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Overview

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 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 its core, 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, whilst also outlining a memorandum of understanding about the value drivers to pursue in the long term.

There are several key questions one should consider before determining which type of consortium, new or existing, best 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.
• Operative and technical standards will be running within the Consortium.

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 move. 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.  

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.

we propose to co-create some documents for the TFSIG on blockchain TF consortiums and the associated governance.

It will cover the present landscape, the understanding and development of these consortiums, their governance and opportunities/challenges of interoperability.

It is well recognised that a key component of the digitising of trade finance and the associated benefits to global trade will be the continuing development of healthy, vibrant blockchain consortiums and networks that can service and adapt to the global market complexity.

Areas of interests

• Trade Finance Consortium Landscape (who’s who directory)
• Trade Finance Consortium Governance (corporate governance formation, ongoing corporate governance, business operations );
• Trade Finance Consortium Standards (business standards, technical standards).

Scope

The activities  would  include:

Introduction

The Hyperledger Trade Finance Special Interest Group (TF-SIG) is focused on better implementing technical and business practices to distributed ledger technology cooperation model with particular focus onHyperledger technologies.

Scope

The activities of the CGO-SIG would  include:

• Documenting market initiatives, corporate practices, operations.

• Identifying related reference architectures or business cases (for example business or technological consortium.
• Sharing stories of successes, failures, opportunities and challenges. 
• Exploring and addressing cross-industry corporations, options and decisions.  
• Identifying existing or needed common critical  issues in strategy,  formation, governance, operation processes.
• Working towards proposing solutions to the problems identified.
• Collecting and  sharing best practices around blockchain consortia or  facilitating introductions between companies who want to join existing consortia.
• Identifying conferences or other opportunities to connect face to face, as well as submit talks or present as a group at an event.
• Identifying the business community and building an inclusive platform for early adopters to contribute through their experiences. 
• Identifying all different common practices across Hyperledger SIG TFSIG so as to build a standardization across the different parties and efforts. 

The CGO-SIG cannot in anyway perform or engage in any form of lobbying or attempts to influence government policy making or regulatory processes.  It is also not intended as a platform for procurement of services.

Work products

The anticipated initial work products will include (but are not limited to) a set of documents describing Consortium model formation governance & operation use for blockchain technologyoperations. 

All members of the group are entitled to submit a lecture proposal with the intent of showing a useful business case cooperation.

All the participants are invited to share their experiences providing a use case in terms of business origination, formation, governance, operation. At the end of each meeting the lecturer will provide his “key rule” according to his presentation that will be inserted in a collector of best practices that should support all the members in the operations. The CGO-SI has also the intent to support further development cross industries identifying through presentations common ground for cooperation.

Meetings

Interested parties

The following individuals have already expressed an interest in joining this special group, and we hope they will become contributors over the first year:

- List of interested parties listed with their consent, including name, association, and optionally email addresses.

Project lead

The following individual Mr. Eugenio Reggiani has volunteered to serve as the initial Chair for the special interest group: Eugenio Reggianini, Konosko Group and Andrea Frosinini as Vice Chaira project lead.