Citizen's Ledger

Currently, people have very little visibility of the decisions made by government agencies with or about them, and the rationale behind the decisions is rarely captured or stored. People might receive a letter with an outcome from different departments, and this has led to the onus often being put on citizens or businesses to prove why a government department did something down the track. We have already seen cases around the world where the record given to a person was overturned in court, so how can people trust or be empowered in such a situation? This has become a burden on people who are already time poor, and particularly when people are vulnerable and already under significant other burdens.

If decisions made about or with citizens regarding service delivery was captured in real time, in a form that citizens could access, with traceability back to law, then there would be greater transparency and empowerment for citizens receiving services, and better records for citizens, and ease of appealing. For instance, "x received this rebate/service/entitlement on this date based on this authority/rules". This citizen's ledger could also ensure greater accountability and auditing of government service delivery. It could be a gov ledger, or could write to the citizen's digital wallet for instance.

We want to demonstrate two ways of providing such a service. Firstly, we will work with Ahau, an Indigenous self-sovereign identity solution here in NZ to demonstrate how the ledger could be a standardised format/method for all department systems in real time to write to a personal record for ease of access and trust. We can use examples from government systems we know. Secondly, we will prototype a centralised ledger approach which could be a government or community held approach, that uses public keys to write a record so a person can have visibility of their parts of the ledger with their private key. This second approach is how banks have been creating enormous efficiencies in transactional recording for the last few years.

Milestones

We anticipate this would be a 5 month project, including 1 month discovery, 3 months to test and build an MVP, and 1 month to document and ensure it is all publicly available as open source. There will be a small product team (3 ppl) for the 5 months, with efforts peaking through the test and build phase. We will use open source tools and will get cloud provisioned through supporters and participating organisations. The MVP will be launched with a media release, event, and engagement with relevant government Ministers and departments.

Success will be defined by takeup of the approach in local identity solutions, and willingness from at least one government department or company to write their interactions to a Citizen's ledger.

Please note, the technical standards are pending discussions currently underway which will be finalised well before the work commences above. There are clear records keeping standards to draw upon, but a standard for actual storage of a decision that traces back to law is not a practice yet standardised globally, as such traceability is more possible now with machines than in the past.

Team

Team includes several Cardano community members plus members of the NZ open source community (Pia Andrews, Ben Tairea, Jonah Duckles, Jo Allum, Hamish Fraser, Brenda Wallace, Tom Barraclough) with support from experts including Peter VG, Rob O'Brien and privacy/records management experts.

We will draw on experts in this space from across the Cardano community, will work in the open with regular showcases and open sprint reviews, and will invite oversight and insights from aligned and complementary projects, such as the good work of Peter Van Garderen and Rob O'Brien.

Our team includes several Cardano community members plus members of the NZ open source community:

Pia Andrews (Project Lead and subject matter experts liaison) - Open [govt|source|data|standards|society] geek, with 20 years experience working at the intersection of government, society and technology, usually in digital or service transformation of government. Established Rules as Code programs in 4 jurisdictions to date, and now very keen to establish a community commons. https://twitter.com/piacandrews and http://pipka.org/

Ben Tairea (Ahau and identity lead) - CEO and co-founder of Ahau.io, Ben has a passion for holistic and self-sovereign identity that enables and empowers people and their communities to live well. https://twitter.com/ahauio

Hamish Fraser (RaC Platform Lead) - Hamish is a Legislation as Code researcher and practitioner, developer and builder of great and wonderful things, and co-founder of the Digital Legal Systems Lab in Aotearoa New Zealand. https://twitter.com/verbman

Siobhan MxCarthy (Design Lead) - experienced service designers and user researcher, currently finishing her Masters, with a track record in private and public sectors. https://twitter.com/ssibbehh

Jonah Duckles (support) - Jonah's work sits at the nexus of technology and people. He works to empower and enable people to create teams and organisations that can build their own capacity to teach, learn, and imagine a better future together. https://twitter.com/jduckles

Jo Allum (support) - Co-Founder of Venture Centre, community manager and innovation commons establishment. https://twitter.com/jo_allum

Arama Maitara (intercultural expert) - intercultural navigator and facilitator with deep experience in establishing shared ways and equitable co-design towards common goals.

Brenda Wallace (developer) - experienced developer including with Rules as Code. https://twitter.com/BR3NDA

Tom Barraclough (legal lead) - Legal eagle with deep experience in the intersection of technology and law, and co-founder of the Digital Legal Systems Lab in Aotearoa New Zealand. https://twitter.com/Tom_Bcgh

Rob O'Brien (support) - Rules as Code, developer and innovator, working on self-sovereign systems for identity, culture, data and governance. https://twitter.com/robertobrien