Hyperledger SI-SIG Quarterly 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, has been increasing with total membership currently at 141 members. Over the next quarter, 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 141 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 quarter, the SI-SIG completed two essential activities; developing a community survey and electing a new Chair. The community survey, initiated in July, focused on determining the activities that the greater SI-SIG community identifies as areas of interest to support and to build out community eminence. The survey results will be used to drive activities across the SI-SIG community over the next year. As per the results of the community survey, we have developed workstream groups (Whitepaper, Use Case and Best Practices, and Community Liaisons) to facilitate community interactions. The workstream groups have a membership community and we will be identifying workstream leaders as projects are identified and take-off. Another point of activity, was the Chair elections that were initiated and processed over the past quarter. In early September, the new Chair Nancy Min was announced and a smooth transition process ensued, made possible by the Hyperledger POC Karen Ottoni.
Activities across the community of merit include the following:
- Hyperledger Hackathon team that was supported by Hyperledger to attend the “Scaling Impact for the SDGs Hackathon” that took place in New York City between September 21-22. The team (Lindsay Nuon, Matt Steele, James Waugh, and Alejandro Pinto) took home three awards: (1) first place and (2) second place awards.
- The SI-SIG supported two applications (submissions by Lindsay Nuon and Jim Cupples) to the Hyperledger Global Forum Call for Proposal that will be held March 3-6, 2020.
Planned Work Products
“The State of the Social Impact Ecosystem: Whats new and noteworthy in the Hyperledger Greenhouse” – submitted by Lindsay Nuon to the Hyperledger Global Forum Call for Proposals
“Meet the Data: the People in our Blockchain Applications" – submitted by Jim Cupples to the Hyperledger Global Forum Call for Proposals
State of Social Impact in Blockchain – Project in the Use Cases and Best Practices Workstream
Social Impact Quarterly Pulse Surveys – Due to the success of the SI-SIG community survey that is being used to drive the activities of the SIG, we will develop and send out pulse surveys to ensure that our activities align to the ever-changing needs of social impact.
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.
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.