July 2021 Report - Public Sector SIG

Owned by Daniela Barbosa
Last updated: Jan 14, 2022 by Jim Mason
3 min read

The following is a suggested template to use for your SIG bi-annual report. Please edit as needed.


Special Interest Group

The group is becoming larger and diverse with subscribers and participants from all around the world. Recently volunteers from the group has participated in the virtual Hyperledger Global Forum 2021. Presently we are more than 200 subscribers and expect a wider engagement on diverse topics covering Blockchain applications in Public Sector.

We have a biweekly meeting schedule.

General Biweekly meetings are conducted regularly as per schedule and there has been new attendees sharing exciting ideas and new subscriber base addition to the evolving PS SIG Community till June. We are planning to start a new working group soon focused on tracking blockchain policies and adoption globally.

The Confluence wiki and Zoom do make it easy to hold meetings and share meeting content.

We post all our meeting recordings and presentations on the site as a session library for later review.

Report Author(s)

Jim Mason

Public Sector - SIG Overall Health

We have a group subscriber list of 215 people with low level of turnover.

Recently I've promoted our sessions on the Hyperledger Boston Meetup as well as a few other meetup groups and on Linkedin.

That has improved attendance as well.

Some sessions have been as low as 20 people and some over 90.

Issues and Challenges

Challenges include building a backlog of speakers wanting to present on new topics.

We also don't want to overlap on sessions with other Hyperledger groups on topics. For example, Federal had test Fedcoin as an early CBDC prototype. While that's clearly Public Sector, we already have a very strong focus in capital markets where CBDC topics are well covered.

Overall Activity in the last 6 months

Our Past 6 months have been very active on the meeting schedule

Past Meetings:

  1. 7/30 NFTs - Non-Fungible Tokens: What, Why, Use cases, Legal concepts
  2. 7/2 Liz Tanner - Rhode Island on track for digital government with identity blockchain
  3. May 21st - Indicio - Cardea: a Verifiable Credential for Health - Heather Dahl, CEO of Indicio
    Ken Ebert, CTO of Indicio
  4. May 5th - Alastria mission to promote the digital economy with the Hyperledger community
  5. May 7th - Good Health Pass Overview - Todd Gehrke - ID2020.org
  6. April 23rd - DLT and Business Eco-System - Aleksandar Zelenovic - Publicis Sapient
  7. April 16th - The Open Mobility Network (OMN): An infrastructure for a new economy of movement
    Speaker: Robin Pilling
  8. March 26th - Identity and Privacy in Patient Health Care - Jim St Clair - Lumedic
  9. Mar 12th 10 am EST - Self-Sovereign Identity in Govtech for Financial & Healthcare Inclusion
    Speaker: Debajani Mohanty
  10. Feb 12th - NSF-Treasury Grants Payment Proof of Concept
  11. Jan 29th - Infosys - Solutions for secure digital identity and credentials: 2 government use cases
    Speakers
  12. Jan 15th - Stephen Curran - Digital Identity in the Government of British Columbia
  13. Past Meeting: Kaliya Young, the Identity Woman - The Domains of Identity

Planned Work Products

Continue to build a session focused on blockchain issues, solutions, challenges related to Public Sector

Work on finding speakers or "session leaders" to organize a topic.

Extend our repository of important related topics for the Public Sector.

Our attendees are not primarily developers so I don't trying to build software products as other groups have focused on.

We have done a lot of research and focus on Self Sovereign Identity from a variety of sources.

There may be an opportunity to collaborate on a paper on topics ( eg I contributed to a paper on NFT legal aspects for the EU Blockchain Forum )

Participant Diversity

We don't formally track diversity statistics by country, sex, race or age clearly.

Given our meeting times, we do draw good participation from the Americas, Europe with a few attendees from other locations ( Middle East, Africa, India )

We informally have more male than female attendees on most meetings but that ratio may be 60 / 40 as an estimate.

On the speaker side, 6 of our last 13 sessions were women.

Finding women speakers who have great information on many topics for our audience hasn't been more difficult than finding men.

Additional Information 


Date Published

8/9/21