Why establish a CGO-SIG?

As we observe the landscape of blockchain business technologies we clearly see that day after day it requires interoperability, cross functional capabilities, and business cooperation from different industries. Blockchain consortia are playing a key role in terms of technology implementation in society for business use cases, from big corporations to SMEs.

Further studying how to manage at best practices this phenomenon is necessary for a better software development, with the goal to further investigate the upcoming business needs and requirements. At the same time, it is vital to create an interaction between all different areas of industry that nowadays SIGs are nowadays focusing on,, from a technological perspective, such as interoperability.

Blockchain-based collaboration cannot come from a single company. Industry collaboration has to proactively drive disruption, innovation, and transformation throughout the industry by identifying and modeling areas that can best work for society.

Because effective consortia rely on the participation of multiple members, it is of utmost importance to identify the critical participants and intermediaries involved in a specific use case, understand their incentives and trust loops involved in their interactions, and have enough influence to drive the development of a cohesive platform for future developments.

Each member’s individual success is based, at the its core, based on the group’s success; as such, every participant must commit to building a shared platform that provides a strong business case for each member in the short term, while whilst also outlining a memorandum of understanding about the value drivers to pursue in the long term.

There are several key questions you one should consider before determining which type of consortium, new or existing, is right for youbest fits for its own exigences, such as  for instance:

1. What are the consortium goals? Do they align with your corporate goals?
2. What is the participation structure and governance model?
3. What is the funding model?
4. Who owns the intellectual property?
5. What are the consortium business, technology, and regulatory risk factors?

In addition many areas have still no secure answer,  the business is very peculiar and cross functional so, no theory in the books is available.

• Consortium formation process: (MOU - pre agreement - final).
• Business goal conjunction and formation model.
• Governance: e.g. “off-chain” and “on-chain” considerations that members need to agree and align on.
• Operating considerations:Legal entity structures Liabilities, IP management, Funding,Use case development, Technical considerations, Risk management, Data management, privacy, and ownership, Dispute resolution.

Finally, an increasing number of businesses are joining existing blockchain consortia around the world or, in some cases, developing new consortia to meet their specific needs and requirements. There is still a lot of work to be done before and after organizations decide to join a consortium. Like other critical business decisions, several factors should be considered before making any movesmove. In subsequent articles of our blockchain consortia series, we will more closely examine the finer points of building and executing an effective consortium strategy, and take an in-depth look at specific points around technology and governance.

To conclude, Hyperledger created a business environment, through different business oriented SIGs, focusing on a wide range of industries that can really benefit from understanding each other’s needs and experiences in order to foster  further business integrations.

 Basically, it is time  to create a platform for our community in which every SIG may talk to the others with the intent of  learning, discussing, sharing troubles and  successes. At the end of each sharing  the scope is to build up a set of “core governance and operations rules” that all participants that may benefit improving their own day by day activity and further develop operations cross-industry.  

The final goal would be to create, session after session, a set of rules based on the takeaways of each experience introduced  by all different SIGs.  

We Although the input has started from the Trade Finance environment, which shows a treasure trove of consortia, with two of the main protagonists embodied by we.trade and dltledgers, being part of the Hyperledger Fabric family, we are open to what the “work products” of the group will be: documents, new project proposals, reports, demos. The aim is to bring the different industries experiences together.