Foundation in-depth member webinar where you will be starting in about a minute. Thank you for joining us and we'll go through some housekeeping and going ahead and get started with our distinguished panelists today. Let's go ahead and get started. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone joining us from around the world for today's Hyperledger Foundation in-depth member webinar. This discussion is going to be a lively one and very interesting as we are all citizens of different jurisdictions, whether it's in the U.S. or globally. We'll be talking about how states like the state of Rhode Island are driving process transformation in public services using blockchain and working with partners like Infosys, one of our Hyperledger Foundation members, as well as AWS. So we're looking forward to this discussion today and I'll introduce the panelists in a bit. Before we get started today, just a quick reminder that all are welcomed in the Hyperledger community. 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Today's webinar is driving process, transformation in public services using blockchain. We are all digital citizens and I think how blockchain and related technologies are being used to improve citizen services is really a core service that I think many of us as citizens are interested in. Today I'm honored to have on our panel a Liz Tanner. The Secretary of Commerce at the State of Rhode Island, one of the small but very mighty states in the United States. And Liz has been a champion of the Hyperledger Foundation for many years speaking at multiple events and really championing blockchain throughout the world. We also have Shri Chala who is a senior director for Blockchain at Infosys. Shri has also been another long time contributor to the Hyperledger Foundation and really driving transformation with their customers worldwide in using blockchain in various use cases. So we're interested and very excited about hearing his perspective on public services as well. And last but not least, we're pleased to welcome Charles Okuchou. And Charles is a senior business development manager for AWS and AWS has been working in partnership with Infosys and Rhode Island on some of these public services. So once again, welcome everyone in the audience and especially welcome to the member panelists. Liz, it's always great to see you. So let's go ahead and get started. Maybe you can introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing there in Rhode Island. Thank you so much, Daniela. Thanks for having me. Good to see you again. And good to see all the panelists, some of my have met before. I am currently the Secretary of Commerce for the State of Rhode Island. But I got into this space because I was an attorney who had had many clients who were very frustrated with how hard it was to do government business for their business in the state. And they were looking for a way to make it easier. And so I came to the state government and left private practice to try to make it easier to do business. And that's what led me down this path. Excellent. Well, and we're very glad it did. So welcome. Shree. Hello, everyone. Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon. Where are you joining from? I'm joined from Boston. I run the Blockchain Market Initiatives for Infosys. My area of focus and my advent into this space has been from 2017. We've been involved in a number of initiatives on Blockchain, especially for enterprise applications of Blockchain. And believe it or not, one of the early sectors that we started working on was public sector, which continues to be the case. I am glad to be joined here and share the stage with Liz Stano, who's my close friend and collaborator on a number of things that we've been working on. So excited to be part of this panel. Welcome, Shree. And Charles. Hi, everybody. My name is Charles McCotchew, and thank you all for joining this panel. I'm the Senior Business Development Manager for Amazon Managed Blockchain Service at AWS. I've been with AWS now for about four years, and my main role is helping to develop go-to-market strategies and business development initiatives for the blockchain service. And I work very closely with AWS customers like the State of Rhode Island sales teams and partners like Infosys and Shree to deeply understand customer needs, identify the gaps and look for opportunities for blockchain use cases across broad spectrum of AWS customers globally. And that includes enterprises, startups, digital-native businesses, ISVs, and also government and public sector customers. And prior to AWS, I worked in various leadership roles. My previous job was at a cryptocurrency hedge fund, as well as in fintech and banking firms across Wall Street in New York. I worked on various projects on digital transformation and cloud migration and building high-frequency trading cloud clubs. I'm happy to be here and looking forward to interfacing this question. Well, once again, welcome to all. I think this is a great combination of a panel to really talk about the reality of how blockchain and public services, you know, there is no doubt, you know, and it's not just myself or my family and, you know, the people in my neighborhood that, you know, citizens more and more worldwide and especially in developed countries like in the United States are demanding digital services. And, you know, I would even venture to say that if public sector services are not thinking digital, they're going to lose their connections with citizens and the services that you need to provide the citizens. So I was hoping that we could start maybe with a baseline of what public sector services citizens experience today and, you know, highlighting maybe some of the key challenges and issues that we see and that blockchain and blockchain related technologies could really enable. Liz, you know, you're certainly of all of us in the front lines here in the United States, in the state of Rhode Island. Tell us a little bit about what you're seeing and kind of some of the challenges and issues, but also, you know, what do you have to deliver to your citizens in order to meet their needs? I mean, the answer is it's all over the place, right? It's it really just depends where you live specifically and what it is you're trying to do. A great example is I had one of my employees said, hey, I'm going to be in late about an hour tomorrow. I'm putting I need to do something. OK, fine. She came in and said I was we're putting a new garage on top of or new roof on top of our garage. So I needed to go to Town Hall to get a permit to make that happen. And when she got there, she went to go fill out a form and they said, well, actually, you have the ability to do this online. And that was a project that we had led within the state. But it really depends on what town you live in, right? Because not every town has it. So you've got you've got a situation where you as a as a resident have no idea what to do, you have to kind of guess, because it might be fully electronic with a where you can submit a credit card into a transaction. It might be a PDF form where you can maybe fill it out online or maybe you just have to print it and then fill it out and either send it in or mail it in or or maybe you can submit it electronically. Or it might just be regular role.  And so it's it's really just all over the place and it causes confusion. And for our business clients, that's one of the chief complaints is how am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to know what I'm supposed to do? I have to come and ask you to figure out with it what that means. So that means time, that means convenience. And it's it can be a real burden if if you're trying to run business or trying to go to work for the day, now you have to call and work late. So, you know, for for what we see, it's all over the place. Now, if you do have technology, great, wonderful. But a lot of these technologies are older, you know. So you might have somewhere that they have a PDF and that was the new hot technology a long time ago, but it's not any more. And so you're you're trying to convert out of something that they're already paying for to something new and is it more expensive, less expensive? It's always more expensive, right? You know, there's never anything that's less expensive. But does that technology that you have doesn't have an API? Can you make some sort of a connection? So the answer I would imagine at any government and any jurisdiction across the globe is it really just depends, you have to figure it out. And it can be very burdensome for any kind of a person or business to do to do business with the government. And our core is digital transformation and certainly, you know, many cities and states and nations worldwide are at different stages of that transformation and being able to offer those citizen services. Shree, what is what is Infosys? I know you work with a lot of customers in the space as well. The public sector space. What are you seeing as some of the challenges and the opportunities for citizen experiences? Wonderful. Thank you very much, Liz. I think, you know, it's always very good to have close and rooted examples. Nothing gets much more easier than you working on a project. And one of your employees not knowing how it can happen. So in my perspective, Daniel, I think there are three main reasons why this is important. Number one, to bridge the gap. Essentially, the digital divide that exists between you today have, you know, haves and have nots and the digital haves and digital have nots. Second is in anchoring citizen centric services for the future. And the third one is actually, you know, this is here and now. This is not, you know, something that is distant and far out in the future. Now, on the digital divide, there's a lot of factors that come into play. Today, I think the socioeconomic factors, infrastructure, limitations on where you are and how you approach these services is driving the disparity, is accentuating the disparity between accessing digital services and what that means for creating opportunities, helping simplify things. Second thing is on citizen centricity. And I think this is such a critical thing. It's no more an aspiration. It's a necessity. The simple question is, why should my government services not be as simple as ordering coffee at a Starbucks or my experience in banking? Not going to a bank. I mean, today I have the ability to just scan a check on my phone and be done. And I haven't visited a bank in more than 12 months. And then the other thing here is that this digital transformation, as you pointed out, Daniel, powered by blockchains and DLTs and Web3s more broadly, along with commitment from government is actually going to forge an equitable and accessible future for all. And this is not going to happen just because somebody, you know, this is not going to happen. There has to be a deliberate effort by leaders. And Liz is a great example here that, you know, somebody optimizes the leadership that is required to turn tomorrow's vision into today's reality. And I think for all those three reasons, it's a very important aspect. I think let's not forget about, you know, sort of the invisible hand and all of these things, right, which is legislation or maybe not so invisible hand. But that's that becomes a critical part of how do you progress in this? Yeah, so I love, you know, the thinking of the digital, the citizens requirements and that digital divide, because I do think that's important. But regulation obviously comes into play here, right? And legislation and some states and some countries, obviously, are leading further faster. And we see a lot of that obviously coming out of Rhode Island, which is great to see. Liz, can you comment a bit around the what's the relevant legal regulatory landscape that you see here in the United States and with a focus on Rhode Island? We did a lot of research to figure that out, because that was, of course, the first question, because before you implement the system that we are that we're looking to implement, can you even do it? Because if you can't do it legislatively, then, you know, you've got to wait to the legislative cycle goes, which could take up to a year or two to pass laws. So after doing an enormous amount of research, we discovered that we didn't have to do anything to do the blockchain project that we're doing. However, we this was at the beginning of blockchain. And we basically threw blockchain into the bucket for everything. We did have to do some things for crypto side. And so we worked on the licensure streamlining a licensure piece of it. But from a utilization of blockchain, we didn't have to do anything. However, it's on a case by case basis, right? So depending on what you're specifically wanting to do, you might need to do something great example is a lot of states are now using blockchain technology for their driver's licenses to have those available that can be on your phone, that does require legislation. So something specific like using your block, using your driver's license as a instead of having a physical one, if you wanted to, whether it's being able to buy alcohol or cigarettes or whatever it is, you have your driver's license, but it was also for police to be able to accept it. So it really depends on the specific issue. But we also are starting to see legislation around it from a privacy aspect. So we've seen it where there's sort of the right to be able to choose. Do I want to do this? Do I do I have to do it electronically? Doesn't have to be on a blockchain, right? So we're seeing some states really take a look at that. And then you're hearing, of course, in Europe and now what you're starting to hear in Canada and the North and the United States about the right to be forgotten. And so those are all sort of new things that are coming out. But as far as legislation to do what you want to do, it really depends very specifically on what it is your goal is. Excellent. Yeah. And I do completely or hardly agree around the digital identity requirements and kind of making sure that there are specific legislations and regulations that people can adhere to as well. So I do think so. And we'll talk a bit more about the specific use cases in a bit. But before we go that, Charles, maybe your perspective, you know, AWS works with many government customers in the public sector. What kind of relevant regulations are you seeing being applied in the blockchain space specifically? That's an excellent question. The landscape is the regulatory and legal landscape is a blockchain in the public sector is still evolving. We have different states that have enacted legislation regarding the use of blockchain and we've worked with some of those states as part of their request for information just to kind of give them additional context. And for instance, like in 2019, you know, Colorado launched a base digital driver's license, which and, you know, and also Arizona also began to offer digital ID for Apple smartphones last year. And we work with them on that. And we've also seen impact of COVID because everybody was working from home, but they still needed to be able to get their driver's licenses and other types of verification that the impact of COVID actually sped up adoption of some of these services and sped up the legislation as well in California, which, you know, the governor just signed Senate Bill SB 786, which allows county recorders upon request to issue a certified copy of the birth certificates or death certificates as a verifiable credential using blockchain technology. And in addition, we also work very closely with Utah on a bill that got signed earlier this year, which was HP 740, which requires the state division of technology services to launch a pilot program that will be working on for digital verifiable credentials using blockchain technology. And also there are other bills like that are helping to create a legal framework for decentralized autonomous organizations, which is their online cooperatives that live on the on the blockchain and are governed by ownership in tokens or cryptocurrency to operate in states. And that new law will actually treat those dows that haven't registered as corporate entities or nonprofits, you know, the legal equivalent of a domestic limited liability company. And last but not least, I think as the regulatory landscapes evolves, we're going to see governments, you know, there need to be proactive in developing practices and policies and regulation that will enable safe and responsible use of the technology. Liz talked about the privacy right to be forgotten laws like California has the Privacy Act and which and also the Europe has a GDPR, which can be in conflict with blockchain legislation. And basically, the fact is, since the blockchain is immutable, you can't delete the information. We need to ensure that certain personal identifiable information or PHI, which is personal health information, in the case of healthcare use cases, then are not stored on the blockchain. So instead, you know, we work, we deploy the hash of that data, cryptographic hash of data will be stored in the blockchain along with a reference to the location where the data is stored on immutable database. So if a user requests for the data to be deleted at some point, that can be done easily. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, the things around verifiable credentials and identity, as I mentioned before, quite important. And across the hyperledger ecosystem, we see a lot of these use cases in the public sector space, especially in collaboration with public and private sector, like what we're talking about here, right, when the public sector is working with the private sector to come up with these solutions. And in Europe, for example, we see regulations around things like sustainability with the EU Deforestation Act that just came through in the spring to ensure that food and byproducts of agriculture sustainably farmed in from a forest perspective. And also the electronic vehicle car battery requirements are on sustainability in the EU battery passport. So we're seeing a lot of work coming out of Europe, for sure. Also in Canada around digital identity requirements. And we're seeing even governments getting involved in blockchain and building public infrastructure. So like in Latin America and Caribbean with lack chain, where they're actually building a layer one blockchain, they're using hyperledger base to do that to build public infrastructure so that government's agencies and private sector can build on top of lack chain, which essentially is a permissioned public blockchain. And in Europe, we're also seeing EPC, which is the European blockchain system systems, and that was part of the European Commission and Elastria and Spain. So blockchain is being used by governments building public sector applications, for sure. Shree, can you talk a little bit about these solutions specifically that we are talking today with Rhode Island using hyperledger technologies? Yeah, sure. You know, I think, as Liz was mentioning, one of the one of the key areas when we started out, and this is just not with the state of Rhode Island, but with other areas also is that, you know, when you look at use cases, there are primarily three buckets in which you can put the use cases. A bucket which requires nothing to be done from a legal legislative perspective in that, you know, it's legal to do stuff on blockchain either as an addition to what you're already doing as part of what the law requires. Say, for example, issuing a license or a credential, which is done paper, but in addition to that, you're also adding a digital thing. Second stuff is where, you know, it requires, second bucket is it requires some amount of legislative or interpretation. And the third piece is as Liz was mentioning, you know, stuff like driver's license, which absolutely requires legislative support, legislative backbone before moving into this.  If I'm not mistaken, we had, you know, if not more, at least 60 on use cases that we started out with in terms of, you know, where can blockchain be applied across the state more focused on Department of Business Regulations, which was the agency which started out this initial project. And then I think, you know, through a more, you know, standardized framework and a methodology working along with, you know, different stakeholders, we were able to narrow it down to a handful of use cases, which a couple of things. Number one is doable. And second thing is in doing whatever it is that we're doing, it's worthwhile. And one such use case is the Certified Public Accountant Licenses, which is what we've done and we've published extensive along with Liz and, you know, others from the state who are at it. And here's, it's a pretty simple thing, right, you know, Certified Public Accountants, there's essentially three things that need to happen, right? Number one, you need to make sure that I am who I am saying that, you know, if I am if I am Sri Chalana and I was born and raised somewhere and whatever is my identity, that's verified. Second thing is my educational qualifications. Do I have the right set of educational qualifications in order to qualify to practice wherever I'm practicing with the profession? And the third thing is, is around the actual license itself that is issued by the competent, by the required agency or department within the state, within the jurisdiction. And when these three things come together, that is when you have a verified, approved Certified Public Accountant License, which then allows that individual or that entity, a group of people together to practice and oftentimes what happens is a lot of these things are done after the fact, you know, the services are rendered. And that's when you probably figure out that something is not correct.  Now, it happens to be that the individual did not carry a license to operate in a, you know, in a mid-rise building in the city, in the jurisdiction that I'm living. And all of this was only possible to be done, like, you know, multiple emails and phone calls and this, that and the other. Worse, I think, you know, when you codify all of this and put everything together, you would not even be able to contact or contact with that individual and, you know, be able to provide or render that service. So broadly speaking, you know, that's sort of what we have done. Now, I'll just touch upon a few other things, which is, you know, in addition to credentialing, I think another area. So I'll stress upon this, which is the California Senate Bill 786, that has been enacted, which now offers, allows counties to record issue and verify vital records on the blockchain. We've built a system for this in partnership with AWS for one of the counties in California. This is now, again, something that's seeing a lot of traction, you know, given the tailwinds of the force that has been put at the back of it through some legislative support that is coming in. Now, overall, you know, from, why does it matter, you know, in terms of the choice of technology or the group of technologies that one has to pick up, right? And I think here, the capabilities of, you know, the broad set of projects that Hyperledgeal has are relevant and important because two things, right? So number one is, can I drive immediate success? So it's one important thing because you don't want to experiments to last for, you know, months or years together because by then, you know, everybody would have lost interest, but then an equally important thing is, does this framework, technology, choice of, you know, architecture give me the long-term legislative compliance for my evolving innovation goals?  We see, you know, based on our experience that, you know, especially for public sector, this is such a great place because, you know, these technologies do provide a native way to support and offer these things. Liz, do you want to add to that? Talk a bit more about the solutions themselves? You know, for us, again, it was my goals to make it easier to do business, right? And so that was sort of the overarching piece. And so we said, all right, well, how can we do this? And I very much have been a fan of the Estonian model. And so we were saying, OK, how do you where do you start if you're looking at the Estonian model? Can you explain the Estonian model? Maybe for some of the attendees who might not be familiar. That one's been out there for a long time. All those of us who've been in the industry for a long time, we know exactly what you mean. But if you can do that, I'll give you my 30 second introduction. So my bad if I get it wrong. I did get to go to Estonia last fall to really get a hands on. But the way I interpret it and what we want to do is essentially have one place of entry with one identification, right? So, you know, I have my my my I'm an resident of Estonia and I have my card somewhere here. But, you know, the ability to enter one website to be able to do all of your governmental functions, you know, and so I believe in Estonia, every single governmental function except for marriages and divorce are somehow electronic. I don't think any other government can even come close to being able to say that they have that. And one of the beauties of it is that you don't have to enter your name over and over and over again. Right. So so you see here that I'm Elizabeth Tanner Esquire on there, but I'm also Liz Tanner and sometimes I'm Elizabeth Mary Tanner. My mother is trying to yell at me and sometimes I use the Esquire and sometimes I don't write. And so, you know, when you have a when you have a name, if it's not the same name in government, that causes us a lot of problems, right? And it also makes it more ripe for fraud. You know, so for us, it was very much, can we have one way to get into a system and then perform government services?  What we're aiming to do is essentially you enter through one website. I'm able to prove that I'm Elizabeth M Tanner Esquire and that's my official name, and then I can do the variety of governmental functions that are the spokes on the wheel. That's what we're aiming to do. And so we started with the CPA license and why do we start with the CPAs? Because CPAs are accountants in America and they're one of the few professions that have to continuously prove that they are licensed accountants because they file taxes in lots of other states. And that's a that's a pretty common thing for them. So we wanted to be able to give them the opportunity to be able to say, here's a way that I'm recognized. And then other governments would be able to say, OK, that's a recognized CPA. And so it's a verified credential they're able to do business within our state. But that was really the first piece of it because where we're trying to grow next is the business registration process. So pretty much any state in America, if you want to become a corporation or an LLC, you need to file with what's almost always the Secretary of State's office with the Division of Taxation, as well as if you have employees with the Department of Labor and Training. That's what we call them in my state. I'm sure they're called something similar in most other states. And so that's three different places that you have to go. You also have to let the IRS know and you also let your county or your municipality know that you're working there. That's for any business, whether you're a restaurant or a big, huge corporation conglomerate that makes, you know, manufacturers, that's pretty much how you start. So what we're trying to do is to get those places as the first spokes on the wheel so that you only have to go to one place instead of all of those different places to set up your business. Then ultimately what we do is start to add on more and more and more spokes.  If you are restaurants on the ocean, you might have to do some forms with the Department of Environmental Management. You know, so you just keep adding more and more spokes. That's sort of the Estonian model and that's the model that we're trying to employ, but you have to start with something really small first. And then you have to get people to be on board with it before you can add a whole lot more. And you would have thought that doing what we, what Srin just described as something simple, but it was extremely complicated and it continues to be extremely complicated. So it's something that all governments struggle with, but we're making our way. If I may add to what Liz just said, or Elizabeth Mary Tanner just said, I think, you know, the problem with the Estonia model is it works for Estonia or countries or entities, governmental entities where there's a centralized identity, but in the case of the United States, the key issue is you have over 50 states, each state is its own mini state or in its own mini country. And they, you know, there are also laws on the books that prefer sharing of information between the federal government or the federal and state. So we can't really implement that model here in the state in the US because there are lots of institutional political resistance to those types of centralized centralization. So I think that that might be the issue. I mean, we can handle it at a state level, but imagine the case of the restaurant you talked about that has to register that wants to open up branches in multiple states, they have to go through that same process in Rhode Island, but if they want to go to California, they have to get subject to somewhat different legislation and they have to kind of validate, provide the same validation and processes that they were doing in Rhode Island. And even moving a person, when the person is moving from one state to the other, I have to give up my existing driver's license and then move to a different state and apply for a new driver's license. So that whole process, it's much harder to implement here in the United States. And but I'm hoping that as more people adopt blockchain services, there might be a federation of blockchain that allows you to validate your identity using technology like zero knowledge proofs. Even though if you had your birth certificates in the US, those different networks across state lines can allow the verified credentials to pass from one jurisdiction to the other. And Charles, isn't that the dream? Right? Isn't that the dream to be able to see that kind of connection? I don't know if it's going to happen in any of our lifetimes, but you'd like to think that maybe that's that's the way it will be in 100 years. Who knows? But a lot of the efficiencies, right, the efficiencies that you're seeing, for example, with the CPAs or the businesses, I think that's really critical. And sometimes it's not, as I always say, it's not a sexy, right? The mainstream media don't want to talk about CPAs getting to do their jobs better. That's the reality of it. But you know what, the CPAs certainly do. And the businesses doing business and the government's doing business with those CPAs certainly do as well. Shree, can I call on you to talk a little bit about the specific hyperledger technologies that for this use case you have been working with Rhode Island on? Yeah, sure. So on the specific use case, we built it on top of hyperledger in the because this is related to identity and then we applied it on top of AWS. There's again, additional kinks in terms of stuff that we need to do, which, again, it's a work in progress that we're building on. And I think to Liz's point about the Hubbets book model, right? That's essentially how we looked at this thing, right? There's basic Lego blocks with one application that is built on hyperledger in the for, in this case, Department of Business Regulation for CPA licensing. But then as part of that itself, we had silent participants from other departments and agencies that were just in a listen only mode with Department of Motor Vehicles and Secretary of State's office, which again, the idea was that if and when they're ready to progress and add more use cases, you can build on that basic framework and structure that you have, where you either add more people, add more volume, add more licenses to that particular use case or you expand by adding more applications on top of the core system itself that we've built.   And, you know, we'll come to a little bit about the challenges, but broadly speaking, that's that sort of the high level view of it. Yeah. And for those of you who might not know much about the Hyperledger Foundation, our projects, there's 13 different projects. Shree kind of talked about the modularity and the ability to pick and choose and actually combine either projects within Hyperledger or even outside of Hyperledger. Hyperledger Indy is also being very, very well used in digital services in Canada. The government of Canada, particularly British Columbia, has been doing some great work and Indy has been used, you know, the sovereign network in Europe in a lot of use cases as well. So mature, right? It's been a mature project since 2017 alongside some of our other identity projects like Hyperledger Aries and non-creds, which is our newest verifiable credentials. But, you know, I talk about maturity, right? We're now close to like eight plus years, all of us here on this panel working on blockchain and blockchain solutions. And, you know, I, you know, think many of us thought that we'd be further along, right? We'd be further along in implementations and not having to do a lot of the education around blockchain. And, you know, I always say this and sometimes people are like, oh, yeah, that makes sense is, you know, a lot of these platforms, blockchain or DLT is just one piece and very often just a very small piece of the whole solution. There's a lot of other enterprise systems and other technologies that it needs to be integrated with. There's a lot of data and interoperability questions and requirements and data modeling that needs to be done. And there's a lot of education and upscaling. You have to educate not only the business decision makers, but the engineers and the people that are going to run these systems and be relying on these systems. So there's a lot of upscaling at the government level, you know, in hyper ledger foundation and what we do with the Linux Foundation education programs is really helping that education at upscaling of users from a technology perspective, but more also from a why, why blockchain and how blockchain perspective as well. So it has been a long time. And, you know, so there's challenges and some limitations. And, you know, I'm going to toss this over to you, Charles, because you've seen many of these as well and developing and implementing blockchain, specifically for public sector services that we're talking about today. So what are some of the challenges that you see that you'd like to share with the audience today? Yeah, that's a very, very interesting question. From my perspective, it's like, you know, first of all, is understanding the technology, you know, it's complex, it's a complex technology, difficult to understand. We've already talked about some of the legislative harders that you have to go through. When it comes to implementation, part of the issue, and I must say this is because there's so many different application areas, you know, there's vital records, there's health records, there's supply chain and property and different other other types of applications. And for each of those applications, you know, within the Hyperledger Foundation, there are different preferred projects that can be used, like Indie, which is which we talked about that was implemented Rhode Island is ideally suited for digital identity. Hyperledger Fabric, which is more broad, more general, and it's probably one of the oldest and most mature, as you might mention, can be used for different tasks. However, on the subject, you know, so you use it for supply chain, you can use it for credentials, you can use it for all sorts of things. The only area where there's a limitation is it doesn't by natively support the IDs, decentralized identification. And so Aries, you know, for instance, sits on top of Indie in most cases. So when you're deploying it, you have to deploy a blockchain of nodes for Aries, for Indie and then run Aries on top of it. Then there's a non-credits. So if you take a matter from the perspective of a state and they're going to be using it for transportation, for supply chain, they might start with a project, a supply chain project and deploy a network of Hyperledger Fabric nodes. And obviously they might want to use a managed service like AWS, you know, Amazon managed services to kind of take away the under-printed heavy lifting. And then they now decide they want to work on a credential project. And now you have to deploy a new network of Indie nodes side by side with that. So you could have within one state, you could have a multitude of blockchain networks and which different teams and different departments and different organizations within the state have to manage and maintain. So our position is, you know, for customers, we want to take away the under-printed heavy lifting of running those nodes and provide a managed service. And again, we provide Hyperledger Fabric as a service. And instead, for most of the project that we've seen, like for instance, the project in California, that project was built on Hyperledger Fabric, it's possible to actually run a non-creds on top of any type of blockchain services. So we think that, you know, even if you look at the way the Ares Foundation is moving, the Ares project is moving, they're moving beyond supporting just Indie as a network because they realize this is a challenge that you're going to face if you're even within a corporate organization or state, if you have to run different types of blockchain networks and maintain them, it's not scalable. So they've provided a wrapper for Fabric. So you can actually run Ares on Fabric so you can use have one single network preferably a managed network, which is managed by other people. And they can run Ares or non-creds, which also supports Hyperledger Fabric. So that's kind of the direction we see things going. You know, and but again, every approach is it depends on the two approaches. In some states, everything is handled at the state level. And all different teams or departments manage leverage the shared services. In some cases, you know, different counties, like in the case of Riverside, are having their own projects and some of the counties are doing different things. So determine exactly which of these technologies apply also falls down to the approach that the states and government entities decide to move forward with. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, things like managed services and services that are specific to use cases does help governments. And I just spent a week in Japan and you're talking about the same thing with the preperatures there with the different, you know, basically different governments around Japan in the same issues as well as what is the solution. Shree, maybe a little bit from you around the challenges and limitations that you see in your implementations. Sure. Sure.  Why are we still not seeing large scale implementation? I can't emphasize this enough.  The failure of most projects or lack of success or lack of visibility of most projects, it's not rooted so much in technology. It's a lot to do with strategic and business thinking behind the initiative itself. And, you know, this is sort of a thinking that has evolved along with Liz and, you know, our work. There's three things that are very important, right? You know, when you think about an initial when you think about a project, how will you fund the initial project? Because that's critical where you're going to get money from first. How will you sustain on an ongoing basis? It's not enough, right?  But, you know, how are you going to sustain an ongoing basis? If you're going to run, let's say, you know, issuance of CPA licenses or verification of marriage records or something like this, and then do not forget about the grand mission. You know, how does it tie all the various agencies and departments and services together? And this is, again, you know, to your point about education, what what what comes out as an important aspect is number one, to have a champion that not just speaks blockchain, but is able to speak, you know, the language of the government and different agencies. And, you know, Rhode Island and with this is a great example of that. And then, you know, being able to promote the same thing with different other agencies. You know, I touched upon a little bit about the work that we've done in the pilot with CPA licensing. Liz was great and successful in recruiting, you know, a couple of other senior stakeholders from, you know, other agencies and departments to say, oh, this sounds interesting enough. We'll listen only. I think today somebody is listening tomorrow, they'll start to do piloting.   But the right use case and the right scope for the project is very important because if it's too small, it becomes insignificant. You won't get the support. And if it's too big, you might have taken a bite more than what you can chew, and that just makes it even more difficult to move forward. And again, I think, you know, to the to the to the point of how do you, you know, how do you overcome many of these challenges? It's about, you know, the grand vision, which is that, you know, if I if I start to have CPA licenses issued or if I have vital records issued on blockchain, what value does it create? What is the emergent value that gets created because of that fact that you now have, you know, stuff on stuff on the blockchain, right? To the verifiable credentials, reduce KYC costs for banks, you know, doesn't make it easier for insurance companies to do underwriting. I think this is this is sort of very critical, right? You know, we speak a lot and I think today's today's session, today's panelists, definitely about public sector. But again, the boundaries and the value of this is when you push it and see the public-private sector value and the use cases that you have. And that's truly what, you know, let's also speak about it. That's truly what Liz is also driving, which is, you know, where do we see the value? It's great that we've done this for the state. How do I get the public sector and private sector to come and join this? Because that's where most of the value is going to be. And that's where you unlock the value. Danielle, I'm happy to go next.  I'm getting the kick out of watching the chat on the side, right? Yeah, I want to get to some of those questions next to Alfonso. They feel my pain, right? You know, so and Jeff in the Q&A section. So I'll be I'll be quick. You know, one of my things is I don't use the word blockchain anymore at all. Because it's a dirty word. People don't like it. It scares them. It freaks them out. I'm never going to get funding for my project. So I rarely say the word blockchain anymore. And I just talk about centralized services, streamlining or processes, things like that. I'm actually being harassed pretty bad right now on Twitter by someone who's calling me the greatest threat to the state of Rhode Island because of my blockchain project, right? So to keep that in mind, there's also political cycles for me, you know, so I have new governors, I have new bosses, I have new legislators who ultimately decide whether I get funding or not. And for example, if I were to leave the state of Rhode Island, I think it's pretty safe to say that my project dies, right? So those kinds of things happen. If the people who know about blockchain and understand the project, if those legislators leave, then I have to recruit new people to be able to provide the funding because otherwise I'm reeducating all over again about what the project is. There's the fear of being first. You know, it's just so much easier to let some other state like California, like New York, like Texas, like the big ones do it because there's a huge always a fear of failure. Governments aren't allowed to fail ever because we get criticized hard for it. We're wasting taxpayer dollars. So that's always a problem. There's always the question of are you actually solving a problem? You just trying to find some cool new thing, right? And so I constantly have to have business leaders support the project to say, no, really, it is a problem that I have to go to all these different places, all these different times, and I don't know. And then to Jeff's question about the unions, that is absolutely a big question that we got at the beginning. But we were very quick to be able to prove that that's not a problem because in a small state like Rhode Island, we only have a little over a million people, we have about 1500 open state jobs. There are plenty of places to have other state employees go to. So we've been able to overcome the union concern very early on. But that was a major part of getting funding was being able to address that concern.  So we had to provide sort of assurances that if a clerk was going to lose their job, that they would actually probably now qualify for a higher paying job. You know, so there's all of these things, but also getting credentials for CPAs is not sexy at all at all. Right. So to Shree's point of a big project or too small of a project, that's that's a really tough piece to play with. It's got to be sexy enough that people get excited about it, but not too big that they're afraid of it as well. So that's my quick answer. That's great. And thank you for addressing Jeff's question specifically around employees and because, you know, but this is not unique to blockchain. It's saying, you know, all new technologies need to address these. Right. How how is it going to affect the workforce as well? So thank you for addressing that. And I think we're all for those of you on YouTube and on LinkedIn Live, then that might not be in the Zoom chat. We're all kind of smiling at Alfonso Gavellis comment around the chief political operators are needed for any of these DLT projects for sure. And certainly Liz is a CPO to their best in the industry for sure as well. So, you know, I think there's a couple of other questions. There was a question specifically, and then I want to close off with what does the future hold? What do you what does the panel see as a future hold? But there's a couple of the questions that I think might be helpful. There was a question specifically from Maria Murano around how the wallets are managed to where the CPA credentials are stored currently. If one of you can address that. Probably best for you to do it, story. You know, I think we'll take that question. I think it will take a little longer time in terms of answering that question. Well, Gado is on the chat. He's senior architect from blockchain. So he's going to try and answer that question on the chat. Right now, we have an app, right? There's an app on a phone and you can retrieve it that way. Yeah, I think typically it's like either yourself, you know, you're hosting it, you know, you're custodying it on behalf of the citizen or the citizen has the app on their phone and they store it on their on their Apple wallet, for instance. So it's similar to, you know, totally the COVID credentials that were issued on blockchains during COVID. You have it on your phone when you're going through the airport or areas where you're required to show your code patch you just show. So it's very simple in that sense. You don't have to worry about using things like MetaMask with three wallets. You know, it's just going to be embedded in the app in most cases. Great. Thank you. There's another question around the did Rhode Island set up a private indie network or are you using Sovereign? Three. Another one that will get answered in the in the Q&A. Yeah, I get the answers. Yeah, this is Gaurav, yeah. So yeah, so this was a private indie network. OK. So the answer to that question is a private indie network and not the Sovereign network. For those of you who don't know, Sovereign is a public infrastructure network that runs on indie as well. There was a question and I just want to just want to emphasize that, you know, some of these aspects that are great technical questions will have to answer those, but we want to be careful about how much we talk about the detailed implementation itself. So that's part of the reason why there's a little bit of hesitation. You know, yeah, there's this public case study about it to the extent that less than the team have approved from the Department of Information Technology, that much information is publicly available. But, you know, just know that that's the reason for some of these responses. All right, fantastic. And and maybe we can find the link to that case study. I know if the team could put it on on the chat, that'd be fantastic. There was a question from Alicia Noll around when drafting potential legislation regarding digital driver's license or other IDs, our law makers understanding the difference between giving law enforcement access to IDs hosted on the device and giving complete access to everything on that device. And then, you know, the store, you know, we talked to a little bit about the privacy and kind of the citizen privacy. And obviously with CPI licenses is slightly different, right? If someone wants to see that I'm a certified public account. I think that's easy enough for me to allow people to see. But any thoughts around other digital identity use cases and potentially how this technology actually enables these to be securely presented with essentially with the individual themselves having the authority to say, you know, this this agency can see this type of data about me, etc. So any comments from the three questions? Sure, I can I can talk on that. So we recently worked with the government of South Korea and about four or five mobile technology companies, telecom companies to build a driver's license application, which is helping to improve the security and convenience of identity verification. So it's a mobile app. It's used by about 30 million South Korean residents to prove their driving qualification, adult status or identity through verification system. It was built on Amazon managed blockchain. And the beauty of it is typically when you go to say, for instance, a liquor store, you have to prove that you're above the age of 21. You typically have to take your driver's license with you, right? And prove show your driver's license. If you have a verified credential app and you have a virtual version or eversion of that on your phone and you're able to redact, for instance, your your address. So you only simply show just the information needed to prove they are above the age of 21, which is your data part. And so being able to redact certain aspects like your name or your address improves security.  So having that on your phone that you can carry on your phone without having to carry a physical driver's license is a very secure and convenient for over 30 million residents. And we feel that that's more the convenience, the authenticity and the flexibility and convenience is kind of outweighs any other risks that can happen. So wonderful. Thank you. We're going to wrap it up with kind of thinking about the future. I think all of us here and many of the participants in the webinar for sure are very bullish on blockchain technology, right? We know we've seen it in action. We know that it scales. It has a very rich and growing ecosystem of engineers who can support and build these kind of solutions. We have seen enough use cases worldwide to see the success of the use cases. We've talked about some of the challenges that are some are not related to the technology at all, right? It has to do with with the politics and kind of the education of societies as any new technology, as I mentioned before, we'll see out there. But and, you know, we'll start with you, Liz, you know, where do you see more innovative solutions and processes in the future for public sectors that will utilize blockchain and blockchain? When I say blockchain related technologies, you know, some of the, for example, digital identity stacks like Aries that can work with blockchain and on blockchain as well. So what should we be looking to? I mean, I think two things for me. You need citizens and businesses to demand it.  And then you've got folks who only ever done paper processes. You know, so we're in this transitional stage of going from one to another. So, you know, you've got you're about to reach an inflection point where it's going to be what the norm is and what's required to do. So we'd like to be able to set that up now. So that's what that happens. But you've also got to have the education level. You know, so when I'm sitting before legislators who are, you know, they're elected because they believe very strongly in a couple of things. But the reality is they're a legislator for all things. And so when I bring before them the single blockchain technology to do advanced technological services to make it easier to do business within the state. That's a lot for them, right? So, you know, the education piece of it is particularly critical to legislators as well as having other governments do the projects so that it becomes an acceptable way of doing business. Those are the things that are the biggest challenges for me, that if I can overcome those two items, then I think you're off to the races and everybody just starts doing the projects because that's what's needed and everybody understands it. But until then, it's going to be a real challenge for me. Yeah, you know, I tell you when when when citizens say, you know, I'm going to choose to live in the state versus that state because they're offering me better digital services. And I think this generation will do that because they want to live in that way. I do think I agree that's going to be an inflection point for sure for technology. Charles, over to you. What is the future hold for public sector use cases in the industry? Sounds like you're on mute. You're on mute. We almost had it the whole webinar. Can you hear me now saying something very eloquent, but I lost it. So so I think look into the future. I think we're we see different use cases. I mean, Sri talked about the Riverside County federal records pilot that we operate and again, we've launched that pilot. Then we're extending going to the base to working with the Infosys running. It's going to be running on Amazon managed blockchain. So the park still in the early stages, but it has that potential. But in addition, we're also working with planning and working with other counties in California and agencies in California to join to create like a statewide blockchain network. So once you have that, think about the capabilities that that can bring about. You can have other agencies like the DMB Department of Health Care Services, CalPERS, which is one of the largest retirement companies, retirement teachers that they can listen for events like birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificate, issuances, and they can respond by initiating actions of change. So, for instance, if you take the case of CalPERS, if somebody and somebody dies in the family and, for instance, a death certificate is issued. CalPERS could say, for instance, listen for those events and then initiate a communication with the family expressing their condolences and saying, this person happened to be a beneficiary and started reaching out to beneficiaries that processing claim. So that can help speed up changes and also help speed up if payments of the claims. In the case of, you know, COVID California, the experiences if they're like the Obamacare exchange in California, if they're joining a change, this statewide blockchain, they can listen for birth events and, for instance, when a birth certificate gets issued, COVID California can initiate processes or the steps to reach out to the families, congratulating them and say, hey, we would like to add this child. Would you like to add this newborn baby to your list of beneficiaries in your health insurance? So this can help transform the way government does business. And that's what we're at AWS were very, very excited about. And, you know, also looking to the future, we know we're focused on innovations that kind of make it easy for developers to instantly interact with blockchain networks and using API. So instead of having to deal with managing the blockchain nodes, you could just point to an API and you don't have to worry about specialized infrastructure like those nodes. So we've also made some efforts in launching new services like AMB access inquiry, which was launched last month, which gives developers instead access to standard procedure calls to interact with digital assets, not just on the public, on the private side, but also on public networks as well. And also we just also launched AMB query, which provides standardized blockchain data from multiple blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. So that that will help customers who are looking to pull information from the blockchain and query historical data from the blockchain without having to manage or use blockchain infrastructure. Right, maybe you can come back and do a member in-depth webinar on those use cases as well, Shree closing off the session, some of your thoughts from you. And and then we'll just be closing. Yeah, I know where we're already out of time. So I think in in short summary, as we see this ecosystem transform from paper based records to digital also records to digital only records, what we will see happen is that the service models will change drastically. The function of governments will itself change in terms of how you're doing things and the number of use cases that are going to get added and that are going to get accepted will drastically change. And I think five years from now, I think with all these this generation of mobile only generation, you're probably going to see a lot of acceptance for digital only records. And that's that's where the Holy Grail is. Excellent. Thank you, Shree. Thank you, Liz, and thank you, Charles, for today's session. For those of you who there's a couple of questions and feel free to connect with us on additional questions as well. I want to just highlight, you know, today's session was fantastic and we have many more and you can see these hyperledger member webinars on our events page as well as other events that we speak at and we participate in. And we would love to see everybody here. I saw somebody that saw one of my talks at Futurist last week. Please do, you know, if you see us at these events, do come and say hi. I would love to meet with all of you as well. But visit our events page. We are an open community. There was a question of how can you get involved and contribute? We have our hyperledger discord where you can chat across different special interest groups. We actually have a public sector special interest group that you can participate in and share your stories and work with the community working on public sector use cases as well. And we welcome everyone to join us. If you go to hyperledger.org and you can get access to participation. We have meetups worldwide where you can meet other developers and business minded folks building with hyperledger technologies. So once again, I want to thank Sri, Charles and Liz. It's always fantastic to see the three of you for a great session. And I look forward to coming back maybe next year and getting updates on this project. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity. Thanks, everyone. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you.


And this is one of the things with Eastern Europe is maybe it's because it's a poorer country and there's less economy, but it's also a cultural thing. They understand the best route to high-value men. It's to their beauty. They know that. And in the West, we try and pretend that's a bad thing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with me liking a girl for how she looks. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't mean that's all I like about her. She may be a nice person too. But there's nothing wrong with me seeing her and going, fuck, she's hot. It's inspiring. It's absolutely, yeah. Well, the beauty too is also the genes. Like, that's what you want to put a baby in. There you go. Absolutely. So there's nothing wrong with that. And women in the West have this idea that women that you should be liked for something more than how you look. You know, oh, now I have to be like for what I think and this and this and this. And the reality is, sorry, feminists, sorry.   So it's like, you're like, where do you want to go there? Exactly. I say this all the time. People have this weird conception that men and women need things in common. And I say, no, we don't. We don't. Men and women do not need that much in common.  I like kickboxing in chess. And she's never done either of them.