Innovation in Government: Steps, leaps and bounds

Current transactional processes predominantly involve intermediary institutions, such as governments, banks and other certification bodies, which act as trusted central third-parties that confirm the integrity and authenticity of such transactions and their data sets. Blockchain technologies, on the other hand, are digital distributed ledgers that can offer open, shared and trusted mechanisms for recording and managing transactions among multiple parties without requiring central authorities.

This raises multiple questions considering the role and agency of governments and other public institutions, and it may soon imply major changes in the ways they exist. But it can also help these and other actors in public and social sectors by reducing time and resources spent in mediation and paper-intensive procedures, or even reducing risks and errors related to single points of failure, for instance, while simultaneously providing more transparency over transactions and data.
We must ensure, however, that robust ethical and value-driven approaches are put in place for Blockchain development to better serve social and public good, and to allow organizations to extract the best benefits for all. Moreover, we also need to research and co-create alternative models for Blockchain development, avoiding simplist technology-intensive and solution-driven approaches, and aiming instead at positive social and public impacts.

During this interactive session, we will move into such direction with a discussion around the Ethical Framework for Blockchain as a lens for thinking through the development of public-facing technology. Afterwards, we will proceed by exploring the early stages of a Blockchain Accelerator for social and public sectors, looking to collaboratively inform how such initiative can exist and what could be its main goals and strategies.

As new technologies such as Blockchain quickly emerge and their potential applications start to affect people’s everyday lives, we need to build appropriate use cases to better understand them in practical terms. And we need to discover how governments and other public and social organizations might experiment with such technologies while also learning how to best govern and leverage them for good.