A New Computational Social Fabric
By: Dan Hughes
Tags: Education, Web, Government, Mobile, Blockchain

A New Computational Social Fabric

The web, mobile, and blockchain are being brought together into a new social infrastructure that is digital, portable, and verifiable.

Gartner analysts believe that 30% of higher education institutions in the US, UK, and Australia will be using a digital credentialing infrastructure powered by the blockchain over the next five years. (Source: Gartner Symposium/ITXpo presentation by Terri-Lynn Thayer in October 2016).

This number is significantly understated.

As of last summer, Gartner has infamously placed blockchain at the peak of its hype cycle. It is our view that there are many mini-hype cycles in a shift as significant as the Bitcoin blockchain, specifically, and distributed application architectures, in general. Cutting against the Gartner grain, we believe that the emergence of new fundamental work (e.g. Blockstack, Enigma, etc.) is only now positioning the application layer of distributed apps to go exponential and force state change.

Not only will the adoption percentages be much higher in these three Gartner-selected countries, the real growth story is beyond higher education. At Learning Machine, we have built blockchain digital credentialing infrastructure to power:

Workforce readiness across national health systems, labor unions, and licensed professional sectors where regulated facilities, right-to-practice, and skills expiry are day-in and day-out mission critical concerns (hospitals, docks, courts, etc.).

Strategic rollouts across entire nation states, providing Education Ministers with an expanded dashboard through which to make and measure policy initiatives in light of near real-time data from the K-20+ institutions of their country.

Corporate learning and certification across thousands of global companies, enabling operational leaders and CLOs with internal competency maps, skill gap analysis, and fluid workforce mobility.

The opportunity here is for full-lifecycle adoption across geographies, sectors, and life stages. For verified digital credentialing infrastructures to be deployed across primary, secondary, graduate, postgraduate, workforce, and self-driven learning in every country and across industries. This may seem implausibly broad in scope and, as such, an impractical total addressable market. We disagree. At the nexus of three fundamental enabling technologies — web, mobile, and blockchain — this scope is not only possible: it is inevitable. Together these protocol stacks enable novel applications and new organizational practices beyond what each brings individually. Because they are built on top of standards that interoperate, a new computational social fabric is made possible. It is this social fabric that translates into a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. It is this nexus that affords us a total addressable market of everyone.

Learning Machine Certificates: To hold and share one’s verifiable achievements

Open standards are succeeding when they are assumed. When enabling frameworks are collectively taken for granted, we get something of a social fabric (or, at least, a thread of one). It is intuitive to most people how the internet and web have become a social fabric (even if protocol layering isn’t clear to them). This computational social fabric has been accelerated and extended, for most of us, by our mobile devices that now mediate our fundamental protocols through apps over wireless frequencies, forming an ever-present, communal interaction and information prosthesis. These examples of technologies-turned-social fabric are good analogues for our newest technological thread: the innovation at the heart of the Bitcoin blockchain. There is only one ubiquitous application on the blockchain today: currency. The first killer app is coming: credentials. To get there requires an open standard.

There is only one ubiquitous application on the blockchain today: currency. The first killer app is coming: credentials. To get there requires an open standard.

Blockcerts: The Open Standard

The open standard for blockchain credentials was established in 2016. The standard is colloquially called Blockcerts. It enables educational organizations, learners, and employers to confidently move forward with a digital credentialing project, course, or vendor by setting a minimal bar for interoperability. Being Blockcerts-compliant ensures that learners have credential mobility and institutions have verification simplicity. Issuing digital credentials to the Blockcerts open standard builds toward a future where secure, self-verifying data objects work machine-to-machine, human-to-machine, and human-to-human along durable, trusted pathways that outlast any given institution or individual.

The Blockcerts design principles are public and simple:

Open source

Open standards

Open participation

Recipient control

Simplicity

Minimized resource requirements

Viable without any proprietary product

Blockchain-agnostic

Maximized confidence

The MIT Media Lab and Learning Machine incubated the Blockcerts standard and open source ecosystem over the last year for one reason: to preclude the fragmentation that occurs at the start of any early adopter cycle as it turns into a commercial land grab. The last thing the world needs is one more proprietary standards war. Generations of learners are impacted if educational institutions, vendors, governments, and employers cannot rally around, govern, and evolve a common, open standard.

Blockcerts is available today. A reference implementation of an entire blockchain credentials ecosystem has been built and open sourced to jump-start technical organizations. Schools, MOOCs, and companies are already issuing Blockcerts-compliant credentials.

Blockcerts is content-agnostic. Any national or transnational framework, disciplinary or industry standard, academic taxonomy, or niche pedagogy can be followed when issuing trusted claims using the Blockerts open standard. What makes a certificate Blockcerts-compliant is a minimal interoperable core. Extending this core to meet the needs of a particular constituency is simple. The interoperable core is not in competition with any other rubric, standard, taxonomy, initiative, or framework. Through an open and extensible standard that is fixated on doing one thing extremely well, Blockcerts seeks to enable all.

We will not get the positive effects of this new social fabric — learner self-sovereignty, worker mobility, and commercial/governmental workforce readiness — if we lose this chance at a common, open standard for blockchain credentialing. This means we have to do framework thinking: the community has to continue building a core standard that is minimal, extensible, and governed by a respected body. It is time to build on and extend a standard that ushers in this new distributed reality.