SOTS #43: Might the next big thing in Ethereum be Records Management Systems?

Transcript

02:00 - Background thoughts

hey superfish here uh this is going to be state of the state 33. i just finished a run um had some thoughts i wanted to get off my chest they're not going to be earth-shattering to anybody probably except to me but i want to share them this has nothing to do with staking it does have to do with ethereum so uh in my previous life i worked in schools so helping kids adjust and helping them acclimate to schools a couple of the things that are relevant here are that one of the things i discovered is that kids who are happy in their placement do well oh my gosh who would have thought it so if you have a

engaged student who is surrounded by uh 26 other students who are interested in causing trouble it's obviously difficult for that one student to engage likewise if you bring a student who has behavior difficulty and place them around other students who have behavior difficulties theirs is likely to become more severe and so one of the things that i began doing was collecting behavior data for each student and i developed a system to place students in classrooms where their behavioral needs would be addressed from the outset and the wonderful benefit of that is that kids are happy at school they're in a in a class with other kids

who are um so essentially they're balanced so there are kids with behavior issues there are kids who are well engaged but there's not an overwhelming majority of anything it's balanced and basically every student in the school gets a fair opportunity to engage in the same way so where i'm going with that is one of the difficulties with that is maintaining records you have a new student who comes in and you know nothing about them many times parents will disguise or cover up information and that's really fine because it's gonna the students behavior is going to bear out eventually but it brings me to records management and this sudden realization

04: 18 - How the blockchain could impact records management

that the next big thing in ethereum is likely to be records management systems um in my frame of reference that is student management systems where you have um basically a i want to be careful not to use technical language for two reasons i don't want to lose anyone and i don't want to do it wrong anyway you have a a blockchain based file an ethereum chain based file for a student who comes into a school and that student carries some kind of key that allows the unlocking of that file so that it can be edited by their present school and then when they go somewhere else um they can take that key with them and that that key can unlock their history and so schools don't have to transfer anything

because the student is the key to that data whether or not they lose it i'm sure it will happen that's a problem for the future but it really brings to to bear this idea of records management on the blockchain which is something we have completely that's not true something that has not been developed yet not been developed well enough yet i know projects like factum we're working to canonize information which is not the same as managing it and i know a lot of people have put um like marriage certificates and property certificates on the on the chain still not the same what i'm describing is a system where a record follows a person and

that record can be updated and managed based on a piece of information that person has or maybe based on a recovery with people who has dealt with that person in the past and so in terms of a school that might be grades record grade records for me my interest would be uh i say behavior and you think of bad behavior but when i think of behavior i think of like what does this student need in order to do well and if that information is seamlessly transferred from school to school then when a new student comes in that new school is ready to receive them again i'm framing this all in school just because that's my history but it brings me to paul brody's ey

05:33 - Paul Brody and supply chain management on the blockchain

global talk from probably over a year ago now where he talked about supply chain management on the blockchain it really blew my mind because i suddenly began to recognize um more future potential for the network and especially with sharding coming with the the increased capacity of data i realized that um before that kind of supply chain management can really happen you need good records management and so this whole my whole rant today is the recognition that the next big thing in ethereum could and maybe should i don't know be a

robust records management system that can be templated and applied to many different types of fields because once that records management system is in place it could be applied to education to health care to supply chain management and rather than having to recreate it over and over the building blocks that we need are that basic uh records management system so anyway that was big on my mind today uh like i said it's an epiphany for me it may already be done and well developed i'm not aware of it if it is and if i'm not aware of it it means it's not developed enough yet so i think that is a really great

place to consider shifting our efforts defy is great d5 needs to happen i'm all about it but what we observed with d5 was this ability to build building blocks that could be um are basically like standard libraries that can be applied in different ways and i think when we build that same kind of tool set for records management then we're really going to take the world uh into the future more quickly all right that was my rant i hope uh you found something in it useful i'll get back to talking about staking soon and uh it's so funny i skipped over 98 things that i should be talking about but like i said i talk about the things that interest me at the moment and that's what you get

thanks