The Online University where “The Best” get rewarded with a job opportunity
Introduction
Blockchain Education Program
Everywhere I go at the minute, the world is talking about Blockchain, and its abilities to solve many problems, the ability to fix the world, the stories are fascinating, I have met people from all walks of life, people who work on the track for Jaguar Land Rover, CEO’s of corporations, the Head of HR for Global brands whilst zip wiring in Snowdonia, they all want to know about Blockchain and what does it actually mean for them.. Plus how much money can they make on the Crypto stuff? Confusion everywhere.
I haven’t seen this much excitement since the days of the internet and Social Media, the difference right now is that with the Internet and Social Media is available there is tons of information; but still not many places to go that you can learn and trust the information being given.
Opportunity
An opportunity exists right now for an online University / training programme, managed by Practitioners, the people who have worked with the technology for many years, the team who have completed practical real-life delivery of real projects, not just those who have been on a course and now claim to be experts, a team who fully understand Blockchain and its potential, a team who can create a career path once the learning is complete for the student.
So we are creating an online Blockchain Strategy Program, for students from all walks of life, professional individuals or just curious people can subscribe to the program and immerse themselves and learn about Blockchain, with our six-week full on program.
Content is being written, the platform is being prepared, and the marketing machine is already turning.
Students will be given a certificate of learning from a recognised practitioner organization, Rothbadi & Co.
Pathway to Success
“Moneyback learning”
The program is designed to provide a pathway for those students who want to learn, want to test and then want to implement using Blockchain.
Firstly students will subscribe to our six-week course; this will then provide them with a certificate for the ones who pass the course successfully, this will enable them to use this certificate in the real world as they have learnt from the elite providers (Rothbadi & Co), giving them credibility to any prospective employer or partner.
Secondly, for those students who wish to progress, Stage 2, an online learning centre with access to our many online live consultants, whereby students will have their own idea, and we will help them test their concepts and take them through to a final proof of concept. (We may decide that we wish to support them beyond this stage and help deliver or share the knowledge).
Lastly, unlike any other training provider, Rothbadi & Co are in a unique position whereby the students who pass through phase 2, the best of the best could be offered a consultancy contract with Rothbadi & Co, providing them with the capacity to earn back the fees paid upfront. (“Money Back”)
Content & Platform
Alongside the above, Rothbadi &Co are working with several universities who are helping to compile the content for the courses.
We will also be working with larger organisations to allow them test Blockchain, a light touch, several week consultancy service, whereby they will bring a problem, and we will show them the result using Blockchain; this will provide them with the information to decide to go or not go with this exciting technology.
Follow on consultancy will be offered beyond this stage should the corporate decide to progress.
Figure 1 World’s first quiet treehouse provides safe magical haven in a noisy world. Image source: Inhabitat
Abstract
The main pillar of the decentralized society of the future is decentralized governance. In this paper the concept of blockchain organizations is developed to strengthen community participation on the decision-making process in a first move opening room for subsequent incremental improvements.
Introduction
Power and Governance
For millenniums power has been strongly associated with governance roles. The roman army brought a great revolution for its time with a novel governance model, it was highly hierarchized and followed a 10 to one fashion. With this technological breakthrough romans could become the greatest ever empire on earth. Still today organizations concentrate power following a similar scheme.
Ten to one means:
A commander is a commando and has besides his, the power of its 10 underlying commandoes
A commando can also be a commander with another underlying set of 10 commandoes.
Figure 2 Roman army structure considering two to one for analysis sake.
To better understand the roman power model, a two to one scheme is presented on Figure 2. In this example, the cohesiveness of the organization depends on the strength of the six instance-links. The main problem about this governance model is that it was conceived to make war, not peace. A “enter war” order from Cesar won’t ever be contested by its peaceful commandos just willing to live a happy life because no other commando has overall greater power.
The reduced autonomy each commando has leads to an increased unhappiness of the organization.
And with the concentration of power, abuses are more likely to happen. In this scenario there is strong evidence that decentralizing the power increases motivation and drives growth at a faster rate.
Automation revolution
The more automated the processes are the less human interaction is needed and hence a higher productivity level is usually achieved. With automation productivity naturally rises consequently but there is still an important bottleneck. The decision-making process is traditionally heavily dependent on human interaction.
To increase organization’s overall productivity level, the automation of the decision-making process is also key. That is one of the main reasons why The DAO[1] grabbed a lot of attention, see Quote 1.
Quote 1 Auryn Macmillan – From Consider.it website
The DAO technology stack
Merging the following two key technologies allowed the birth of the alleged first decentralized autonomous organization:
Ideas were submitted to be curated by the community. Once the idea was properly curated it became a proposal and moved to the technical analysis of required resources to be implemented. Once operational costs, resources, etc. were agreed upon by the community, the proposal was accepted and smart contracts started being implemented by technical team. It was an iterative process that pursued the maximization of positive outcome to the community.
Blockchain Organizations proposal
Power decentralization is the process in which individuals naturally gain power, happiness, freedom, health and productivity. With individuals feeling divine, collective productivity and well-being is maximized. At the core of power are there organizations.
With the advent of the blockchain, unprecedent levels of privacy and transparency when needed are possible within organizations. It allows the automatic enforcement of smart contract clauses to secure the correct behavior of operations.
The DAO was a social experiment considered to have failed. But it had great merit which can’t be just forgotten in the past. There is the need for a robust organizational framework that utilizes state of the art technology to organize people and projects around worthwhile causes.
In this paper we take the lessons from The DAO and develop the broader concept of Blockchain Organizations.
Blockchain Organizations
Modern institutions are transparently purposive and that we are in the midst an evolutionary progression towards more efficient forms
Quote 2 Modernization theorist Frank Dubbin
DAO
Organizations if they have a website are internet organizations (IO). But people just don’t call them “internet organizations” though because almost all organizations are IOs. The Internet represents decentralized communications and is a fundamental pillar of the decentralized society of the future.
The same analogy applies for decentralized governance. Almost all near future organizations will most likely be blockchain governed organizations. A whole country government can take advantage of this technology.
Are pillars of the decentralized society of the future:
These type of blockchain governed organizations are going to be called from now on as simply Blockchain Organizations.
Social Organizational theory – Less is more
Organization foundation
A member attempts to join an organization when it feels it becomes stronger packing together with other members who ideally share common goals. And the organization accepts that member when it also feels that it will make the organization stronger. This means there is a virtual social contract celebrated by the organization and the member and if violated would potentially result in membership cancellation. This contract basically determines how the member and organization make each other stronger.
A member of an organization could be an individual or another organization. For example, nobody knows the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto if it was an individual or an organization, naturally or artificially intelligent, alien or terrestrian. It does not matter here; what matters is that this member strengthens the blockchain organization and vice versa. This is why, in the diagram, I will leave the idea as most generic possible to avoid limiting organizational possibilities.
Figure 3 Member organization use case diagram
As can be seen on Figure 3, this opens an interesting recursive possibility where an organization could be a member of itself. To better understand the social contract, it is necessary to understand what each member brings to the table, basically resources and goals as can be seen on Figure 4.
Figure 4 Resources and goals brought by a member to the table
An organization can have members and child organizations too. In the other hand a child organization can have multiple parents. Members can also pack themselves to form a cluster with common goals. These associations can be seen on Figure 5.
Figure 5 Members clustering, organization membership, organization parenthood.
Organization operation
Members up to this point are well organized and aligned behind common goals, plenty of resources. But the organization is not yet operational. To make it operational it needs to have active directives as can be seen on Figure 6.
Figure 6 Directive Organization associations
The questions that arise are:
Which directive proposals should be activated?
From where directive proposals come from?
How directives are controlled?
These are important governance questions to be answered by the organization. Things change perspective when it is realized that the governance itself is also a directive. This means organizations need to have at least one Governance directive to be able to evolve themselves by selecting most fit directives.
A directive has goals and budgets. It can also have a controller to make sure variables are controlled within desired range. This structure can be seen on Figure 6.
Figure 7 Directive and shared aggregates
Figure 7 Directive and shared aggregates
Because resources are limited, the main role of governance is to get the most fit directives from a given set of directives population. Ideally the directives population should comprise both active directives and directive proposals, so that active directives can be deactivated and directive proposals can be activated to maximize positive outcome.
Canonical organization class diagram
Combining all structures discussed up to this point the minimum organizational class diagram is completed as can be seen on Figure 8.
Figure 8 Canonical organization class diagram.
Consider the structure above to be implemented as a set of smart contracts on Ethereum chain. It then becomes possible to instantiate a plurality of organizations with radically different personalities. Because the Controller contract is responsible to keep important variables from the outer world within desirable range it needs to get external information through oracles. Here I added Oraclize.it framework as an example of this interface.
Because every organizational class could have issues, Issueable abstract class was created. Every major class inherits from Issueable class. So that they can be associated with open and closed issues as can be seen on Figure 9. UrledComponent abstract class which has a name and url properties was created so that every major component can be displayed by a given webpage with reactive and updated information in real-time based on blockchain retrieved information.
Figure 9 Urled and Issuable class diagram.
Instantiation of an organization on the blockchain
Assume a hypothetical revolutionary organization that wants to be the first totally managed on the blockchain. And it has already made an ICO in the past, it has its cryptocurrency value swinging relatively high due to unknown market forces. But it has a proven record of 12% sustainable organizational growth per month. Now this hypothetical company has millions of dollars in crypto currency in its accounts but wants to utilize a part of that budget as monetary cushion for dampening quotation swings and to reflect close to real 12% monthly increase to its underlying crypto currency.
This can be managed transparently on the blockchain with a monetary policy directive coupled with a controller that monitors the quotation of the crypto currency through Oracles. Depending on quotation the controller places buy and sell orders automatically keeping quotation within desired range.
The diagram of such blockchain organization is shown on Figure 10.
Figure 10 Instantiated organization on the blockchain
Conclusion
In this article, a canonical, flexible and simple organizational model was developed. It can be directly implemented as a set of smart contracts on selected capable blockchains. This technology can potentially allow organizations to transparently evolve by creating or sharing directives with each other in such a way they become more productive, transparent and confidential whenever needed.
It naturally provides a novel way to monitor organizational lifecycle in real-time making it easier to stablish cause and effect relationship due to organizational decisions and to fight against corruption.
Not only legacy governance schemes can be used such as democracy, plutocracy but this model can be used to support the development of new ones in the pursue of circular economy growth maximization.
Acknowledgements
This work is a fundamental part of the great vision of the Centre for Citizenship Enterprise and Governance (CCEG) and is totally aligned with the Blockchain Alliance For Good in which key technologies like the internet, the blockchain, new decentralized governance systems among others, free people from a plurality of unhappy lives. CCEG has a clear understanding of the underlying revolution and invites you to be part of this new universe creation.
Regardless of old politics and countries supporting The United Nations, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are one of the purest initiatives humanity has come up with to date. We at CCEG recognize the beauty of the SDG goals not only protecting these values wholeheartedly. But catalyzing them by means of concrete technological shifts.
[2] The Ethereum blockchain is the pioneer on its space and currently the most widely adopted platform to build smart contracts with blockchain technology. It is possible to build an entire country constitution on the blockchain with a set of smart contracts.
[3] Consider.it was invented at the University of Washington as part of the National Science Foundation funded doctoral research of Consider.it founder Travis Kriplean. Its research objective was to create a method by which large groups of people could civily deliberate together online and find common ground, even on contentious topics. The research was conducted in collaboration with colleagues in Computer Science, Political Communication, Statistics, and Human-centered Design.
In a nice day, you come to the supermarket, hold in your hand a pack of tomatoes. The succulent tomatoes look tasty with green leaves promising a good meal for your dinner. But, have you ever tried to get the address of the farm grew up the fresh and tasty tomatoes in your basket? Does it adapt the requirements of food standards? Have ever you questioned about what it says in the food labels is true? Although we are in the Information Age when your mind is flooded with the news from all around the globe, sometimes you face a lot of challenges to answer the simple given questions. But what is the root cause?
Main challenges of tracking provenance.
Before reaching the end consumer, goods come across a long journey through a lot of factors. In each end-point of this journey, each retailer, each manufacturer has their own system with the different way of storing, tracking and circulating data. For example, the storage facility is running a system made by company A, the transporter is controlling the data management system by the product of company B. The compatibility in those centralized systems is not valued in its level of importance. Otherwise, the difference of specific progress makes the synchronization between two systems is impossible. If someone would dedicate their time to draw the picture of this product life-cycle from birth-to-death, they must dedicate an enormous amount of time with the huge workload to overcome a lot of obstacles in gathering, classifying and accumulating essential data. Consequently, surprisingly how little we know about the info of all goods we purchased. The unseen dimension of our possessions has still existed if the suppliers are insisted with the current information system meanwhile customers keep concentrating only the info in the wrap-page. Obviously, we need some changes.
Currently, some companies dedicated their resource to build their information repository that opens for customers to observe their vast network of sub-suppliers. However, all current systems are just focusing on the hard asset attributes with the boring scientific index or rough numbers about the industry standard what does not bring much significance to the understanding of normal customers. We have to acknowledge that with a little knowledge about the food industry, we are hard to differentiate the advantages of Global G.A.P certification against the organic certification from USDA. All the terminologies or even financial figures are not more useful than the brand of producers. More than that, the customers demand simple metrics that directly relate to their value preferences.
The last challenge I would like to share on this blog may be illustrated after this short story. Most customers may know about the top favourite product of Apple – iPhone which is normally seen in the bright, clean and modern iStore where is full of happiness and well-mannered people. But only a few ones have ever heard about the investigation conducted by The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract) that tells you about the sad story behind the lovely and cutting-edge products made from the assembly-line workers who have begun killing themselves since 2010. The given article reports that 18 reported suicide attempts with 14 confirmed deaths, depression and suicide have become normalised in the sprawling factory where more than 1.3 million workers are working daily. The life condition of these pitiable workers is controversial but the numbers never lie. Obviously, they are not happy or at least have the positive attitude with their work. Once the figure about the working hours or average salary gets the failure to reveal the secret of these poor workers, people are eager to find the alternative approach which incorporates not only the hard asset criteria but also soft asset information.
Our solutions
In CCEG, not only products, we believe that all organizations, processes, projects and peoples have their stories. In the world of transparency and good things, people have their own right to track things from the start to the finish. Moreover, in the rise of social responsibility and an increasing interest in the ethical practices, no one would like to purchase products from unhappy workers, the soft asses like the positive sentiment should not be un-regarded in the decision making progress.
Using the combination of revolution in Distributed Ledger Technology and big data filtering methods, we are developing the tool called by Provenance Engine. Not only the information repository, Provenance Engine is the base to empower users presenting their value preferences and get profit from it.
About the structure of Provenance Engine, developing by the enthusiastic and well-skilled blockchain and big data developers, the system consists of two main parts which are called by Data Format Engine and E-passport.
Provenance Engine Overview
In the Data Format Engine, input data from suppliers will be collated and formatted following the existing non-financial metrics standard to their industries. After short questionnaires designed to reflect the total value of given entities, users have their own S/E labels and data about their value preferences. S/E labels is a single-number non-financial attribute monitoring product provenance, modern slavery conditions checks, Proofof-[…] metrics. Users could opt to have the digital presence through E-passport hosted by blockchain where store their corresponding non-financial attributes.
By this way, users could permanently determine their non-financial attributes. Generally, users are not only consumers but also all kinds of organizations, products, processes, projects and people. In case of e-authentication, Provenance Engine could support to provide the social attributes to identify social inclination of any citizens. The use of S/E labels implies wide-range application in many sectors, especially in e-commerce industry where the information of suppliers is limited.
In cooperation with other add-on services of Seratio Platform, consumers could precisely connect with the suppliers who share the same values preferences upon the information supported by provenance engine. Through the purchasing power in the hand of all people, we could positively impact the community and enhance our life experience.
Blockchain seems to be ubiquitous nowadays. The space is burgeoning with DIY blockchain (or more generally DLT) development platforms, while there are times as many of the blockchain based applications. However, having a closer look, these blockchain development platforms and eco-systems are focused mainly on the financial digital assets and starting your own ledgers (permissioned or not… up to you!) Majority of the current blockchain platforms do not offer anything more complex than e-wallet, new cryptocurrency development tools and sometimes an exchange. How does Seratio Blockchain offering stand out and why we call it an all-in-one blockchain environment?
Before delving into the technical overview, Seratio Blockchain Environment goes beyond an ordinary blockchain platform by introducing additional social non-financial values based services and including AI into the system. With one of the largest blockchain research and development teams in the world CCEG & Seratio are trailblazers who work towards creating not merely technically unique but most importantly community beneficial solutions.
It started from just a blockchain platform in 2017… Since then, Seratio development team has introduced a few new components into the system. Although our plans have grown, the goal is the same: we are looking to enable beneficiaries to keep track of the value and impact they make and let them profit from it.
Bird’s-eye View Seratio Blockchain Environment consists from the following main parts:
– Seratio Platform (incl. platform embedded services)
– Add-on Services
– Decentralised Exchange
– Decentralised Autonomous Foundation (DAF)
Multicurrency E-Wallet
Seratio Wallet is an interface multicurrency wallet. As of May 2018, platform users can store and transfer platform native tokens such as SER, SER Altcoins and Microshares, as well as other ERC20 tokens (ETH, ETC). The work is going on introducing BTC and other Altcoins (Q4 2018).
Another unique feature that Seratio development team is pioneering is a new token standard – ERC995. The standard will allow tracking token origin – so called Association Flags. It is introduced to give token holders the opportunity to check which financial tokens (whether SER & Altcoins) gave ‘birth’ to their Microshares (non-financial tokens), and therefore check what values are stored & carried. From technical point of view, the standard is ERC20 and ERC827 token standards based, and ushers improved token transfer functionality. ERC995 Token Standard has been already introduced to the community and is scheduled to go live in summer 2018.
Soft Value Tracker
One of the most important and unique features of the Seratio Platform are the S/E certificates. Certificates allow transaction of the non-financial attributes (labels), more precisely they show how much social non-financial value an entity creates against its financial value. Although S/E certificates are optional they are essential to benefit from all the services (embedded & add-on) provided by the Seratio platform. S/E Certificates are currently available for the platform users in the alpha mode.
Add-on Services
There is a number of add-on services that are connected to the Seratio Platform and its APIs. The services include:
– Provenance Engine – software to track financial and non-financial origins;
– Seratio AI Wallet – AI bot injected ‘hot’ cryptocurrency wallet;
– Retailer’s Portal – blockchain-based service that allows crypto transition without interfering with the existing Retail Management Software;
– Rewarding Body Portal – blockchain-based service that provides entities with ready-to-use token development and management (S/E based) tools.
The services can be accessed through the Seratio Platform account as well as independently. All 4 services are currently under development and each have a dedicated development sub-team. Retailer’s Portal & Rewarding Body Portal are close to completion and will go live simultaneously with the mobile version of the Seratio Platform (summer 2018).
More details on the platform & add-on services can be found in Seratio Whitepapers.
Decentralised Exchange
ClassicDelta is a decentralised crypto-to-crypto converter and trade homeplace for the Microshares (non-financial tokens). The exchange is aimed to support functionality of Seratio Platform services, particularly SER & SER Altcoins token holders. ClassicDelta brings together both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic blockchains whilst other crypto exchanges operate mainly and exclusively on only one blockchain. ClassicDelta is now under active development and is scheduled to start operating in Q3 2018.
Decentralised Autonomous Foundation (DAF) DAF is a hybrid concept introduced by the CCEG. DAF is an extension of DAO and represents a decentralised wisdom-of-crowds community engaging tool. DAF is currently at its early stages of design and development.
