations and primary sources verified by the author. The foundational pieces (the 0' academic restatement, the Taiwan deep-dive, the AllenBridge essay) are human-reviewed; many of the empirical anchors are not yet, and are marked WIP.

Translation note: the articles were originally written in Traditional Chinese and translated into formal academic English for this site. Chinese originals live at the Chinese-language version of this site (and at pro.mashbean.net).

Citing this work

All articles are working papers and should be cited as such. URLs are stable; the canonical URL of each article is the appropriate citation target. The series is actively edited — refer to the Updated date on each article.

Contact

For correspondence, questions, or disagreements, the primary contact path is via mashbean.net.