The rising popularity of crypto-currencies globally has dramatically increased attention to blockchain technology’s capabilities in advancing peer-to-peer transactions and interactions. Namely, blockchain can promote more agile, cost-effective, and intrinsically data-driven project management practices and decision-making in e-governance. These capabilities are translatable not only to the financial and technological sectors but can also promote more efficient public and corporate sector systems. However, there remains a lack of understanding among practitioners regarding how exactly this digital technology could be fully realised removed from the context of crypto-finances. Furthermore, questions remain in terms of what public and corporate values related to government, business actors and decision-makers could harness in various sectors of the economy as part of the implementation process (e.g. public, corporate, social, political, technological or regulatory ones).
An article I recently published in Policy & Internet, titled “Prospects of Blockchain Governance”, addresses recent developments of blockchain-driven governance in various sectors of the economy. It answers the following questions:
- How exactly does blockchain technology work?
- How could one illustrate schematically the fundamental principles of its work in a practical way that is easily comprehensible for practitioners and project managers in both corporate and public sectors of the economy? What are the critical features of blockchain-driven project management? Why are they essential for public and corporate decision-makers?
- What benefits could the blockchain concept bring to different sectors of the economy?
- If the potential of blockchain-driven management is fully realised, what areas in the public, economic, social, political, technological, and business sectors would benefit most?
Relying on the analysis of rich empirical data provided by experts in the industry across the globe (i.e. those directly engaged in promoting various related decentralised project management tools for a wide range of public and corporate digital ecosystems), the paper provides insider perspectives on the latest blockchain-driven public and project management advancements. Furthermore, it describes the essence of decentralised data governance, how it is intended to be realised by design and implemented as a cross-referenced ledger, what public and economic values are harnessed, and what challenges insiders face in building better governance and society.
Through my research, I discovered the following elements of blockchain implementation that are important for both producers of such technologies and policymakers who aim to regulate them.
Namely;
- Blockchain‐driven e‐government data management ecosystems could be self‐regulated, self‐governed and self‐controlled. As such, they provide robust technological solutions to preserve data in public archives since it could be easily shared among a wide range of public datasets and data hubs in an intrinsically decentralised manner.
- The collaborative nature of cross-referenced metadata and its reuse in various blockchain-driven data management platforms creates a unique digital environment. This environment advances fully decentralised e-government data registries and scales them up in accordance with data-driven interactions and transactions between a variety of individual and legal ledger block owners, e.g. hospitals, police stations, schools, universities, government agencies, public utility companies, banks, employers, etc.
- Blockchain-driven data management systems hold the potential to democratise the legislative process, inviting civic stakeholders to participate in commenting and even making decisions on bills of laws in decentralised platforms such as open e-legislation and open e-lawmaking systems. This could mark a significant shift towards more inclusive and participatory governance.
- There are growing opportunities for converging blockchain-driven data management ecosystems with solutions based on artificial intelligence in a wide range of e-government platforms. For example, e-government stakeholders could resort to data-driven prediction models for new e-services or forecast a growing demand for existing e-services. They could also foresee the need to scale up the existing blockchain-driven networks due to the expected growth of users or block owners in the future. This convergence of technologies opens up new avenues for innovation and efficiency in e-government services.
- The implementation of blockchain-driven open data management platforms in both public and private sectors of the economy creates a new technological market niche. This niche aims to provide a wide range of third-party decentralised data-driven digital solutions, potentially sparking public sector innovations among independent developers and technically savvy citizens.
Note: the above draws on the author’s work recently published in Policy & Internet.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of Policy & Internet, nor the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney.
