 Welcome everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. Excellent. We're gonna go ahead and get started. Good morning. Welcome. It looks like everybody is in high spirits, high energy. I think I'm assuming it's because we're all here in sunny beautiful Lisbon. So we're gonna try to keep those spirits high and that energy high and we're gonna directly go into a video, a short video and then afterwards I will introduce our panelists. I'll introduce myself and I'll run through the agenda for the session. So we're also kicking off with this video because we recognize that the topic of discussion today is yes blockchain. So we know that we may all be talking about blockchain, blockchain technologies. We may all be talking about it but I think that many of us also feel that we're not sure if we're talking about the right thing or the same thing as the person that we're talking with etc. So one of the themes of today is actually gonna be just that. It's what we know and what we don't know because I think collectively we understand that there's still there's still a lot to understand and learn about this topic. So let's start with this video just to align around some basic information. Many people think of blockchain as the technology that powers Bitcoin. While this was its original purpose, blockchain is capable of so much more. Despite the sound of the word, there's not just one blockchain. Blockchain is shorthand for a whole suite of distributed ledger technologies that can be programmed to record and track anything of value from financial transactions to medical records or even land titles. You might be thinking we already have processes in place to track data. What's so special about blockchain? Let's break down the reasons why blockchain technology stands to revolutionize the way we interact with each other. Reason number one the way it tracks and stores data. Blockchain stores information in batches called blocks that are linked together in a chronological fashion to form a continuous line. Metaphorically a chain of blocks. If you make a change to the information recorded in a particular block you don't rewrite it. Instead the change is stored in a new block showing that X changed to Y at a particular date and time. Sound familiar? That's because blockchain is based on the centuries-old method of the general financial ledger. It's a non-destructive way to track data changes over time. Here's one example. Let's say there was a dispute between Anne and her brother Steve over who owns a piece of land that's been in the family for years. Because blockchain technology uses the ledger method, there is an entry in the ledger showing that Adam first owned the property in 1900. When Adam sold the property to Dave in 1930, a new entry was made in the ledger and so on. Every change of ownership of this property is represented by a new entry in the ledger right up until Anne bought it from their father in 2007. Anne is the current owner and we can see that history in the ledger. Now here's where things get really interesting. Unlike the age-old ledger method, originally a book, then a database file stored on a single system, blockchain was designed to be decentralized and distributed across a large network of computers. This decentralizing of information reduces the ability for data tampering and brings us to the second factor that makes blockchain unique. It creates trust in the data. Before a block can be added to the chain, a few things have to happen. First, a cryptographic puzzle must be solved, thus creating the block. The computer that solves the puzzle shares the solution to all of the other computers on the network. This is called proof of work. The network will then verify this proof of work and if correct, the block will be added to the chain. The combination of these complex math puzzles and verification by many computers ensures that we can trust each and every block on the chain. Because the network does the trust building for us, we now have the opportunity to interact directly with our data in real time. And that brings us to the third reason blockchain technology is such a game changer. No more intermediaries. Currently, when doing business with one another, we don't show the other person our financial or business records. Instead, we rely on trusted intermediaries such as a bank or lawyer to view our records and keep that information confidential. These intermediaries build trust between the parties and are able to verify, for example, that yes, Anne is the rightful owner of this land. This approach limits exposure and risk but also adds another step to the exchange, which means more time and money spent. If Anne's land title information was stored in a blockchain, she could cut out the middleman, her lawyer, who would ordinarily confirm her information with Steve. As we now know, all blocks added to the chain have been verified to be true and can't be tampered with. So Anne can simply show Steve her land title information secured on the blockchain and would save considerable time and money by cutting out the middleman. This type of trusted peer to peer interaction with our data can revolutionize the way we access, verify and transact with one another. And because blockchain is a type of technology and not a single network, it can be implemented in many different ways. Some blockchains can be completely public and open to everyone to view and access. Others can be closed to a select group of authorized users, such as your company, a group of banks or government agencies. And there are hybrid public private blockchains too. In some, those with private access can see all the data while the public can see only selections. In others, everyone can see all the data, but only some people have access to add new data. A government, for example, could use a hybrid system to record the boundaries of Anne's property and the fact that she owns it while keeping her personal information private. Or it could allow everyone to view property records, but reserve to itself the exclusive right to update them. It is the combination of all these factors, decentralizing of the data, building trust in the data, and allowing us to interact directly with one another and the data that gives blockchain technology the potential to underpin many of the ways we interact with one another. But much like the rise of the Internet, this technology will bring with it all kinds of complex policy questions around governance, international law, security, and economics. Here at the Center for International Governance Innovation, we seek to bring trusted research that will equip policymakers with the information. Okay, so welcome again. My name is Nicole Anand. I'm the Director of Strategy and Learning at the Engine Room, and I have with me four excellent panelists doing some very interesting work on digital ledger technologies. I'll start all the way at the end with Marco. So we have Marco Konapaki, right? And Marco is currently pursuing a doctorate degree in political science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and he holds a master's degree from the Federal University of Paraná in political science. He was an advisor in the Secretary of the Legislative Affairs of the Ministry of Justice, where he coordinated the public debate on the regulation of Brazil's Internet Bill of Rights. And he is currently the project coordinator in the area of democracy and technology at the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio, where he's created the Mudamos app that we'll hear about later for Citizens Initiative draft bills in Brazil. Next to him, we have Anders Peterson. And Anders is a senior open data officer at the Natural Resource Governance Institute NRGI, where he leads work on open data and emerging areas, including net research NRGI is undertaking on the potential impact of blockchain in the extractive sector, which we'll also hear about in a little bit. Next to Anders, we have Andrew, Andrew Young. Andrew is the knowledge director at the GOV lab, where he leads research efforts focusing on the impact of technology on public institutions. Among the grant funded projects he has directed are a global assessment of the impact of open government data, comparative benchmarking of government innovation efforts against those of other countries, a methodology for leveraging corporate data to benefit the public good and crafting the experimental design for the testing, for testing the adoption of technology innovations in federal agencies. And last but not least, we have Stefan Verhulst. Stefan is the co-founder and chief research and development officer at the GOV lab as well, where he's building a research foundation on how to transform governance using advances in science and technology. Stefan leads several projects at the GOV lab, including research on open data, data collaboratives, blockchain technologies, and people led innovation. Previously, he held senior leadership roles with several academic institutions and civil society organizations, including Oxford University and the Markle Foundation. And Stefan has authored and co-authored numerous books, and his articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review and Stanford Social Innovation Review. Finally, Stefan is also a curator and editor of the GOV lab digest, a weekly curation that may be of interest to this community. Great. So we have about 60 minutes together, and I'm going to start us off with a tiny, a very quick intro. Then I'm going to be asking one round of the same question to each of the panelists. It will be a rapid fire round. They'll have a minute to respond. Then I'll ask each panelist a separate question. They will each have about 10 minutes to present back to us. And then we'll wrap it up with one last rapid fire round. They'll have a minute to answer that question, and then we'll try to reserve 20 minutes for Q&A. Sound good? Yeah. Okay, good. So let's get started. The video you just watched presented, hopefully some clear and digestible information about blockchain technologies, but it also included a lot of the potential advantages to using it. I think there was a lot of use of the potential revolutionize. So it presented a lot of kind of the positive side. But we are here today to talk both about the potential opportunities as well as the risks or the challenges that may come with using blockchain particularly in the civic tech world. So I'm just going to very quickly introduce one framework to help us think through the risk side of the equation. Let me just put up one slide. So there are many things that we don't quite know about blockchain, but one thing I think many people can agree on is that it's popular and it's gaining popularity. So what does that actually mean for us? Again, we're not sure there are maybe clear answers to that question. But one framework that has definitely been useful for analyzing popular technologies or hyped tech is this hype cycle, which I'm sure all of you are quite familiar with. But essentially what it shows us is that where we start, it shows us that there's a cost of high tech to society, right? And where we start where it starts is really to say, we think we think this technology is the silver bullets, and we over invest in it. And then we realize that it really isn't the end all be all or the cure all. And we we fall out of love with it, we run away from it. But slowly, slowly but surely over time, we realize there are certain aspects to this technology that might be useful in certain contexts with certain stakeholders. So at this point in time, we know we know that blockchain has been considered in other sectors and has been used. We have some anecdotes about it being used in our world in civic technology, and we're we'll hear more about that today. But but to avoid costly decisions and also take advantage of the potential opportunities, we want to know and what we're going to discuss here today is if we should be considering this potentially high technology, when and how. So that's basically the question we're going to start with, which is, should we be considering blockchain technologies in our civic technology work? Why or why not? And I'm going to hand it over to the panelists. And maybe we start at that end with with Marco. Yeah, just very quick 60 seconds. Thank you. Thank you. And good morning, people. It's a pleasure to be here with you. And this is a wonderful morning. So it's a big, big, hard question. But I try to put in two basic questions to provoke the audience about it. I think the big mistake many organizations are doing nowadays is to put technology first, when they are designing social and civic solutions. And the blockchain is not different. And blockchain is in every moment of our lives. And people are speaking so much about their for me to blocks in my coffee, if if it's possible. And so to try to frame the more specifically, what where when is important to use blockchain? I give you two questions to do to yourself. And is keep information with one player could unbalance and power and generate mistrust between participants and the system and share the power between participants can make it more reliable. So two questions. Thanks, Marco. My my rapid answer would be that one reason why we need to deal with it is that the private sector is investing immensely in it. So in many of the sectors where we work, we will not be able to avoid it in the future. There will be a as cycle of overinvestment. But we also actually see quite rapidly that industry is clustering around commercially viable areas. So we need to understand that. And then, obviously, we need to unpack what are political problems and social problems and which parts and what are technical solutions that can maybe help address some of these. But really doing our analysis and getting back to our theories of change and understanding what problems we're dealing with will help us sift through all the noise. And there is a lot of noise right now. And and our ability to ask the questions now will help us avoid a very hard landing in a few years from now. And that's both for us as a community. It's also for the donors that are putting in money towards this right now. All right. Thank you. So my 60 seconds. I think yes, the civic tech field should be considering the use of blockchain. I think it's important thing that we're going to talk about in a moment to take a more nuanced approach, though, and consider the different attributes that different types of DLT implementations might have, the different risks and benefits associated with different types of blockchain implementations and be a little bit, again, more nuanced and strategic about how we consider using blockchain rather than just going back to all of the blog posts and research proposals that we wrote five years ago and replacing Uber 4x with blockchain 4x. Yeah, I don't have that much to add here, and we will, of course, go into depth during our presentation. But I think one thing that I think is positive about the hype. And of course, as you mentioned, the hype might become a bust as well. And that's the danger. But I think one thing that is positive about the hype of blockchain right now is that it has actually unleashed a lot of energy to think about a problem differently. And it has really created this new kind of energy to look at a problem and say, perhaps we can find a different solution, whether it's around protection of data, whether it's around power relations with regard to certain kinds of records, whether it's about even direct democracy, is that suddenly the blockchain has actually unleashed new power, new imaginative discussions about what could we do differently. And I think that's actually a positive element of the blockchain discussions. Whether, of course, blockchain can deliver, that's a different question. But I think the hype has really created new discussions and brought actually new actors to the discussion that I think is positive. And so, for that reason, we should use blockchain not just for technology adoption, but use blockchain as a way to force us to think differently about the problem and differently about how society is organized. Great. Thank you all. So, building off of that last comment, Stefan, Andrew, I think these questions are for both of you because you'll be presenting together, right? So, two questions. Can you tell us a bit more about how and when the civic tech community should be considering blockchain in their work, so this audience? Are there certain applications that seem more useful? The second question is, at the GovLab, I know you guys are talking a lot about when an ecosystem is ready for a new technology. So, can you share with us a little bit about what you mean, what ecosystem readiness really means when it comes to the application of blockchain technologies? So, this is such a big question that we're going to back a team to answer that question. We prepared a little presentation to answer those questions. So, what we will tag team about is to try to answer that question in the context of a project that we started a few months ago. So, we are actually still early in the project, which is called BlockChange. It's not about blockchain for social change. And we thought that given the fact that we were quite happy by the title, that we can only go down a hill because we have a catchy title, then the expectations are too high, so that's why we're going to help you to explain what we are talking about. So, what we try to do here is exactly what Nicole asked us, which is, when is it appropriate to think about blockchain for social change? And what is the current practice? Because, to a large extent, as the introduction already showed, there is a lot of promise. So, what is the real practice? And what is the gap between practice and promise? And how do you go about covering that gap if deemed to be appropriate? Now, important to say is that while we got this introduction through the video, which gave us a flavor of what blockchain is all about and what the technology is all about, I think it's important to say is that while we are in the high stage, we're also actually really at the early stage of development. And this is just when you have many of those slides, actually the interesting one that I found was about startup scene in Luxembourg, which was like, you know, gigantic, which is surprising around FinTech and the blockchain environment. But I think the big message here is that the technology is not set yet. And that there are a huge amount of investments both in the infrastructure, but also in the application. And that as a result, we really don't have one kind of technology. We have a variety of technologies. And so what we try to do is not talk about blockchain technologies or BLT as being the set infrastructure, but really talk about what are the attributes that matter from a social change point of view. Right. And so this is where we take a little bit of issue of what was in the video. This really is looking at this more nuanced view of blockchain and DLTs. What we find is that the narratives around blockchain often includes both the guaranteed attributes that are found in basically all blockchain implementations, as well as some more optional attributes that could be serviced for Konami depending on the approach. So in the guaranteed attribute space, we see, you know, a level of immutability, some confidence that the data is going to remain, that the data in the block is going to remain immutable over time, a level of guaranteed integrity that the quality of the information found in the blockchain is going to again remain high quality over time, and then also a level of distributed resilience, where the information is held across many databases that are duplicated in places so that data breach or a hacking approach is a bit more difficult because of that distributed resilience approach. But again, looking at some of the narratives around blockchain, you often see these more optional attributes included in that discussion. So, you know, if we look at the different types of blockchains, something like a device permission blockchain, essentially where all of the nodes exist within one or two institutions and only certain actors have write access and only certain actors have read access, it's hard to talk about attributes around disintermediation or transparency or accessibility. So while those could be present in certain applications, they aren't always there. It's important to recognize that these are optional actions. So the question then is of course given that we know what those attributes might be, what are the types of applications that blockchain could provide to the city chain and community? And frankly, there are three large types of kinds of use cases that we see. The first ones are track and trace, where you exactly can track and trace over time the flow of the record and the, in some cases, even the record that is connected with an identity. The second one is smart contract and then the third one is a random identity. And so in the track and trace space, probably the paradigmatic example to date is this initiative where the purity and provenance of diamonds is being tracked over the blockchain to ensure that the diamond that you buy in a regular local jewelry store isn't contributing to conflict areas or course play. As it relates to smart contracting, which in essence is basically just a kind of an algorithm, if x then y, that's basically the concept of smart contracting. So if you actually have a record that automatically does an action, an automated action connected with the record, so if the record is added to the blockchain, then there isn't what the matter is. So in this case, it was an interesting experiment that is happening in Indonesia, which indicates that if a community can prove that they didn't put their agricultural farmland on fire, which is a typical method of actually clearing certain kinds of crops, they would be rewarded a monetary price that they can then decide to invest in whether it's in schooling or whether it's in healthcare for instance. And so that was an interesting experiment of smart contracting, because normally A would take a long time to validate that certain action in this case did not take place and B would then be trying to actually reward the action. And so in this case it was smart contracting where in the moment a record was established and verified, there was automatically a reward for the new complex. And then the last type of blockchain for civic change type of initiative that we've been looking at is around identity and this is the type of use space that we're especially focused on at the moment, and one interesting example there, and we'll talk about it in a moment, is this pilot project from Illinois where new births were being registered on a blockchain, testing the feasibility of that kind of approach to have an immutable ledger of new births in the state. So we decided that of all the three use cases, this is Franklin Tray's smart contracting identity, that identity really for this field is the foundational application that we should stop looking at. And it also provides for a lot of promise from a social change point of view, because identity has ultimately a key role in social change, because to a large extent it allows for access to certain kinds of services, like for instance that you have no identity, you cannot access quite much financial services, you cannot access some kind of commercial services, but also identity is also linked to rights. Without an identity it's very hard to implement even political rights, for instance like voting, which is why blockchain is quite often connected with actually improvement in voting because it can deal with actually providing for a trusted identity over time that allows for more direct voting and more regular voting for instance as well. The second reason why we believe that identity is very important for this community to look into is because it underpins very smart contracting and the tracking traits. Without quite a lot of identity it's not very hard to do tracking traits, and you would not talk just about identity of individuals, but it could also be identity for instance of any diamond or identity of a corporation for instance, and that ultimately allows for them the identification of the tracking and the trace of certain kinds of aspects. And then thirdly that's where there's a lot of narrative these days around blockchain. Identity is being, the blockchain is being seen as allowing for the missing protocol to be established. There's a lot of talk about Web 3.0 in which the point that actually in the previous web versions they missed one important protocol that actually led to the creation of Facebook and other identity owners. And that was actually the protocol to identify identity. I mean absolutely that being able to identify identity without relying on an intervener that has actually created all the business models behind certain kinds of services that we see. And so there's a lot of narrative that if blockchain could solve this, we would actually create a whole new ecosystem a distributed ecosystem as if the web wasn't meant to be. And so that's the other reason why we try to understand what actually is the case for regard to identity. And then so just as blockchain, blockchain technologies are not a model. Identity is not a model. So to get a little bit more strategic about the potential of blockchain in the identity space, we're really focused on the identity life cycle and the different problems that are particularly present at different stages and the potential attributes of blockchain that could potentially address those problems at those different stages. So I'm just going to look at these real quickly because I know that we're running a little bit short on time, but at the first stage of provisioning the issue around lack of identity, you often hear the discussion around is blockchain an approach to address the 1.1 billion currently lack of visual identities around the world. So the idea that universal access could be created in the blockchain. At the authentication stage, the lack of quality and trusted identifiers is often kind of both the foundational ID and the transactional ID level and does the integrity that blockchain initiatives can provide. Does that show away forward there? At the administration stage, the lack of agency that we often see where I have no control over different identifiers that can access and view them can a blockchain approach actually give me more user control over my identity of different elements, identifiers associated with me. At the authorization stage, fragmentation of requirements, I recently had a new debit card sent to me that got lost in the mail. I went to the bank, showed them my New York City ID and a credit card just provided to me by the same bank and they said, oh, these don't work. Do you have a passport with you? Obviously, a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but those fragmentation requirements you can imagine how they could be a major issue in a more important area. So, blockchain provides a kind of interoperability of different ID approaches. And then finally, at the auditing and monitoring stage, we often have that opacity of who is, again, who is looking at my information, the identity as a black box issue, can, again, certain types of blockchain initiatives that are focused on surfacing the transparency aspect actually address that challenge. Yeah, and so that's what we have set out to do. So, we are currently looking into a variety of practices that try to deal with some aspects of the identity life cycle. Because I think it's important to really become a granular, if you talk about blockchain, about what element of the life cycle do they really try to address? And so, for instance, on the provisioning stage, we have something called ID 2020 that was created last year, which really tries to, or has the narrative to bring on the 1.1 billion people that cannot identify themselves at the moment to bring them on an identity system. And in terms of the provisioning, the blockchain is not the right, probably not the right technology for provisioning in the first place. That actually, in order to get an identity, a record, you actually need other technologies quite often to get on the blockchain, such as biometrics, for other kinds of tools. And so, the whole narrative about blockchain can create identity whether it is no identity, turns out to be low in maturity, as we say. Do you want to do the authentication? Sure. So, at the authentication stage, we're looking at, especially another one of those paradigmatic examples of current practice, the World Boot Program's Building Blocks Initiative, which is actually one of the more mature, specific implementations, but there's a lot of issues around it that we're looking at, including the different benefits of blockchain and how they play off each other. So, the authentication protocol for the World Boot Program initiative is using biometric data as a scanning of irises to confirm and authenticate identity. So, while that leads to a high level of efficiency, there are some questions around what that affects on identity. So, while there is a maturity of the technological implementation, there are still some bigger questions. Yeah, and the real valuable position quite often as it relates to identity and blockchain is then related to administration. If only you could give power to the individual to control his or her data, and then negotiate with all the actors in the ecosystem on how and what they want to disclose, then life would be so much better. So, that's what the whole range of technologies and startups around self-sovereign identity try to do. So, here we again have explored a variety of initiatives, and one famous one that most refer to is the initiative of ZUK, which is a town in Switzerland where they try to actually experiment with self-sovereign identity for their citizens. Now, the challenge here is again how do you get the self-sovereign identity in this case, it actually really also still means that you have to go to the city hall in person to request an identity, and then ultimately the question is what do you do with the self-sovereign identity? The challenge with self-sovereign identity while promising, I don't want to be too critical, the challenge is if you have no ecosystem that accepts the self-sovereign identity, then you have no transactions. And so, at the moment, the ecosystem is clearly not ready for self-sovereign identity because it is no parties that accept your self-sovereign identity. And so, most of the cases that we see are like a scale of 50 individuals that have a self-sovereign identity like in ZUK and then try to figure out how can we start sharing this with actually the real world in terms of that it might be harder. I could go on. A similar issue around ecosystems to Nicole's earlier question is present at the authorization stage. So, one project that we're looking at right now is MIT's Digital Diploma Project which is essentially a blockchain initiative for transcripts and your diploma from MIT. The project works fantastically. The people who accept it they use it well. But again, it's the ecosystem ready where if I get offered a new job I can send my blockchain diploma. That's a big question still. Yeah, and on the other thing, the monitoring here we of course have a range of interesting initiatives around land registry and I think I'm just going to talk about that as well. So, I'm not going to go too into detail but that really turns out one of the interesting and most successful areas where the blockchain has been experimented with the key challenge here is already what's the legacy system of land registries. In terms of like for instance in the case of Sweden they actually did have a good land registry system and so it was easier to actually transfer the registry to a blockchain in the case whether it is no land registry or trustworthy land registry system it is still harder to then have blockchain as the solution which again is linked with actually the provision. So, the question that we then posed is when as a civic change community when is it actually appropriate to start thinking about blockchain because we are in a lot of discussions with actually civic civil society organizations about let's do blockchain and the question is when is it actually appropriate to do blockchain? So, we really focus on three types of categories of enabling operational conditions and the first is around the problem so again going back to the Uber for X for a blockchain initiative to really have potential in the identity space there needs to be a clear problem definition and an understanding of how different blockchain attributes could address that problem. A second one is around information asymmetries and high levels of transaction costs in the current system if that can help to incentivize change for the economists in the room we often point to the market of labor and the which is focused on information asymmetries and the purchasing of used cards so whenever there is a high level of in the current system if there isn't the type of quality of information across all of the actors that could be a good a good situation in which to implement a blockchain project. Then on the data and technology side as Stefan said the presence of visual records could be a great head start for a blockchain initiative also really importantly again not looking to have a blockchain to be the hammer always in search of a nail if there's already a credible and alternative disclosure technology being used in the space blockchain might not really be all that necessary and then finally again to the ecosystem question the presence of intermediaries can be a big determiner determinant of the effectiveness of a blockchain initiative whether it's strong and efficient intermediaries that can be leveraged as partners in initiative or largely deficient and ineffective intermediaries that can incentivize a new and more decentralized approach and besides those operational conditions when is it appropriate to think blockchain we also feel that the field needs to prompt a one startup developing a set of design principles and so here is our attempt to give a range of design principles under the term be guarded in which G stands for actually it's very important to have a legitimate governance structure governing the blockchain and I think that should be a first principle if you engage on blockchain technology second is that you should also assure a certain level of user accessibility and of course user friendliness and it turns out by the way that most blockchain initiatives right now are low on user friendliness and user accessibility and so that as a civic change community this should be one principle third principle is that you really want to adopt a certain agency of participation we gave the examples for instance of the world food program where they developed blockchain to establish identity but there was little agency of participation by the refugees meaning the refugees had frankly no choice except for to accept biometric technology if they wanted to benefit from the services provided so what's the agency of participation on a blockchain system is very important and the same thing but then of course is that a lot of this discussion as all the technologies in the space is very vendor driven and so we also need to make sure that there is no vendor lock-in rights-based approach is similarly a design principle dignity of establishing a record again the example of the world food program what is the dignity having a record on the blockchain ecological footprint there was a lot of we haven't discussed that yet there was a lot of discussion about how do you establish proof and of course if you use a coin system turns out the coin system can actually create a huge carbon footprint and so if you are a civic tech community and you care about the environment then you use a coin system environment might actually be harmed as a result but we need to also think about what's the ecological footprint of adopting a blockchain and then last but not least of course many of those examples that we've given or have given and there are many more are experimenting in situations where there are vulnerable populations and quite often have no agency to reject blockchain as a solution and so we really have to think about anyway if you are using those experiments try to also form during the experimentation phase of using blockchain to those vulnerable populations and so that's why we feel you should be guarded when developing blockchain technologies and with that Nicole we probably went over time alright okay thanks so much really interesting information to the three use cases to all of the frameworks thereafter I especially liked the title and the acronym but those were my favorites so moving on Anders at NRGI recently you've decided to explore the potential of DLTs with work on extractives so can you tell us a little bit why you've made that decision and what you hope it will result in yeah yeah and I'll I'll try to be to be quick so that we can get to get to questions and discussions as well so at NRGI we work on extractive transparency and that means what are mining and oil companies doing anywhere from when they start exploring to the taxes to pay to how does what is the environmental impact so we really look at a number of different things like this will look like a lot of sort of frameworks that you will see in sort of any kind of sector wash any other but it's mainly mainly just to say that I think there's a huge potential for sector-driven organizations in understanding how this can be applied because knowing having topical knowledge and understanding problems in a specific area gives you it's much easier to understand problems and then pick and choose blockchain then this understanding blockchain and then going and finding your problem and that is a lot of the sort of a lot of the discussion in the community is right now happening around this and that's that's what I've called the implementation dessert but what we really have is a dessert in terms of actual use cases what is happening what are the results and the the reason for that is really that we have seven white papers going out each week from start-ups and they are in a pitching mode and they will pitch basically until they run out of money or need to go and find another job and that means that we really don't have a lot of material so the research right now is very much based on interviews is based on some of the documentation that's starting coming out and I would encourage people who are interested in this in reading some of the really good skeptical pieces around this that really takes a hard look of like the lack of uptake of blockchain if you take the hard look over the last ten years have been very minimal it's still incredibly costly to run tokens it's still the use cases are very are still very niche but what I found maybe even more what I find maybe even more interesting is all the gray area implementations and we'll start to see much more of that one that struck me was what was the refugee camp program in Jordan where a recent review of it said in a sort of insert sentence that this was all great for cost reductions we just at some point found out that it was a little too expensive to run it on token so we ended up just doing it on our own database so that means like you've reduced costs and that's why you went into it and then you found out okay it's actually really it's we can't meet our cost reductions so let's cut out transparency and transparency was your pitch so this comes back to some of the we've been in the open data movement for five or ten years there we've had a lot of challenges of really defining accurately what is open what is not open and we will have the same with blockchain we will need to be very clear in does this add on transparency or accountability or is this a cost-cutting exercise because there's just no doubt and to the skeptics we can just say there's no doubt this the language of cutting out the middleman will be is very powerful I mean there's been a 10, 20 year for 10, 20 years economists have wondered how do we eliminate the notary profession and this may be their chance but before that there's been all kinds of other attempts to make that profession and make the manual review of legal agreements that are to challenge that so there are really economics behind this so I want to talk about two cases where we are currently exploring it this is we're very early in our research stage we're working actually in full disclosure with GovLab to understand this space and at this stage we're like looking at some different cases mining licensing is a really good example the core technology of understanding land titles and of enabling blockchain technologies in land titling where the extractive sector may actually end up benefiting from technologies developed in other areas that can then spill into into mining I'm not sure why it's doing this and just to take an example of a real problem we have Indonesia has thousands of land titles where multiple jurisdictions will award the same land for various use so you have a mine where a provincial government has awarded that mining license maybe another agency has awarded it for forestry and at the same time you may have communal land claims on that same land so this is not a technical challenge where there are multiple political jurisdictions they're probably all legal and allowed and mandated to award these licenses so what Indonesia has tried over the last 10 years is their one map policy where they bring all of this together in one database with one ministry and guess how much public information we have about settled disputes from that central core ministry I mean the one map policy is an example of the solution of taking one database and centralize all decisions in one ministry that may not be the only solution out there and thinking about verification from multiple parties and having a more open verification system where disputed claims can be made public is probably something that's worth exploring another thing another area that we have eyes on is commodity trading so right now one of the most secret areas of the oil sector is the sale between between Swiss commodity traders for example and national oil companies so the government of Chad they run a national oil company they sell some of their oils through Swiss commodity traders and we are going now at the same time we can see that commodity traders are very excited about blockchain why are they excited about that because they would like in New York to know if that trade that is coming in and that is in a PDF that that is actually oil from Iraq or Chad and that it's not oil from somewhere else because they need to sell that resell that and they need to reduce this trade this is a real value proposition if they can reduce risks on a lot of their trades they can there is a higher margin and they can also focus their risk more appropriate to a smaller number of trades so what I could imagine what we are imagining could happen in the future is that we may end up with the same countries that we know are in risk for example there are potential transactions that those will be de-risked and have a more accurate risk proposition assessed to them so there's a lot of things here that shows us that there's definitely a private market for that the questions for us is how do we as accountability actors ensure that there are disclosure mechanisms built into this that we're thinking about how can this train is just gonna go so so that's sort of that's also an argument for saying we don't necessarily need to do blockchain as civil society but we need to understand how it's implemented because the next disclosure wave or the more granular data the more timely data if we don't want three-year-old PDFs we should probably try to understand how we can ask questions about how this can be disclosed through security exchanges or through other mechanisms and that's all thanks Anders for those sector specific examples this has been great because we've set kind of the scene we've talked about it at a broad level we've talked about the ecosystem we've moved on to a specific sector and we're gonna end it with a specific example of application so Marco you've been working on a project called Mudamos can you tell us a bit about the project why you decided to use blockchain in this project and what you've learned thus far good morning everyone so I split my presentation in three parts like the first one what is Mudamos and after that why we use a blockchain and how blockchain to explain how we use a blockchain in this project Brazil all Brazilians citizens have the right to present to the congress citizens initiatives draft abuse which are presented and legitimate by gathering signatures from the Brazilian society for a national bill to be presented for the congress are needed more than one and a half million of signatures to present a bill to the national congress it corresponds almost two thousand kilograms of paper to signatures so we design an application to use in a creative way technology to substitute the way to present draft abuse to sign it by paper to turn the smartphones into digital pens to sign think about it yes we we create mudamas to turn the smartphones into digital pens to to sign citizens draft abuse and so on eliminating paper to propose the initiative bills and we we did it in the very kind of simple hello hello and a very kind of simple way we when we created mudamos mudamos when people download mudamos from the application store the register and once they are registered they had the mudamos created a private key that is only contained in the smartphone of the users so with this private key they can sign draft abuse disposing that are disposed in the application to sign and weekly mudamos generates the list of the sign and make a stamp to get the process the entire process of gathering signatures trackable and traceable I put it in a general case what is mudamos but why we use blockchain can't we do the same thing just making an application that can organize those signatures and make the support viewable by the whole citizenship like have asked do or does or like change.org does that's the question Brazilian institutions had a bad reputation and people perceived as unreliable it's worse when we talk about political institutions signature campaigns running by organizations the signature campaigns I'm meaning signature campaigns to gathering signatures from the citizenship are centralized by organizations and it's hard to people rely on organization when you have low levels of trust in the society so sharing is caring unless if it's a standard what we do and we made with mudamos is creating a system that the way we sign or the way the people sign for those draft bills are shared and everyone can check the signatures made by by the civilians the citizenship and any campaign coordinator or any public institution or any citizen can have the same condition to signature checking and have the whole accountability of the campaign in their hands we have we have built a system of shared trust where the signature generated by users is an asset which can be verified by anyone who cares about this asset it's an important thing we treat the signature generated by mudamos as an asset so people who cares about the campaign gathering signatures cares it as an asset and it's an important asset when they reach the amount the minimum amount of signatures this have a political value because they can present draft bills to the legislative houses so how blockchain how we made this this way to get this this way to share trust about the signatures collected by mudamos can you warn me when press thank you we how blockchain with mudamos we thought blockchain beyond the block it's one one thing I like to say blockchain is not an univocal technology it's good to think and good to say many people think blockchains like something that it's like a block univocal block and there is just one way to see it but blockchain more than than a block blockchain is composed by many different pieces of technologies small technologies that made blockchain possible like communication protocols crypto cryptographic technologies so it's important to decompose what blockchain is and for instance in mudamos we use blockchain just in one of the part of this authentication and tracking in track of the process when people sign in in mudamos we have a process of hashing of that signature and we had a small piece of data that is necessary to present a draft bill to the congress so it's a legal concern about what data we put and is signed so when people signed for a draft bill they have some personal data and they hash this data with their private keys inside their smartphones so we have a signature that is verifiable by the public key generated when people had registered for mudamos so this is the same technology blockchain uses to sign messages when people broadcast messages with bitcoin transactions all the messages generated for the network are signed by the people's wallet so we did the same technique to to the public to the citizenship signatures and it works very very in a very very interesting way weekly we gather and combine all those signatures and PDF documents that these documents are signed and registered stamped in a blockchain and mudamos to the nowadays use bitcoin and interior blockchain so these documents can can demonstrate to the public and to the to the citizenship the track how trackable this process of gathering signatures is being done and it's important to make this process upditable so anyone who participating in gathering signatures for initiative draft bills citizens initiative draft bills can check how the process of signature collection collecting is being done when yes I'm I'm just finished so what we have learned with mudamos mudamos was launched in march of 2017 so we are running for a year and we what the lessons what good we we learned it was think blockchain beyond the technology and take advantage of small technology piece of blockchain it was one of the good things and in particularly we now are working as a wallet and testing some identity experiments so it's interesting one of the small pieces of technology we can prove and test beyond the blockchain the entire the whole blockchain but the bad was overcome blockchain literacy even we have made a system where anyone can check signatures even we have created a trustless trustful system people still rely on ITS instead in the system so ITS plays a hole in this process and we created we have created a system to make the system independent of ITS but until now because this block the lack of blockchain ITS still plays a hole in this and it was one of the bad things we have learned in this process thank you thanks so much Marco for sharing in the interest of time we're going to cut the last question out but open it up to you guys task questions yeah we Marco yes yeah nice we address this this is a good question and we address this question in two ways to think about how to overcome this mistrust about who signs and if Mickey Mouse signs for other to be mistressed in the system the first one we address this question thinking about the costs of the fraud in the system maybe one someone can register as Mickey Mouse building a prepaid SIM card and take an electoral ID that one information is necessary to sign for another person and register as Mickey Mouse but if even if you can have one fraud registration it's hard to think someone will try to break the entire system so gathering one and a half million signatures Mickey Mouse as Minnie Mouse and all those things and all those characters and this is important because one and a half million and if you pay for a different SIM card for one and a half million SIM cards you have high costs more than sometimes we joke is more affordable or more easy to buy and then fraud mudamos but the second one is legal a legal response to your question the attribute or the role to verify the signatures legally is of the legislative house the congress national congress of Brazil so what we do with mudamos this offering for the legislative house all the tools to verify this information and they can also check if Mickey Mouse have an electoral ID and if this information is true and can do it in an automatic way so even if there is a chance of fraud assistance it is more reliable than you have the paper way of sign because Mickey Mouse also can sign paper so this is another argument to defend thank you for the question yeah so normally we have in the slide deck we have one slide dealing with legal issues many so in GDPR is just one item that we are going to have to figure out and quite often make the joke is that Larry Lesse gave us code is law but law is code is equally important and that's what we actually see right now is that certain kinds of legal frameworks are probably going to determine how the code eventually is going to look like and so GDPR disabler depending on how the law predicts what the conditions are for being considered valuable valid and and so I have no anyway no immediate guidance if you're looking for GDPR compliance which I would never be capable of doing anyhow except for saying it's going to be a challenge and it's very interesting is that GDPR is actually used right now for self-sovereign identities so that you can actually say is that the whole concept of self-sovereign identities is actually being seen as an empowerment of the individual who then can control what is being shared or what is being deleted or not and so many in the blockchain community on the one hand see GDPR both as a threat but also as actually an enabler of establishing more user control identities so it has both sides from my point of view there are other legal questions one that I think the community should also think about is the massive patenting that is going on right now meaning blockchain is being patented or any kind of line of code is being patented right now which might have implications for the civic tech community on how you actually experiment and adjust some of those technologies that might have all issues but I'm curious to know when you say that you're talking about how you apply blockchain I mean I'm curious to know how you say that because we have periods where I think blockchain can be very interesting and we're interested in what you know or work like we concentrate on these model flows one boundary where it is clear that there is no transparency at all that we need something that could help us to where in fact I mean of course we have an issue of transparency but we also have a lot of sort of policy and also know that many countries the issue of transparency is about people who hold the power so it doesn't matter if you have the information on the data but we may sit there when the issue is there so the economy in which the technology is being developed is crucial and needs to be understood more but as I mentioned at the beginning I think it does provide you quite often new technologies provides you with like a new kind of imagination on how you could deal with existing systems the question is can the technology then ultimately establish the promise and I think that's then up to experimentation and seeing but obviously existing power structures are important and might actually be strengthened again through blockchain because it's not like a neutral technology I mean so anyway it's ultimately how it is being used and the values that are embedded in the technology maybe maybe just quickly add I think one of the things we do see is that there's definitely interest from states that are risk they have risk of getting caught up in a lot of global US dominated financial markets some of these countries are interested in seeing a viable crypto market for financial transactions globally so Venezuela launched a cryptocurrency that turned out not to be a cryptocurrency but there was lots of speculations that this was of interest to both shape ideologically by some countries around the world as but also technically start building it and that is also a conversation around for example the viability of Swift in the future and some of those questions that doesn't really touch on the thing of sort of granular transactions but the whole question around developing an alternative crypto markets I think even past the bust of Bitcoin there will be a sustained interest from this because of the effect of sanctions it's it sounds like a break has started but I know there's a few more questions in the room I wanted to take at least one more question and then these guys will be around so you can you can absolutely come up to them I hope and talk to them about things who wants to yeah I think one of the challenges I'm not a cryptographer as you may have guessed but talking to people who know about cryptography they tell me one of the rules is it can always be cracked it's just a question of where not where not if and I think one of the big challenges that particularly the WFE for example scares me particularly around data very high in personal data the life is is that if you are we're starting to put data like that into it into a distributed you know the ability to hack them you've got thousands of versions of the record starts to pop so I think the I guess I'm just adding a security is another huge variable of this kind of I think we need to take very seriously and not allow a conversation like this to be the thing on the planet and just one very final thought because I think we're running a really difficult line on this agenda which is overcoming my internal snark and actually genuinely engaging with it while still debugging appropriately and I think there's a difficult and I think it's probably something as a community we need to talk a little bit more about engage versus debug versus the kind of actually using it agenda and how we do that so thank you for starting great thank you on the second point I think agree completely on the first that's an issue that we didn't really speak about too much in our presentation at least is that question of what information is held on-chain and what information is held off-chain and that's another of these huge variables and design principles that can have massive implications on privacy security concerns so the point yeah very well taken and specifically about what information is on-chain is off-chain we need to care about the costs of the puts the information on-chain is very very expensive to put those information with Mudamos we split the information what is on-chain and off-chain because of the cost to do everything on-chain firstly we want to put every signature on-chain so we we could take off all the systems of ITS and every signature will pop up from the the smartphone to the blockchain of the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain but the costs are very very high to do it's so we split and have storage the signatures for a period and weekly we deploy those signatures in intermediate file a public file that's a list of signature that this is a sign the file signature that is only the information is is put on-chain so we had less than 8 bytes published on-chain and this is how can we make this information verifiable it's a question of design I think and when blockchain push forward the technology the technology limitations we have as more as possible informations on-chain but this depends on the technology and evolution I think that's all the time we have thank you so much for joining thanks to the panelists and enjoy thanks thanks