The project
Res Publica: Integritas
The Republic of Integrity is the civic project at the heart of ALBeID's work. It is not a bundle of high-tech solutions. It is a proposal for a shift in civic perception: from trusting whoever makes a declaration, to verifying what is real.
This page describes the vision and the philosophy behind it. Technical details will be published when the design is ready for public review.
An objective as old as the company
The objective behind the project was set when ALBeID was founded in 2023. It did not begin as an academic exercise or as the wish to invent a technology. It began with a conviction: digital identity can be built so that citizens hold it themselves, and so that every claim made about it can be checked by anyone.
Technology alone cannot deliver that. A durable civic capacity for debate, mandate, decision and control needs more than tools. It needs citizens who expect to verify, and institutions that expect to be verified. That is the change the project works towards.
Integritas: wholeness and continuity
Integrity comes from the Latin integritas, from integer: whole, untouched, undivided. In its ethical sense it names the agreement between what someone says, does and answers for. Here it is also the quality of a public order. An order has integrity when its parts are not secretly detached from one another: identity from will, decision from reasoning, technical promise from proof, power from responsibility.
The same root opens the metaphor of the integral. An integral does not declare wholeness as a finished object. It builds it by adding ever smaller parts, until the gaps between them disappear. In civic terms, each part is a free, verifiable and responsible act of a citizen, and the ideal is that no unbridgeable gap remains between people who want to take part in a common action.
The bounds matter. Private life is not the project's subject. The formula applies only where a matter becomes common, and an act keeps its private character until it enters the public sphere by choice.
A shift in civic perception
Signatures, encryption, tamper-evident records and audits are the tools institutions rely on to earn public trust. They are necessary. Yet technology applied is not, on its own, a sufficient guarantee: the same excellent tools can serve a system that still asks the public to trust its operator blindly.
What turns technology into trust is openness and auditability. Can the design be inspected? Does the system actually running match what was published? Can anyone check the results, and contest them? These are the criteria of trust the project adopts. Its principle is simple:
Nothing is accepted because it is declared. Every person has the right and the real possibility to judge whether a declaration matches reality.
No citizen needs to become a cryptographer. It is enough that every citizen can verify for themselves, rely on an independent expert of their choice, compare different verifiers or contest a result. Trust then rests on the possibility of checking, not on the authority of whoever declares the process fair.
A living witness: openness strengthens security
The project is meant to be a working demonstration that openness is not a threat to security but its strongest support. Everything is open except what must stay secret: private keys and personal data. Design, code, rules, the software actually running and the records that matter are open to inspection without arbitrary permission.
Its credibility is measured by the ability of an adversary to check it without being able to manipulate it.
The right to continue without the captor
Openness also protects the project from itself. Because specifications, code and rules are public, citizens keep the ability to verify every major claim, to rebuild the public services, and to continue without whoever might capture them.
That right is not a threat to the project. It is its strongest guarantee against betraying its own principles.
What it aims to be
The project aims to give citizens practical means to take part in common matters with an identity they control, sharing only what each situation truly requires. How this will work will be presented when the design is ready for public review.
It takes the tools of networked organisation, not the claims of a state. It is not a state, a party, a social network or a replacement for public institutions, and it competes with no legal order.
Honest about where it stands
The project begins small. In its first phase it is operated by its founder. This is declared openly as a real weakness of the trust model, not hidden behind technical language. The answer is not a promise of good intentions. It is power made visible, and power that no single hand can use.
A public register of responsibilities
Every role in the project is listed in a public register. For each role, the register states clearly:
- what the role does, and what it is not allowed to do;
- who holds it today, and since when;
- the limits and duration of the mandate, and any declared conflict of interest;
- how the holder can be replaced or removed.
The register shows today's concentration of control, the founder's included, and records each step of delegation as it happens. Progress is never declared by the founder's word alone. It is shown in the register, where anyone can check it.
Decisions by quorum
Critical actions do not depend on one person. They are entrusted to several independent holders, and they can be carried out only when a published threshold of those holders agrees. Each holder weighs the request personally. Until the quorum is reached, nothing happens.
No administrator, guardian or founder can act alone where a decision is critical, and every quorum decision leaves a trace that can be audited. The project claims no legal effect, certification or representativeness it has not earned.