2021: January-June Bi-Annual Report

Owned by Nancy Min
Last updated: Aug 02, 2021
3 min read


Hyperledger SI-SIG Bi-Annual Report

Special Interest Group Health

The SI-SIG community continues to grow its membership, attract new members, and develop new activities. The group has a consistent meeting cadence that takes place every two weeks and agendas and meeting notes are well maintained and shared to the community. Overall, meeting attendance has been healthy and it is noted that meeting topics and/or special guest speakers drive attendance numbers and diversity. The community membership, measured through the email list membership consists of 182 members and linkedin page with 91 followers. Over the next 6 months, we will maintain a regular cadence for SI-SIG meetings and build-out workstream activities/projects.

Similar to other SIGs, the goal of the Social Impact SIG is to have the bi-weekly general meeting and core team serve as a “front door” to better engage and keep prospective new members active in the community, align them with resources, and connect them more directly with the community.

The general special interest group (SI-SIG) will continue to serve as an entrée for prospective members in the global social impact community interested in understanding how best to educate themselves and participate in the implementation of blockchain technologies–ostensibly using the Hyperledger Project umbrella of frameworks, tools, and extensive community–in order to create solutions to solve a plethora of issues for positive social impact.

It’s important to note that a strong, core team of member has already formed and contributed to the research, content, structure, outreach and functionality of the group. We have a strong foundation upon which to build. We believe the Social Impact SIG is an important part of the overall mission of Hyperledger and its community. We look forward to continuing to build upon the vision we outlined in its charter.

Issues

With the support of the Hyperledger Ecosystem team, the SI-SIG has been able to garner a regular meeting cadence and healthy community engagement. In order to grow eminence among the community, the following identified issues are areas in which we would like to target and improve:

  • Higher level of membership engagement for core and new members
  • Better facilitate (and highlight) our community members and activities
  • Identify and develop work products amongst the workstreams
  • Identify new forms of community engagement (academic, research, and industry)

Overall Activity in Past Quarter

The SI-SIG holds a regular meeting on a bi-weekly basis on Tuesday mornings at 0700 (Pacific Time).

Membership and activity across https://lists.hyperledger.org/g/social-impact-sig continue to grow. Membership is currently at 151 members. Our chat channel, # social-impact-sig (https://chat.hyperledger.org/channel/social-impact-sig), is seeing activity, but it is not as active as we’d like it to be just yet. There were quite a few structural changes recently with the community assets migration, so we are working to make sure members are aware of how to get to, and use, the new tools.

Over the past 6 months, the SI-SIG hosted a variety of community presentations including:

  • Carbon Tracing: IBM, Newlight Technologies, and Cognition Foundry
  • Transforming the Sugar Industry in Belize: Ripe
  • State of Diversity and Inclusion in Blockchain: Diversity in Blockchain
  • UN Digital ID: United Nations International Computing Center
  • UniCoins for SDGs: UN Volunteers

The SI-SIG also developed various resources to facilitate community engagement including:

Planned Work Products

SI-SIG General Meetings will continue to be held regularly and we are already seeing a bump up in attendance and, with our new meeting time, a stronger set agenda, and the formation of our subgroups with specific deliverables, we feel confident that the group will continue to grow.

State of Social Impact Ecosystem blog post will highlight current trends in blockchain for social good and areas in which blockchain technology is transforming the landscape. The blog post series has been launched and we have a few blog posts lined up for the second half of 2021

Community Engagement with academic, research, and industry is what drives the largest impact for the development and implementation of solutions that drive a positive social impact. The SIG intends to grow in this area to better engage the broader social impact community.

Participant Diversity

This is a very diverse membership with global representation (including, but not limited to, member participation from Switzerland, East Timor, the US and India). The majority of membership represents social impact/NGO entities, though we also see larger enterprise participation. There is also a good mix of gender representation in the group.