Nominee Name

Arun S M

Nominated By

Self

Short personal bio

I am a Staff Software Engineer at Walmart India, leading blockchain initiatives. Prior to this I worked at Intel's India facility on their blockchain initiatives. My blockchain journey started as an experiment to run chaincode in TEE when Hyperledger Fabric was at 0.6 version. At present I serve in as a Technical Steering Committee member and as a co-lead of Hyperledger India Chapter. I am one of the maintainer for the Hyperledger Sawtooth project, lead and maintain the Hyperledger Tooling repositories, help composing weekly developer newsletter. Organized a few events (eg. HYPERHACK 2021, Women In Blockchain - 2) for the blockchain community earlier this year. Apart from these, I have also been helping the communities learn the technology stack of multiple top level Hyperledger projects including Fabric, Indy, Aries, Transact, Grid, Explorer and Hyperledger Labs projects including Blockchain Automation Framework, FireFly.

Short personal pitch

I would like to nominate myself to serve on the Technical Steering Committee. My position at Walmart places me uniquely in the community where at one end we experience use of blockchain at scale like nowhere else, and on the other end we are pioneers in adopting new features. At the same time, this position helps in determining what as an end user organization would like to prioritize when it comes to the advancement in the blockchain technology. My approach to lead a team at work is to follow clean code, and clearly defined process. Hearing everybody's voices, listening from the grounds up and also listening to the people who use the technology will pave the way to better decision making.

Within the Hyperledger TSC's term, my journey started with the heated topic of rolling over a top level project and the related sub-topics. The discussions/debates through the year covered the topic of contributor's experience, project incubation entry considerations, FireFly project proposal, project badging proposal. At present, I am actively contributing to the Whitepaper and Greenhouse Graphic Update Taskforce. Out in the open source community, there's a lot that happened in the last one year.

  • It has been my pleasure to speak/represent Hyperledger at the global forum, meetups (Consensus and Consortia) and conferences (for instance, BlockHash Live 2020, IEEE AKCSSC 2020).
  • Served as a program committee member for the Hyperledger Global Forum 2021.
  • I believe in building stronger and engaging contributor eco-system, bridging the gap where possible. One such effort is to bring up Hyperledger Tooling repositories and host https://start-here.hyperledger.org/.
  • Delegating activities and encouraging community leaders, establishing workstreams/taskforces has exceeded expectations in participation of Hyperledger India Chapter's weekly meetings.
  • Encourage Indian student community, support learning and expose contribution opportunities. One such effort is to establish Hyperledger India Chapter Student Society. The number of mentorship applications from India has gone up as a benefit.
  • Help in building the task force recommendations to the Hyperledger/CNCF landscape. Bring in new contributors to the community.

That's not all, code contributions is still my top priority. There's also more left to do in terms of community building before the end of 2021, couple of notable activities are to run "Blockchain Stories 2021" and establish an industry wing on the lines of student society. Hyperledger's developer showcase series covers a few more questions. From the time I started to help out the community based in India, it has been my pleasure to meet several tech enthusiasts. It is amazing to see how people are willing to join back, contribute back once they understand the technology. Often times it is lack of awareness that makes one think that Hyperledger community is out of their reach. The TSC representation will help me to bridge the voices and bring in new perspectives.

There is a saying in India/Sanksrit "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam" which translates to world is one family. Having a diverse representation in the TSC, from different demographies and geographies will make it a much stronger blockchain community in the world.

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