2023-2H Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG Report

Owned by Tom Klein
Last updated: Feb 08, 2024 by Alicia NoelVersion comment
3 min read

Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG - 2H 2023 Report

Overall Health

The Supply Chain & Trade Finance SIG continues to build the community and its impact. We completed our 2023 eBook project in November, held biweekly industry specific webinars to enlighten and drive adoption of blockchain in general and Hyperledger projects specifically,  curated a weekly newsletter that goes out to over 4k people, and welcomed a new co-chair. The group is looking forward to developing a new project for 2024 while focusing on our continued goal to bring value to Hyperledger and to the community.

Issues and Challenges

  • Current members have software and architecture skills however, we are in need of expert Hyperledger project software code experts to enable deeper technical projects.
  • Several new members are joining regularly and asking how to contribute so we need to continue to create relevant opportunities to contribute. We would still like to see more enterprise participation.
  • The SIG LinkedIn profile has more activity than either Discord or Confluence. We use it as our primary communication method.
  • Need to Update Charter to reflect new needs and participants.

Overall Activity in the last 6 months

  • Our project to create an eBook focused on Supply Chain and Trade Finance applications that use Hyperledger and are in active use with numeric benefit is now complete and available at this link. Highlights are:

    • More than 31 projects were considered for inclusion with a number of others not making the first cut.
    • 7 projects have full profiles and another 7 Additional Project profiles are included. The projects represented are from 11 countries on four continents. 
    • This project has enabled non-technical SIG members to actively contribute, and promoted participant use of Confluence.
  • The four webinars in 2H 23 have had up to 13 live attendees and 250+ viewers on YouTube replays.
  • The SIG Weekly News Digest has continued to be published weekly on Sundays. The digests have continued to highlight hundreds of news articles related to supply chains, trade finance, sustainability, and related issues. Andrea Frosini is the leader of this initiative and shares it weekly over the SIG listserv and our LinkedIn Group profile.
  • The Hyperledger Supply Chain and Trade Finance LinkedIn page has grown from 3,945 followers in June 2023 to 4,258 followers at the end of December 2023.  It is used to share SIG events and our weekly news digest.
  • Alicia Noel has posted SIG events and other news to the Supply Chain and Trade Finance channel of the Hyperledger Discord, and has improved the SIGs wiki pages by restructuring them and making sure content is regularly updated.
  • Tom Klein, Alicia Noel, and Jeff Pribich are the current co-chairs.

    • Jeff Pribich became a co-chair in Q3, 2023.Jeff was a Lead Software and System Architect at BP and since retiring has been working with blockchain projects.  Welcome Jeff!
    • Andrea Frosini resigned as co-chair in Dec, 2023. See announcement. Andrea was the impetus behind the Trade Finance focus so we owe him big thanks for bringing that key part of supply chain to the forefront. Fortunately, he will still contribute our weekly digest and manage our LinkedIn group. Thanks, Andrea!

Planned Work Products

  • We will initiate a new planning cycle in January 2024 to decide upon the best activities to focus on in 2024.  We welcome participation from a broad set of interested people.
  • Hosting future webinars.
  • Revising the written SIG charter and scope to reflect priorities of both the Supply Chain and Trade FInance parts of the  SIG and continue to create a more holistic SIG.
  • Pursuing opportunities to collaborate with other SIGs. 
  • Discord - Jeff Pribich will start taking the lead on determining our engagement on this 
  • Update to eBook in 2024.

Participant Diversity

  • Still needs work across all dimensions. The biggest gaps currently observed are:.
    • Technical skills: Most active members have limited technical skills.
    • Geographical: Most currently active members are in North American. We've also had members participate from India, China, Rwanda, England, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and other countries.
    • Enterprise representation: Active representation from enterprise staff would enable us to pursue most relevant projects.
    • Women/POC: Ongoing

Additional Information 

We’re looking for ideas on creating sector value using blockchain.  Please join one of our regular meetings.