2023 Q4 Report - Public Sector SIG

Owned by Jim Mason
Last updated: Jan 29, 2024
4 min read

Mission

Build an active, diverse, engaged community identifying key concepts, opportunities, strategies and solutions in Public Sector organizations, communities and groups for blockchain related technologies that can help individuals, organizations. 

Special Interest Group

The group is diverse with subscribers and participants from all around the world. Presently we are more than 200 subscribers. With the expansion of many Public Sector challenges, solutions and growth of blockchain technologies we look for wider engagement on many diverse topics in the Public Sector SIG.  We monitor other groups tracking blockchain use cases, policies, solutions and adoption globally.

2023 Meetings

In 2023 the Hyperledger Public Sector SIG had a limited set of meetings. We had 4 meetings, most of which were promoted and supported very well by David Boswell as virtual meetups with Live Stream recordings as well ( Thank you again David for this ).

  • Nov 3, 2023 - Informal discussion on Biden Responsible AI Executive Order - Jim Mason
  • Oct 20, 2023 - SSI Self Sovereign Identity Use Case Discussion - Jim Mason
  • June 9, 2023 - ESG and Blockchain - Mohan Venkataraman
  • Feb 27, 2023 - Build Web-Based Distributed Applications (DApps) on Hyperledger Fabric - Jim Sullivan

Our meeting on DApps had a total of over 200 attendees thanks to good promotion as a virtual meetup as well.

Our ESG meeting with Mohan Venkataraman was next highest with over 100 attendees 

Where our meetings have also been promoted to the Virtual Meetup Groups, we've had good attendance.

We have done some collaboration on topics with Supply Chain, Climate Action groups as well.

The Confluence wiki and Zoom online meetings 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.

SIG Health - Issues and Challenges

Overall our registered membership was about the same as 2022 - 211 registered members on our mailing list. We had some drops and some adds but not a high number

 We seem to draw more attendees from the US, some from Europe and little ever from Asia. I suspect a lot of that is the meeting time that works well for US and ok for Europe.

We need to execute more of the Hyperledger Marketing Strategies for SIGs in 2024 to expand awareness of our SIG and potential value it offers

We need to add to leadership in the SIG as well

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. We do have overlap with other SIGS on Financial Regulation, Supply Chain Regulation, Climate Action Regulation etc

2024 Meeting Plans


January 12, 2024 SIG 2024 Planning session on topics  - Jim Mason

We need to look at options to expand both group leadership and membership as well as connecting with other blockchain groups as a process. 

There are many themes to build on from the work our group has done earlier as well a few new topics to move forward on:

  1. Regulations on Blockchain and Blockchain solutions in the US and Europe
  2. Updates and new Hyperledger Projects ( Besu, Aries, Fabric, Firefly, Orion and other lab projects )
  3. ESG - Mohan’s excellent foundation on ESG provides a base to open all 3 areas for follow on sessions this year: Environment, Social and Governance looking at opportunities, challenges and solutions. Here the focus has been on blockchains adding more trust to proposed solutions 
  4. Identity - Governments continue to expand digital identity and SSI has now had a stronger focus ( Rhode Island, GLEIF and other organizations )
  5. Digital Assets - Building on work from Swift, RLN, DTCC and others enterprise permissioned blockchains supporting regulated digital assets got more focus than the crypto world in 2023. With new regulations in many areas coming, 2024 will have more to focus on including ERC3643 as Ethereum tries to catch up in that space to the current leaders.
  6. Impacts of AI and it’s relation to blockchain especially in the context of AI regulations, Generative AI transparency and governance 
  7. Coordination with other blockchain groups ( INATBA, European Union Blockchain Observatory and Forum, GBBC, GBA, BBA )


February 23, 2024 INATBA overview - Morgane Stein

Tomaz Sedej was key to getting Morgane Stein to present to our group on what INATBA is as a group, their focus on blockchain in Europe and what their plans are


Other Candidate sessions to add to the backlog include:

  • Automated Digital Governance
  • CBDC work and regulations related to blockchain impacts of FedNow, Swift, RLN etc
  • AI and Blockchain in Digital Government
  • ERC3643 - permissioned, governed Ethereum Smart Contracts
  • MICA - EU Cryptocurrency regulations updates
  • New EU legislation for Environment Crime 
  • Potential for Forest Management Tokenization
  • EU AI Act impacts and blockchain support
  • Updates in 2024 on Besu, Fabric, Firefly, Aries

Candidate 2024 Work Products

Some of the areas on ESG, Automated Digital Governance, AI and Blockchain in Digital Government are candidate areas for research papers that can add value. IF there were high community interest based on results, any of those could be later defined as volunteer projects in Hyperledger Labs potentially. 

Report Author(s)

Jim Mason

Date Published

12/17/23