This page records the Discussion Group's meeting notes for August 2016. We meet Tuesdays for 30 minutes at 7:30am PT / 10:30am ET / 3:30pm UK / 4:30pm CET. We meet Thursdays for 30 minutes at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm UK / 8pm CET. US times are normative during daylight saving time changes. We use Kantara Line A (US +1-805-309-2350, Skype +99051000000481, international options, web interface, more info, code 4022737) and http://join.me/findthomas for screen sharing. See the DG calendar for our full meeting schedule. Previous meeting minutes are here: July.
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- Technology subsection candidate: describing and analyzing "blockchain" (Jeff and Eve)
- Vs. "smart contract"?
- Use case content mappings to technology content
Attending: Eve, John W, Domenico, Scott S, Thomas, Jeff, Scott D (deeply interested in progress in distributed systems that are reliable), Jim, Andrew, John M, Colin
Looking at Eve's candidate definition of blockchain: The second bullet: The value is transparency, is not privacy per se. Or secrecy per se? Transparency isn't necessarily inconsistent with privacy. Data controllers need to be transparent.
If many of the risks are controlled for by putting all the nodes in the same cloud or the same organizational domain (where "distributed" is defined in a very special way), it's still a blockchain.
There's support for the three bullets at least as a starter definition, along with the "SWOT" subbullets beneath them. Jeff believes that the only requirement for it to be a blockchain is a particular encryption mechanism for the ledger, but we didn't reach (ahem) consensus on that. Let's share the writeups on the list and see if we can form a draft subsection shortly, and then leverage the SWOTs and other analyses to build our understanding of how well the use cases can be served by the technologies and techniques. Eve makes an exhortation for use cases not to assume use of technologies, but to test them for suitability.
Thursday August 11
Screen share: http://join.me/findthomas
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The biggest question: Is there a role for the blockchain? The three lightbulbs highlight the particular steps where this comes into play. (Scott suggested to the chat that the lightbulbs in the recent edit can be broken out into individual use cases. As mentioned on the call, the use cases will form an ontology, these would be different instances of “record X on a ledger”, with a different X for each lightbulb.) Thomas notes there is a bit of a crisis of repeatability in research. Could that be addressed with the new technologies somehow? John suspects that this is where putting the protocols (the descriptions of the studies) themselves on the blockchain would be more productive, and this is where his mention of a "predecessor or stereotypical case" of Human Research Consent could encompass that solution. He points to https://clinicaltrials.gov.
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