---
id: "hardman-big-desks-and-little-people"
type: "paper"
type_label: "Papers and paper collections"
title: "Big Desks and Little People"
maintainer: "Daniel Hardman"
authors:
  - "Daniel Hardman"
date: "2023-05-01"
year: 2023
reading_level: "intro"
reading_level_label: "Introductory"
reading_level_meaning: "no prior knowledge of the suite"
evidence: "informative"
evidence_meaning: "an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite"
status: "quiet"
status_meaning: "no change in six to eighteen months; still correct"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "theory"
roles:
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/bdlp.html"
source_license: null
source_license_note: "no license found on the page or its site (checked 2026-11-03); the author's copyright"
found_on: "hardman-papers"
kerisse_credit: true
abstract_license: "CC BY 4.0"
abstract_license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
abstract_attribution: "KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/)"
last_checked: "2026-10-15"
kskb_url: "https://kskb.dev/cards/hardman-big-desks-and-little-people/"
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kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/hardman-big-desks-and-little-people.md"
---

# Big Desks and Little People

A position paper by Daniel Hardman arguing that common architectural patterns in digital trust, such as client-server APIs and business process workflows, entrench a power imbalance between institutions ('big desks') and individuals ('little people'). It asks that decentralized identity designs let individuals take part in trusted interactions without being clients of institutional servers. For architects and governance designers in decentralized identity.

Labels: reading level Introductory; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/bdlp.html (license not recorded).
The abstract is KSKB's own text under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/; credit KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/).
Found through KERISSE, the KERI Suite Search Engine (Kor Dwarshuis and Henk van Cann), whose dataset is the source of the documents the base indexes.