Last week, we kicked off the 2020 Hyperledger Summer Mentorship Program. This year we have a cohort of 18 mentees working on a diverse array of projects. As they join the ranks of active contributors to the Hyperledger and open source community, it’s a good moment to look at how this program actively contributes to the open source blockchain ecosystem.
Here are 10 things to know about how this program has grown in size and impact:
The Hyperledger Summer Mentorship Program is its 4th year.
With this year’s cohort, 52 mentees have been accepted into the program since its inceptions. Over 700 students have applied.
More than 70 mentors, including ones from ConsenSys, Oracle, State Street and Wipro and as well as from IEEE, the Linux Foundation and Técnico Lisboa, have designed and managed summer projects.
Mentees have participated from 20 different countries, namely Brazil, Canada, China, Cyprus, France, Hungary, Italy, India, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Taiwan and the United States.
They have contributed to 12 of the Hyperledger Projects and Labs.
Three of our mentees have become mentors.
13 mentors have participated two or more years.
20 mentees have traveled to present at Hyperledger events.
Mentees have gone on to get jobs at a range of companies, including effx, DFINITY, Facebook, Provectus, Red Hat, Salesforce, SAP, Wavestone and White Metrix, while others are pursuing advanced studies in computer science. A couple have founded their own startups.
Hyperledger is committed to growing this program:
“Hyperledger and the whole Linux Foundation are big believers in the value of mentorship in growing community and driving development and adoption of open source innovation,” said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger. “Our goal is to keep expanding our summer mentorship program to help ensure there is a growing and diverse development community with the skills and connections to advance their careers and enterprise blockchain. The demand for open source and blockchain developers will only accelerate from here, and we want to open as many doors as we can, especially for those from underrepresented communities.”
Welcome to our Community Spotlight series, which highlights the work of those taking on leadership roles in our special interest and working groups. Meet Saptarshi Choudhury, co-chair of the Public Sector Special Interest Group and Director of Emerging Technologies for Paramount Software Solutions.
Tell us about yourself. Describe your current role, your current business and background, and your involvement in the Hyperledger Public Sector SIG.
I am the Director of Emerging Technologies for Paramount Software Solutions. Since July 2018, I’ve primarily worked on digital transformation in enterprises through blockchain. Prior to that, I worked for AMK Solutions exploring the values of human dynamics and correlation with digital adoption. I started my engagement with the public sector in December 2012 as an electrical engineer for the infrastructure unit of HSCL. I hold a Bachelors and Masters in electrical engineering and have had the opportunity to glimpse the diversity of the world from the lens of different challenging roles. Last year in February, the Hyperledger Public Sector Special Interest Group (PS SIG) intrigued me as it drew attention from people all over the world with diverse backgrounds in technical, business, political or socio-economic frontiers. I have been regularly attending the biweekly meetings for the last one and a half years and am presently hosting the meeting as a co-chair with Dr. Hanna Norberg.
Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?
Hyperledger is expanding the width and depth of its efforts to promote decentralization for trust and transparency through its evergreen projects. Distributed ledger technologies like Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth are gaining global attention as platforms for private and permissioned ledgers for enterprise applications whereas Hyperledger Indy is revolutionizing how we perceive the fundamental concept of Digital ID. This year Hyperledger Besu was featured in the Coindesk 50. There are other exciting projects like Iroha and Burrow that are on track to help solve critical challenges of the world through blockchain. My hope is that we will be able to make progress on different aspects with tools like Hyperledger Cactus on interoperability, Hyperledger Avalon on trusted off-chain transactions and Hyperledger Caliper on performance benchmarking. In addition, thanks to the Hyperledger Ursa library, we will be able to avoid duplicating cryptographic modules for different projects.
What do you see as the biggest barrier to widespread blockchain adoption?
My take is that the biggest barriers arelack of clarity in policies and regulations covering the different aspects of blockchain and the need for standardization and interoperability among the evolving solutions.
What are the biggest opportunities ahead for blockchain developers?
The Hyperledger projects are based on software languages that are popular among programmers, and so they can get started without specialized training. The underlying coding background could be JavaScript, Python, Go or even Java. Even if someone has limited skill in coding, they don’t need to shy away from working with the community as the starting point could be adding value to the documentation team. They can also review and contribute to the projects in Github.
What is the Public Sector SIG working on currently? Any new developments to share?
The Public Sector SIG is presently hosting biweekly presentations by interested volunteers from different parts of the world. We proactively monitor all the governmental policies and initiatives associated with blockchain. In addition, we are creating a database of all the blockchain initiatives in the public sector globally. Recently, there has been a surge of interest among the members to address the Covid-19 pandemic. We are also seeing interest in the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
What’s the most important milestone for the Public Sector SIG to reach in 2020?
The unending pandemic of Covid-19 has tilted the focus on healthcare. However, there are people who also want to explore and understand the regulatory frameworks and progressive stance for blockchain in different countries. We as a community collectively intend to foster collaboration among public agencies, private organizations and nonprofits with the aim of cutting away barriers to sharing specific blockchain work across borders to minimize siloed efforts and parallel initiatives.
Why should someone participate in the group? Why is it important for Hyperledger to encourage collaboration around adopting blockchain technologies for public sector use cases?
From an individual point of view, open source meetings are a hotbed for nurturing leadership skills and working in a collaborative environment. From the standpoint of Hyperledger, active community participation means solutions are designed and developed based on shared values and joint philosophy. The Public Sector SIG emphasizes wider adoption of blockchain technologies that add value to all irrespective of who they are or what their worldview entails.
What are a few ways people can participate in and contribute to the Public Sector SIG? (i.e., What type of support does the group need?)
People can join the Public Sector SIG meetings that occur via Zoom every other Friday at 10am ET. They can also subscribe to the mailing list to stay updated about the latest progress in the community and contribute to the Hyperledger Wiki. To get involved, it’s best to create a Linux Foundation ID. I would also recommend going through the short clip on “How to get involved in the Public Sector SIG.”
Happy Friday. Welcome to the Weekend Update. Our goal with this weekly post is to share quick updates about online education, networking and collaboration opportunities and resources for the open source enterprise blockchain community.
If you have suggestions for resources or events that we should spotlight in a future Weekend Update, let us know here using #HLWeekendUpdate.
Blockchain Stories 2020 – Chapter II
Hear from Chainyard, Oracle Blockchain Platform, Febdep, Pyse and others in this second discussion focused on what businesses in Asia Pacific are building using Hyperledger projects. This virtual event will be hosted by the Hyperledger India Chapter on Saturday, June 6, at 10 a.m. India Standard Time.
DCI Working Group Discussion: The value of activating the male majority to advance diversity & inclusion
Intel’s Jim Gordon will talk about tactics to advance diversity & inclusion as a guest speaker at Hyperledger’s DCI WG meeting. All are welcome to the call and to help make the Hyperledger community more inclusive.
The event is June 10th at 10 a.m. PDT. More details and login information are here.
Telecom SIG Discussion: 5G, Edge & Blockchain
Join Mathews Thomas and Amandeep Singh of IBM for a discussion of the application of blockchain to improve deployment and management of 5G networks and edge solutions. They will include a demonstration of on-boarding and service creation using a CI/CD process, deployment of a 5G network slice and integrating the service with the edge application layer all using technologies covered in the session.
The event is June 11th at 9 AM pacific / 16:00 UTC. More details and login information are here.
BlockJakarta Digital – June 11, staring at 11am Jakarta time, GMT +7
This one day event, Indonesia’s Blockchain Capability Conference, will include a talk by Hyperledger’s Marta Piekarska-Geater on “Leveraging Blockchain Technology for Business.”
Hyperledger members, staff, and booth visitors spanning Brazil, US, UK, and Russia during our virtual Consensus booth
Consensus and NY Blockchain Week is usually one of the busiest weeks of the year in the blockchain industry. Multiple evening talks and events, sandwiched with Mother’s Day, and a deluge of big industry announcements means that you are guaranteed to run into friends and colleagues from around the world–everyone comes here.
This year, however, with the Covid-19 pandemic epicenter in New York City, the event had to shift to a virtual format…and fast. We have been present at every Consensus since Hyperledger was launched, and this year wasn’t going to be any different. Hyperledger sponsored a virtual booth with the added feature of a live Zoom room each day, where the public could hop in and chat with booth representatives, just like at a physical conference. Attendees came by to say hello, share what they’re working on, and learn directly from our member companies about the exciting projects our community is building–much like passing by our booth at the Hilton Hotel (although without the shaking of hands). Conversations dug deep into visitors’ interests: “It was great to connect with other Hyperledger members and hone in on the specific questions of booth visitors” Chris Kelly from IntellectEU, a Hyperledger member company, told us after the event.
Also new this year, CoinDesk added a Foundations program to the agenda. As part of this new program, Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf and technical leaders from Intel, Accenture, and IBM teamed up on a Changelog presentation covering the latest updates on Hyperledger technologies, including our newest project Hyperledger Cactus. Rafael Figueroa, attorney in New York City, reached out to us after watching the Changelog session, “it was so exciting to see Hyperledger working on so many projects that are at the forefront of these new technologies. I thought the Hyperledger speakers were very knowledgeable about their area of expertise and approachable.”
Here are the videos from Hyperledger’s sessions at Consensus:
Speakers: Arnaud Le Hors, Chair of the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee (TSC), Dan Middleton, Head of Technology for Intel, Jonathan Hamilton from Accenture, James Wester, Research Director of Worldwide Blockchain Strategies at IDC
Hyperledger Executive Director Brian Behlendorf in:
It goes without saying that a virtual format is very different from the experience in New York. There is nothing better than being in an iconic city meeting people as a session wraps up, walking up to speakers to connect, and running into colleagues over buffet lunch. Nevertheless, our meeting schedule was fully booked, and the video conference format allowed us to delve deeper into learning more about each other. There was another surprising effect of going virtual: more global participation in the event. The conference was free and the lack of travel made it more accessible, and thus inclusive, for people who would have never been able to come. Elisa Cardamone from member company Blockforce, which is based in Brazil said, “The experience was amazing! Even virtually, we had the opportunity to learn more about different projects around the world and to establish strong connections with incredible people. In Brazil, the blockchain market is still not so consolidated, so it is very gratifying for us to participate in a global meeting together with the Hyperledger team. It was a time of great learning and networking!”
Randhish Raghavan, a computer architect from member company Mindtree, shared how the connections for partnerships “gave us the opportunity to display our solutions and focus areas to a wider audience.”
Consensus had more than 22,000 registered attendees. Our booth was busy with more than a dozen members signed up for the virtual office hours. As always, it is very important to us that visitors hear about Hyperledger straight from our members. And it pays off: “the networking sessions through the Hyperledger booth [were] very insightful, as it allowed me to better know and understand the mission, purpose and partnership strategy,” summarized Gaston Tchicourel who works with the World Bank.
We cannot wait to see you all in person, shake hands, and have chats over coffee. For now, to make sure the world recovers quickly, we will see you all online at many of Linux Foundation’s conferences and will welcome our members at our virtual Member Summit in September.
Edit, June 1: In just the few days that elapsed between when this was penned and when it was posted so much has happened.
Today in discussing everything that is transpiring, someone pointed out that the roots of Pride Month are not just in the historic riot at Stonewall, but also riots at Cooper Do-nuts, Compton’s Cafeteria, and others.
As we think about what we do to build a diverse, civil, and inclusive community, we look for ways to show that everyone is welcome here and that their lives matter, that black lives matter.
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Happy Pride Month from the Hyperledger open source community! We are proud to have an inclusive community here at Hyperledger. This year has some new challenges for all of us. While the pandemic impacts each of us differently, many of us involved in Hyperledger are fortunate to have jobs that we can do virtually. In fact, one of the reasons it is natural to be inclusive in open source is that it just takes an internet connection to get involved. Of course, it takes an active effort to be a contributor and an active effort from the community to make sure that everyone feels included.
We have a couple new initiatives to announce in Pride Month. First off, we are starting a new guest speaker series. Hyperledger is supported by large and small companies alike, and we are inviting leaders from these companies to come and talk about what Diversity, Civility, and Inclusion mean within their companies and how participating in open source helps. Our first speaker is Jim Gordon from Intel on June 10th: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/x/kw7cAQ
We were also looking forward to joining our member companies at Pride Month events. The plan was to show our support at festivals and other activities and encourage their participation in this open source project. It is perhaps bittersweet that we were able to run Hyperledger Global Forum replete with our “All Are Welcome Here” message, but that might have been the last in-person event for many of us this year. As we looked towards Pride Month events, our nascent on-site plans have had to be curtailed. Fortunately, we are discovering that more and more events are finding a way to continue through virtual means. And as a do-ocracy YOU are welcome to help us be present and connect at those events.
Out and Equal is hosting a couple of virtual events including a June 1st kickoff for pride month and a June 15th virtual brunch: https://outandequal.org/virtual-offerings/
You are welcome to show up and represent the Hyperledger community at these events.
Happy Friday. Welcome to the Weekend Update. Our goal with this weekly post is to share quick updates about online education, networking and collaboration opportunities and resources for the open source enterprise blockchain community.
If you have suggestions for resources or events that we should spotlight in a future Weekend Update, let us know here using #HLWeekendUpdate.
Blockchain Stories 2020
Find out what businesses in Asia Pacific are building using Hyperledger projects at this virtual event hosted by the Hyperledger India Chapter on Saturday, May 30, at 10a.m. India Standard Time.
Webinar: Supplier Digital Passport using Trust Your Supplier
Tune in at 10:00a.m. ET on June 3 to hear Gary Storr of Chainyard provide an overview of the Trust Your Supplier network and discuss the business value to the participants. He will also highlight why blockchain and the selected governance approach makes this solution better for all the participants (buyers, suppliers and third party validators).
Get added details in this newly released case study that covers key steps in developing and rolling out Trust Your Supplier, from concept to PoC to full production deployment.
New Hyperledger Labs project explained
Donald Thibeau of Hedera presented Hedera Hashgraph and the newly submitted Hyperledger Labs project for providing a plugging into Hyperledger Fabric (and Avalon) at a recent meetup.
Interoperability and integration are top of mind issues across the blockchain space right now. From new projects to new solutions, the Hyperledger community is taking on the challenges of cross-chain and cross application communication and data flow.
Here are some of the most recent #HyperledgerInterop developments from across the community.
New Project – Hyperledger Cactus
The newly announced Hyperledger Cactus is a blockchain integration tool designed to allow users to securely integrate different blockchains. This pluggable architecture helps enable the execution of ledger operations across multiple blockchain ledgers, including Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, and Quorum available today, with the aim of developers continually adding support for new blockchains in the future.
Cactus started as a Hyperledger Labs project six months ago and has attracted significant attention and become a locus of collaboration between developers from teams at Accenture and Fujitsu, and dozens of others working on DLT platforms both inside and outside Hyperledger.
Member applications
DAML, the open source smart contract language created by Digital Asset, enables application portability across three major Hyperledger frameworks: Besu, Fabric and Sawtooth. Blockchain Technology Partner’s Sextant for DAML supports both Hyperledger Besu and Sawtooth, as well as Amazon QLDB and Aurora cloud databases, allowing the same distributed application to be easily deployed across all four platforms. Hear more about the “Write Once, Interoperate Anywhere” approach in this presentation on how DAML smart contracts connect networks, especially Hyperledger Besu, Fabric and Sawtooth.
Hyperchain Labs created an oil and gas ticketing blockchain network to help companies reduce costs, improve performance and maintain compliance. The network is built using the Hyperledger Fabric framework and is run on the IBM Blockchain Platform. BlocWatch software is used to ensure the Hyperchain Labs network is running optimally and securely. As a monitoring and security tool, BlocWatch seamlessly integrates with Hyperchain Labs and IBM, empowering users to easily manage all platforms in one place. Explore how Hyperchain Labs uses BlocWatch in conjunction with the IBM Blockchain Platform in this short video.
Smart Block Laboratory built the Hyperledger Fabric-powered distributed register Cryptoenter, blockchain infrastructure for digital banking that unites banks into a single digital space for transmitting financial messages and brings a new level of interaction to the financial market. The platform is designed for p2p interaction between consumers of financial services, safe execution of payment transactions with cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, user interaction within a social network for investors / distributed crowdfunding platform.
The basis of the platform is the Rubicon Blockchain, a cloud platform for the blockchain economy, built on Hyperledger Fabric. Cryptoenter has a dual security system: at the Hyperledger blockchain network level and at the Rubicon Blockchain (also based on Hyperledger Fabric) network level. The solution uses an SRP authentication system. TLS (transport layer security) protocol based on SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol is also included. This dual security system allows Cryptoenter to authenticate the person who signed the message, control message integrity, protect the message from fakes and prove the authorship of the person who signed the message.
Technical talks from Hyperledger Global Forum
Nathan George from the Sovrin Foundation offers his take on “Standards and Interoperability for Identity”
Identity platforms have made significant advances leveraging blockchain technology and standards developed at Hyperledger. In his talk, Nathan covers the latest in trusted information flows and the standards being incubated to promote interoperability and create network effects across multiple blockchains and identity platforms.
Key topics include the advancements incubated in Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Aries, the W3C Credentials Community Group and at the Decentralized Identity Foundation for Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), DID Communications, Identity Hubs, Authentication, and the data models that power them.
Panelists Rich Meszaros and Sarah Banks from Accenture, Melanie Nuce from GS1 US, David Cecchi for Cargill and Patrick Erichsen from Target discuss “Business Interoperability – The Key to Supply Chain Traceability”
Technology such as blockchain has the power to solve complex challenges and achieve improved supply chain traceability. In order to tap into this powerful technology, interoperability, enabled by robust data and transaction standards, are a must! Segments of the supply chain, such as the food industry, have made significant progress leveraging data standards to support food safety and product transparency use cases. The panelists discuss their companies’ work on improved supply chain traceability, the importance of standards and the role business interoperability plays in accelerating the success of new technologies like blockchain.
Join the conversation about blockchain-based identity technologies and solutions with #HyperledgerInterop this month on social channels.
While supplier management has garnered particular attention in recent weeks thanks to COVID-19-related demand surges, manufacturing disruptions and quality concerns, vetting and signing news suppliers has long been a challenge. The whole process is slow, costly, and fraught with risks and errors. It creates friction and delay between buyers and sellers.
Chainyard and IBM Blockchain set out to streamline that process with Trust Your Supplier, a network built on Hyperledger Fabric, an open source enterprise blockchain platform. The solution went live in November, 2019, and is gaining steam quickly as a new model for using blockchain as a trust platform for sharing business information securely and efficiently.
Trust Your Supplier creates a unique “digital passport” for each supplier’s identity on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. This ID can be shared with any permissioned buyer on the network to save time validating and onboarding a new supplier. Several third-party verifiers are on the network, including Dun & Bradstreet for business data, EcoVadis for sustainability, and RapidRatings for financial risk. These third parties can provide further audit or verification services to create an even more comprehensive picture of any vendor. As a result, buyers and sellers can save time and money and keep their supply chains humming by accessing a single repository with verified accurate data.
To date, 25 major corporate members from Anheuser-Bush InBev to UPS have joined the network. Members cover many major industries including aerospace, consumer packaged goods, electronics, logistics, pharma, tech, and telecom. All told, the members’ suppliers number in the hundreds of thousands. And they’re all committed to modernizing their procurement with the new system. Initial results show:
Vendor onboarding cycle time cut from an average of 60 days to 3 days
For buyers: 50% less cost to verify and maintain a supplier’s information
For sellers: much faster time to first sale
The Hyperledger team has worked closely with Chainyard and IBM Blockchain on a detailed case study about developing and rolling out this network, from concept to PoC to full production deployment. The case study also offers details on the long-term goals of the network and how it could support other key business processes.
While the Hyperledger community was gathered in Phoenix at Hyperledger Global Forum, many members took the time to sit down, on camera, and explain what happens in the array of Hyperledger working groups, special interest groups (SIGs) and technology projects. These videos are great introductions to the community-driven activities in the Hyperledger ecosystem. Geared towards anyone looking to take on a more active role in the effort to advance open source enterprise blockchain, the “How To Get Involved” video series provides an overview of the goals, key initiatives and target use cases each for each group or project. The message in each case is that you are invited to join and all are welcome here.
In our first post in this series, we put the spotlight on work in the identity space and introduced the distributed ledger Hyperledger Indy as well as the libraries Hyperledger Aries and Hyperledger Ursa. Now it’s time to share more about some of our other projects.
Hyperledger incubates and promotes a range of business blockchain technologies, including distributed ledger frameworks. A distributed ledger is a multi-party database with no central trusted authority. The differentiating nuance is that when transactions are processed in blocks according to the ordering of a blockchain, the result is a distributed ledger. Hyperledger hosts a number of distributed ledgers. Below, learn more about getting involved with three of them: Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha and Hyperledger Sawtooth.
Hyperledger also hosts a range of tools, including Hyperledger Caliper, a blockchain benchmark tool, which allows users to measure the performance of a specific blockchain implementation with a set of predefined use cases. Here’s an introduction to this project and community.
Happy Friday. Welcome to the Weekend Update. Our goal with this weekly post is to share quick updates about online education, networking and collaboration opportunities and resources for the open source enterprise blockchain community.
If you have suggestions for resources or events that we should spotlight in a future Weekend Update, let us know here using #HLWeekendUpdate.
Learn for free: Blockchain – Understanding its Uses and Implications
Enroll today to take part in a five week Linux Foundation Training class that covers exactly what blockchain is and its impact and potential for change around the world through use cases in technology, business, and enterprise products and institutions.
Webinar: Africa Perspectives and Economic Recovery
The Blockchain Research Institute is hosting a webinar exploring blockchain initiatives currently taking place in Africa including ones that aim to speed up and increase economic recovery from COVID-19.
Tune in on May 26 at 11:00 a.m. ET. Register here.
Hyperledger Jobs Board
Ready to start a new job or career in enterprise blockchain? The Hyperledger Jobs Board is a great place to start. See openings from members all around the world.
