In Part 1, I wrote about vaccination certificates and passports, and ways they can complement each other. I also wrote about visual inspection as a form of faith.

Trust but verify. Or faith in disguise?

Now that I got the common confusion out of the way, let’s dive into the design of HealthCerts and help more countries with safe travel. ✈️🌎

HealthCerts is a set of digital standards and schema for issuing digital COVID-19 test results certificates that are in line with international standards — such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and the Singapore Government’s requirements.

It is designed for global interoperability and to maximise adoption among three groups of users — medical institutions, travellers and government officers.

1) Medical Institutions 🏥

Medical institutions such as clinics/labs/hospitals can either purchase HealthCerts issuance as a software service from any of these providers or issue HealthCerts by themselves.

To issue HealthCerts, you can use OpenAttestation, a document signing framework that we open-sourced in 2018.

• Here’s how the schema.json and sample-document.json look like.

Fun Facts

1) OpenAttestation is the same technology behind OpenCerts. OpenCerts is a set of digital standards and schema to issue educational credentials for all educational institutions in Singapore.

2) OpenAttestation is similarly used by TradeTrust to digitise trade documents such as bill-of-lading in Singapore and other countries.

In a nutshell, OpenAttestation takes a bunch of HealthCerts, creates hashes from them, and writes the merkle root to Ethereum — which can then be used for verification. It allows document revocation and decentralised issuer identity verification. As of today, DNS is the primary way to verify issuer’s identity.

We chose a public permissionless blockchain, so anyone with access to the internet can issue HealthCerts. To overcome the Ethereum gas fee, we recently introduced DID Verifiable Credential (zero fee & real time transaction) and more…

We have made all things possibly free, free.

As of now, we have nine providers across five countries who are helping medical institutions issue HealthCerts. ❤️

2) Travellers 🧳

Travellers have to provide their HealthCerts as part of travel requirements.

After a COVID-19 PCR test, the traveller will receive an email with a HealthCerts document attached to it, sent from the medical institution.

In addition to the email, some medical institutions or HealthCerts providers provide their customers a mobile app with an e-wallet so that travellers can receive, store, view and share HealthCerts from the e-wallet.

We recognise the convenience of having an e-wallet. To encourage adoption, we have developed and open-sourced the e-wallet reference implementation.

For privacy reason, travellers can select or omit a subset of their info to share, aka selective disclosure, from the e-wallet.

As of now, we have SingPass Mobile, Accredify’s Digital Health Passport, AOKpass, Trybe.ID and Riverr that provide this e-wallet service. Stay tuned for more HealthCerts digital passports… 😎

3) Government Officers 👮

The last group of users is the authorities who screen incoming travellers for valid negative PCR test results, positive serology test results and/or vaccination certificates.

There are two ways to verify the HealthCerts.

a) In-person verification: Scan the QR code from the traveller’s HealthCerts — embedded in email or e-wallet — with any QR code reader app.

b) Contactless verification: Submit the HealthCerts document online so that verification can be done before arrival. Your border checkpoint officers will thank you for this safer approach.

The verification process checks for three things:

1. The integrity of the HealthCerts by verifying the hash of the certificate against that from the blockchain — here’s how
2. The identity of the issuer is MOH
3. And the certificate is still valid — not revoked. Here’s how

Our QR Code can be dynamically generated from the e-wallet and it requires no special QR code reader app to read. This will greatly ease the verification ops and reduce the security attack vectors such as spoof apps and data theft.

No surprise that our verifier is open-sourced too! 😁

This helps other governments and private companies to develop their versions of Verify such as Affinidi’s Unifier, to check against their own list of recognised medical institutions.

To help more countries with safe travel ✈️🌎

We have designed HealthCerts to

• Allow any medical institution to issue HealthCerts
• Allow any digital passport to store, view and share HealthCerts
• Be verifiable on any platform

We have open-sourced the codebase of all components, to maximise reach and global interoperability.

Free as in beer. Better than beer, if you help us make it better.

Look forward to your contribution.

Together, let’s make travel great again! 🏖️😎

Our team is looking for software/quality and devops engineers who are passionate about tech and want to help us build awesome 🇸🇬 digital services!

Reach me at steven_koh@tech.gov.sg (ゝ‿ ・)

Want to know more? Here’s how we operate and the work we do.

Cheers! 🍻😊

HealthCerts — Part 2 was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you are evaluating digital solutions for Covid-19 test results, vaccination certificates and passports, here’s what you should know.

Hullabaloo

Much ink has been spilled about vaccination certificates and vaccination passports on the web but details of implementation have often been glossed over.

Let’s dive in to separate the wheat from the chaff, amid all the hullabaloo.

Vaccination Status vs Vaccination Certificate

If I am an officer trying to check your vaccination records, here are two methods for me to verify. You can either show me your vaccination status or send me your vaccination certificate.

Method 1 — Show your status

You log in to your mobile app. With your unique identifier, the app fetches your vaccination status from a trusted database and displays it on your mobile device.

You then show me your screen to visually inspect your vaccination status, but this screen can hardly be differentiated from an edited screenshot or a spoofing app. As a result, there is too much of such (not so new) news.

Coronavirus: Fake test certificate gang foiled at Paris airport

This method is often marketed as digital passport. But not all that glitters is gold.

Method 2 — Send me your certificate

With this method, your certificate exists in a form of a digital document that you chose to store somewhere — the hard drive of your PC, mobile devices or cloud storage.

You can choose to send this certificate to me via WhatsApp, Telegram, Email, Dropbox or in a thumb drive carried by a pig🐦on, etc…

Upon receiving your certificate, I will then go through the verification process to (a) verify the authenticity of the certificate, (b) ascertain its provenance and (c) trust that the certificate is not revoked — more on this later…

The key difference between the two methods is the location of verification.

• In method 1, I will need to believe whatever you are showing me on your device, which also means you need to be physically present.
• In method 2, the verification process is performed on my trusty device and not a visual inspection of your glittering screen.

Vaccination Passport vs Vaccination Certificate

There are some digital health passports that merely display vaccination status (method 1), some that store and send vaccination certificates (method 2) and few that can do both. Let’s compare them.

Method 1 — Show your status

In this method, the digital passport is a mobile app that seeks to be the certificate or at least pretends to be one. 😏

Even though this “Show your status” method has obvious flaws as mentioned in previous section, this method bestows great power on the solution provider as the key arbiter of trust for safe travel.

With a stronger position to monetise from the network effect between issuers and verifiers, solution providers are commercially incentivised to provide solutions with method 1 than 2.

The history of fake passports is as old as some countries because controlling the movement of people has always been, and will continue to be a lucrative business.

Method 2 — Store, view and share your certificate

In this method, a digital health passport is a mobile app to store, view and share vaccination certificates. It does not seek to supplant the digital certificate but to complement it.

The key purpose of this mobile app is to improve the user experience of handling digital documents, akin to a file explorer/manager.

In both methods, the digital health passport should also provide strong identity assurance to prevent impersonation — that the owner of the certificate is indeed the owner of the app.

In addition, digital health passports can provide convenience to the traveller by providing information of authorised clinics/laboratories, flight info, travel requirements of countries, etc… at the right place and the right time.

Verification Process

Method 1 expects me to trust the screen and needs no explanation. This section is about verifying the vaccination certificate.

Trust but verify. Or faith in disguise?

To trust the certificate, there are three requirements to meet.

1. I must be able to verify the authenticity of the certificate. In other words, the verification process must inform if the certificate has been tampered with.
2. Its provenance can be ascertained so that I know if the clinic/lab is qualified and not a fly-by-night institution.
3. And if the certificate is revoked, the verification process must inform me that it is no longer valid.

Is the format proprietary?

I’m not saying it’s proprietary when otherwise but it’s obviously not proprietary when any QR code reader can read it and render its content to human-readable form like this.

However, if you need a special reader/app to render its content to human-readable form, you should ask if there are alternative readers available.

Qn: Is interoperability an incentive or a tech problem?

If you can use any email clients — gmail, outlook, hotmail — to receive and send emails to your friends, why are messages in modern messaging apps — WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, etc — stuck in their own apps?

And if alternative commercial readers are available, make sure you are neither using a spoof app nor one that’s designed to steal (your traveller’s) data. 😏

What’s coming…

In Part 2, I’ll cover the key components of HealthCerts and how you can use it to help your country with safe travel.

If you are a medical institution looking for help to issue HealthCerts, here’s the list of HealthCerts providers.

For more information on HealthCerts, check out our developer portal.

Singapore develops new standard for cross-border verification of COVID-19 test results

Our team is looking for software/quality and devops engineers who are passionate about tech and want to help us build awesome digital services for Singapore! 🇸🇬

Reach me at steven_koh@tech.gov.sg (ゝ‿ ・)

Want to know more? Here’s how we operate and the work we do.

Cheers! 🍻😊

HealthCerts — Part 1 was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stage 2 — Culture fit

Congratulations! Only one in eight people get to this stage! 🎊🎉👍

In this stage, you will meet our HR manager, your hiring manager and one of your colleagues. We will start the interview session with an ice-breaking question like, “Tell me about yourself” and this session will typically last for an hour or longer. When it’s over, we shake hands, you leave and then the interviewers will exchange notes and decide on one of these outcomes:

1. Good fit with a great attitude — hire
2. Poor fit with a poor attitude — no hire
3. Unsure of culture fit or attitude — still a no hire. Like what Joel said, …

“ … it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people’s time fixing all their bugs. … Bad employees demoralize the good employees. And they might be bad programmers but really nice people or maybe they really need this job, so you can’t bear to fire them, or you can’t fire them without pissing everybody off, or whatever. It’s just a bad scene.”

Speaking from experience, the ratio of poor-fit to unsure-fit is about 3:1 for experienced candidates and a dismal 1:1 for fresh graduates.

So here are some tips to improve your odds :)

1. Unlike the technical assessment at stage 1, stage 2 interview session is a panel interview with HR, hiring manager and your potential colleagues. If you are not comfortable with talking to 3–4 strangers, you might falter. To ease your anxiety, you need to understand that we really want you to pass this stage. Our other option is to spend additional time and effort to scout for another candidate and screen her/him through stage 1 and stage 2. The odds are on your side so be confident! :)
2. During the session, pay attention to symptoms of anxiety such as dry lips and fidgeting fingers. Ask for more water and/or a bio break to calm down. It’s perfectly fine to openly acknowledge your anxiety and request for a break. Bonus point for your sense of self-awareness and compensating skills. Remember, we are rooting for you :)
3. Still edgy? Try “power posing” right before the interview. :)
4. Be prepared for ice-breaking questions like “Tell me about yourself.” It can be hard to regain your composure if you fumble at the first question. Look in the mirror and practise your opening. Start strong, gain confidence and finish well.
5. Look at these questions. We are looking for candidates who are self-driven, intellectually curious and passionate go-getters
6. Demonstrate your curiosity and resourcefulness. Find out about us — Google, Facebook, Medium, LinkedIn, GitHub, Glassdoor, etc …
7. Learn about our past, present and future. It helps if you know people from our team.
8. Hint: We operate like 18f and UK GDS — Do some homework :)
9. Prepare some questions for us. No question means you either believe you know everything about us or you don’t know enough to ask or worst, you simply don’t care. Any one of these reflects badly on your curiosity, initiative and resourcefulness. One of my best candidates took out his checklist of questions at the end of the session and he has proven to be always well-prepared for meetings. Pay attention to your habits and your habits will take care of your behavior.
10. Tell us your beliefs, values and opinions. If you play it too safe, we will be unsure of what you stand for. Be bold. We respect diversity of perspective and opinion. In short, we are not looking for ‘yes-(wo)man’.
11. If you are a go-getter, you will follow up with HR on the interview result. This can be the tiebreaker.

To find out more, check our articles on our workplace, our work and our culture. Look forward to your CV whenever you are ready for the challenge, steven_koh@tech.gov.sg.😀

How-to be part of our engineering team was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reflect on the past

It all started in Nov 2017 when Patrice from Ngee Ann Poly approached us with this use case. Our team accepted the challenge and developed a prototype using blockchain within four months. Patrice then used the prototype to rally other institutions to onboard OpenCerts.

It then took six months to rally all institutes of higher learning (iHLs) to onboard, followed by another six months for their students to graduate before the institutions anchored the graduating certificates onto the blockchain.

By Apr 2019, OpenCerts has grown from a blockchain PoC with Ngee Ann Polytechnic, to a national deployment in Singapore’s 🇸🇬 education sector.

All credit for our success goes to the amazing people mentioned in the Credit Rolls 👇

Look to the future

…, the Government cannot make this happen alone, cannot make this happen through force of will, by wishing it, by making speeches. We need the ideas and the capabilities of our people and businesses. As a nation, everyone needs to be part of our Smart Nation journey.

We do not have a monopoly on the best ideas and talent, and we need to create opportunities for citizens, community partners and businesses to contribute meaningfully to Smart Nation — Dr Janil Puthucheary

We have received requests from both local and overseas institutions to onboard OpenCerts and would like to partner our communities and businesses to meet these demands.

To encourage partnership and drive adoption, our engineering principle on using open-standards, open source and public permissionless blockchain for OpenCerts shall remain unchanged. OpenCerts will continue to be free for all students and employers to verify educational credentials.

We are looking for partners who are interested in one or more of these areas:

1. Help us support more educational institutions such as private training providers onboard OpenCerts. E.g. Partners such as systems integrator, ISVs, consultancy and product companies in educational sector, especially those with overseas experience are welcome!
2. Tech startups who are keen to build products to manage OpenCerts beyond education sector, such as driving license, business license, marriage certificate, birth certificate, death certificate, etc…
3. Job portals, HRMS and employment companies who are interested to automate their credential verification process via API.
4. Support overseas education institutions and foreign government agencies who expressed interest to onboard OpenCerts.

For more info, check out our doc and send us a pull request! ✋

What else

Compared to other non-blockchain based solutions, I believe a blockchain based solution, such as OpenCerts works best for this use case. But don’t take my word for it, here’s the comparison with other solutions. 😊

Other from OpenCerts, our team is also exploring the use of blockchain for other domains such as the bill-of-lading, virtual currency and cross-border identity.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten — Bill Gates

We live in interesting times where technology has such a deep and profound impact in our economy, society and how we live our daily lives. There’s no better time in history to be an engineer.

Our team is looking for software engineers, quality engineers and devops engineers who like what we do and how we operate. If you are interested to join us and make our world a better place, I look forward to hear from you — steven_koh@tech.gov.sg.

For more updates, follow us and our blockchain meetup !

Cheers! 😊

Credit Rolls

All credit for our success goes to our

• Amazing people in GDS — Raymond Yeh, RJ Chow, Joel Tai, Angel Wong
• Bee Teck and his IT team in MOE — Chen Chen, Carol and Charis
• SSG’s team — Richard, Kian Wee and Wenshan
• Most importantly, Clarence, Patrice and his team from Ngee Ann Poly who started this amazing adventure because …

Failed IT projects are often technology-driven. Successful ones are business-led.

Thank you for believing in us while others kept asked, “Has it been done before?” That’s what differentiates visionaries from the average. 😊

Blockchain, OpenCerts and Partnership was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The good news is everyone is onto agile these days. The bad news is people are onto agile without knowing what it entails.

One of my biggest bugbears is the myth of faster, cheaper and deliver better outcome with agile, and here is why …

Origin (本)

The story of the agile manifesto is well-known in the agile community. Unfortunately, not many have heard of lean manufacturing which predates agile development and has a strong influence on agile development.

Many practices in agile development are heavily influenced by lean manufacturing and both methods have a similar philosophy, which emphasizes waste reduction. These two approaches differ in execution primarily because lean manufactures physical goods while agile develops digital products.

By reducing waste, lean manufacturing produces higher-quality goods at a lower cost.

Which begs the question, “Isn’t agile development faster, cheaper and deliver better outcome through waste reduction?”

The myth of faster, cheaper and better outcome

Yes. It does. Unfortunately, it is even easier to do agile without waste reduction.

Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking. It’s like sticking a Porsche decal on a bicycle. QED.

Sometimes, it happens when the delivery team or scrum master is inexperienced so you will want them to read this and send them for proper training.

In most situations, stakeholders or product owners don’t really understand the implications of agile development. They often believe that agile is something for the delivery team to do, while they can remain status quo. Unfortunately, nothing can be further from the truth.

For agile to be effective, stakeholders and product owners have to change their behaviors and provide a conducive environment for the delivery team. Else, they should just stick with traditional waterfall because doing agile without reaping the benefit is sheer stupidity.

Why bother when it’s all pain and no joy. Not even a masochist.

Seven wastes to eliminate

Waste 1: Partially done work (aka work-in-progress, WIP)

Such as detailed documentation and wire-frames and I don’t mean partially done documentation and wire-frames. I am referring detailed documentation, wire-frames, and plans that are yet to be implemented as code. Until they have been implemented as working code, these are WIP.

WIP worsens task switching, waiting time and the possibility of rework.

Unfortunately, people craves certainty and planning gives comfort, and some stakeholders and product owners have more emotional needs than others. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Plans, documentation, and wire-frames are proxies, with varied fidelity waiting to be implemented.

The amount of waste you can reduce depends on the risk appetite of your stakeholders. WIP is an unavoidable evil so strive to keep it low.

Waste 2: Extra processing

Obviously, don’t spend too much time to polish proxies such as plans, documentation and wire-frames.

Unfortunately when organizations are structured as functional groups, functional specialists tend to over-process because they are appraised to do so — planners are evaluated by their detailed and exhaustive plan, business analysts are measured by the thickest of their requirement documentation, and designers are… you get it.

No single raindrop believes it is to be blamed for the flood

This systemic waste cannot be eliminated by the agile delivery team. It requires organizational restructuring by the senior management, to align incentives throughout the organisation. This is why our people report within the squad in GDS. Mission-focused over functional-centric.

Waste 3: Task switching

Another side effect of functional groups is the tendency to assign each specialist to multiple projects, in order to fully utilize them.

Digital delivery activities are highly abstract and require creativity. Switching across tasks incur waste due to context-switching. Additional waste is incurred to persist the current state with reasonably high-fidelity, in order to be correctly resumed. It takes about 15 minutes to interrupt, persist the mental state and then resume work for every task switching.

Another common cause of task switching is meetings. If you must have meetings, always move meetings to the beginning or end of the day in order to minimize waste to the entire team. Understand the difference between maker’s time and manager’s time.

To be responsive to change requires slack. A fully utilized workforce is the antithesis of agility because it increases waiting time and delay. Yes, you are trading off utilization for responsiveness, so deal with it slave driver.

Waste 4: Waiting / delays

Excessive waiting often arises when the product owner is not collocated with the delivery team. The team needs the product owner to clarify user stories and validate their work when it’s completed. Waiting time can be disproportionately high when teams are distributed across different time-zones.

This impedes the team’s ability to get feedback from product owner during retrospective and from other stakeholders during sprint review. No or slow feedback means no or slow improvement, which causes persistent defects and repeated rework.

Meeting is the most common cause of delays — finding a common time slot, synchronizing room’s and people’s availability. If you must have meetings, here’s how to make the most of it.

Waste 5: Defects (rework)

The longer it takes to detect defects, more defects will be created and more waste incurred on rework.

The only solution is to shorten the feedback loop and rectify early. Daily stand-up, sprint review and retrospective session are the best avenues to obtain feedback, rectify defects and drive improvement.

Unfortunately, these sessions are often underutilized. The team requires a safe environment to share critical and constructive feedback, in order to level-up their game. The product owner must participate in and co-create this safe space.

Waste 6: Hand-offs

Like similar reasons for partially done work, extra processing and task switching, hand-off often arises due to functional organizational structure.

Knowledge is lost every time a deliverable or an artifact is handed-off across roles. This results in longer delay and higher defects, on order of magnitude more than the hand-off of physical goods. It is foolish to incur hand-off cost in favor of higher utilization of people, for digital work.

Waste 7: Overproduction

Overproduction is to develop features that are not needed by the users. The best way to prevent overproduction is to build the smallest possible feature or product (MVP) and validate the hypothesis before building a bigger and better version of it.

Unfortunately, overproduction often happens because of product arrogance by product owners and other stakeholders. They are often overly certain of their idea that they choose to skip the MVP and invest in a full-blown product.

Of all the wastes, overproduction is the worst because it exacerbates all other wastes.

Summary

Agile rituals and engineering practices are useful and will help your team improve their game. Unfortunately, the team’s performance improvement will soon hit-a-wall due to obstacles beyond their control.

These obstacles are also known as wastes — a term borrowed from lean manufacturing. They arise from excessive planning, functional organization structure, unavailable product owner, excessive meetings, lack of a safe environment for critical and constructive feedback, and product arrogance by HiPPO.

Surprise! There’s nothing magical about agile.

Agile makes these wastes visible, so that product owners and stakeholders can eliminate them. Otherwise, it’s just another fancy idea that produces more noise than substance.

I hope this article broadens your perspective on what’s important in agile and why it works.

Our team is looking for software/quality and devops engineers who are passionate about tech and want to help us build awesome digital services for Singapore! 🇸🇬

Reach me at steven_koh@tech.gov.sg (ゝ‿ ・)

Want to know more? Here’s how we operate and the work we do.

Cheers! 🍻

The biggest myth of agile development — faster, cheaper and better outcome was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you are spending too much time in meetings, here are some thoughts on how we can all do better. :)

Before you accept any meeting invitation, consider these questions first.

Objective — What does a successful meeting look like?

Agenda — What are the discussion topics to achieve the objective?

People — Do we have the right people in the room to achieve the objective?

Most importantly, why should you attend?

• What value are you expected to bring to the meeting?
• What value can you derive from the meeting?

Lastly, instead of meeting in-person, why not just replace it with a phone call? :)

If you are an engineer or designer and are spending too much time in meetings, help your team understand the difference between maker’s time and manager’s time.

In GDS, our people are encouraged to be protective of their time. Spending time with users and building products is always time well spent. For everything else, use the guide above.

Be mindful of the opportunity cost of having pointless meetings.

If you like our culture of getting things done with minimum fuss, frill and formality, our team is hiring! Drop me a mail at steven_koh@tech.gov.sg

We are looking for software/quality/devops engineers who are passionate about tech and love to build awesome digital products for our Smart Nation! 🇸🇬

Want to know more? Here’s how we operate and roles we are hiring.

Cheers! (ゝ‿ ・)

Making the most out of meetings was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So you have finally gotten the funding to deliver your first digital product and eager to form your first digital delivery team. Like many others, you are probably perplexed about the required roles and ideal team composition.

Here’s some help to demystify this common question :)

Key guiding principles — to avoid hiring mistakes

• Every product has different needs — there’s no one ideal team composition so please don’t copy blindly from others
• Hire one full stack role for each group — this is more prudent than hiring multiple sub-roles per group. Less gets more done.
• Start with generalist with higher learning agility over specialist — This allows you to defer certain hiring decision to the last responsible moment. Unless your company hires and fires, slow is fast.

This is a full stack role
- Sub-role 1
- Sub-role 2
- Sub-role 3

Full stack designer
- Visual designer
- Interaction designer
- Content designer
- User researcher

Full stack delivery lead
- Product Manager (here’s how a kickass PM looks like)
- Scrum master or even better, a delivery manager

Full stack developer
- Frontend developer
- Backend developer
- Build & release engineer

Full stack DevOps engineer
- Build & release engineer
- SRE

Full stack quality engineer
- Application security engineer
- Application performance engineer
- Test automation engineer

What else

• Unicorns are rare and here’s some help to find them.
• Subsequent hires in each group allow more specialization. E.g. The second hire for each group should fill the skills gap of the first hire.
• Common skills in each group lend itself well to engender T-shaped and eventually π-shaped specialists.
• Back-filling a position? Do a SWOT analysis with your team to identify their skills gap because you do not know everything. :)
• Grown so big that you’re thinking of having a CTO, VP or Director of Engineering?
• And everything else you need to know about building an agile team, and then scaling up — thanks to Poh Kah Kong, our awesome 💪 delivery manager!

Here’s what we do at GDS. We’re looking for great team players with solid technical chops. Join us to build awesome digital services for our fellow citizens and businesses! CV -> steven_koh@tech.gov.sg.

If you find this article valuable, don’t forget to help others find it by recommending ❤ and sharing it.

Let’s make our tech industry 🇸🇬 great again! 😉

Cheers! :)

Hiring approach for digital delivery was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this post, I will touch on the use case for consortium-based DLT and conclude with some thoughts on this technology.

Copyright Registry on Consortium DLT

Copyright infringement can happen because sometimes it is difficult to find the contact information of the author of creative work or is challenging to obtain a suitable licence to use. The traditional approach is to have a trusted authority such as IPOS, running the copyright registry in a central database.

There’s no better time to dream bigger, beyond our shores. 🦁🏖️

Together with IPOS, we envisioned a copyright registry on DLT that can be collectively run by IP Offices across the world. This will expand copyright protection of creative work across borders and can enable a global marketplace, where it’s easier for authors to collaborate and collect royalties for their creative work across countries.

So we developed a copyright registry that allows an author to create a unique fingerprint of her/his digital work as a hash and save this hash in the DLT, together with creation’s timestamp and content’s meta-data. This unique fingerprint can then serve as proof in a copyright infringement dispute.

For this PoC, we experimented with several DLTs that are suited to run in a permissioned and consortium environment, such as Parity and Swirlds.

Unlike the PoC on academic credential, this use case is pretty self-explanatory because short of having a central body who commands the trust of all IP offices, DLT is the next best alternative.

DLT is an institutional technology — not just a shared database.

Here’s how it works — implemented in Hashgraph as well as Parity🏂

Final thoughts on DLT

DLT is a very promising technology, albeit with a very small problem-solution space. So before you get all excited and add to the already nonsensical blockchain hype, here are some compulsory readings to temper your expectations.

• Avoiding the pointless blockchain project
• My professional opinion as a blockchain researcher: I don't see the point (yet)
• Blockchain or Bullshit?
• Do you need a blockchain?

“Curiosity is not a sin…. But we should exercise caution with our curiosity.” — Dumbledore

There are three types of DLT — private, consortium and public.

1. If you can use private DLT, chances are you can also use a traditional database. So why bother with DLT when you can use a traditional relational database which is battle-tested for decades, able to process thousands of transactions per second and well-supported by tech specialists. Unless for blockchain hype, ICO craze or corporate KPI, no? 😉
2. Consortium-based DLT is useful for organizational collaboration, such as inter-bank payment and settlements, and copyright registry across countries when no single entity governs all others. Warning: If a 3rd-party service provider operates all the nodes in your consortium-based DLT, you are basically shifting trust from a central database to a new intermediary. So unless this new middleman can provide the service at a fraction of the cost, this doesn’t make much sense. 🤷‍♂️
3. And of these three, public DLT makes the most sense because…

The biggest benefit of DLT comes from its unique ability to distribute trust across multiple writers which is the basis of OpenCerts. This dis-intermediates dumb notary.

Dumb because some functions of a notary are smart, such as interpreting patents — until AI comes along so let’s save that story for another day. 😉

Our work on OpenCerts lends itself well to many industries that require notary services:

1. Are not time-sensitive and therefore allows batching to overcome the performance challenges and transaction costs of Ethereum.
2. Allow user to disclose — confidential — information selectively.
3. Have a dumb notary that is expensive or inconvenient to upkeep — not disruption for disruption’s sake.
4. And preferably use across borders.

Examples are health records, identity, bill of lading, contracts, licenses and other legal documents. E.g. deed poll, driving licenses, business licenses, etc…

Coupled with open-standards and open source, DLT is a powerful technology for governments to collaborate across borders, especially in areas of trade, finance, education and identity — of all, I personally find Decentralized Identity Foundation most interesting.

And here’s a parting question — How can polygamy be detected or enforced across countries without DLT? 😉

We are looking for solid software engineers who are passionate about tech and want to help us build awesome digital products for Singapore! 🇸🇬🏆

Reach me at steven_koh@tech.gov.sg (ゝ‿ ・)

For more DLT adventure, follow us and join our DLT Singapore meetup! 😉

Cheers! 🍻

Distributed Ledger Tech for Public Good — Part 2 was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the uninitiated, blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Apart from the widely known Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are many other flavors of DLT with different attributes and value propositions. For noob, this and this might be helpful. :)

Over the past four months, our team has worked on two DLT PoCs with Institutes of Higher Learning and Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS). We tried out different types of DLTs and evaluated their capabilities in areas of performance, security, scalability, flexibility, ease of use and etc…

In this post, I will touch on the use case for educational credential, using public DLT.

OpenCerts on Public DLT

To digitize educational credential, we built on the good work of Open Badges and Blockcerts, and developed a solution on public DLT. The objective is to create digital educational transcripts and certificates that are based on open-standards, are tamper-proof and can be used across borders.

DLT is best suited for low-trust environment or one with no central authority. In the high-trust educational environment we have in Singapore, it might not make much sense to use DLT to attest local certificates. Unless, it’s for cross-border.

Using proprietary technology or platforms will greatly discourage adoption by overseas institutions, which is why our solution is based on open-standards, is open source, uses a public permissionless DLT and runs smart contracts. No prize for guessing Ethereum here. 😉

Our system has two workflows:

1. Issue/revoke certificate
2. Verify certificate

Issue/Revoke Certificate via Certificate Store Admin

Certificate store admin is the website for all educational institutions to issue and revoke certificates. Some videos on how this works:

1. For 1st timers, deploy a new store to store certificates.

2. Use our CLI tool to batch your certificates and issue into your store in a single transaction. Regardless one certificate or 10,000 certificates, it will take about the same amount of time to transact. 😉

3. Revoke certificates with smart contract, from our certificate store admin.

View and Verify Certificates

Certificate viewer is the website for employers or 3rd party to verify the authenticity of certificates. This is where we can

1. Verify if the owner of the certificate is who he claims to be
2. Check if the certificate had been tampered with
3. Make sure the educational institution is legit — not degree mill :)
4. Check the certificate against revocation list

In comparison with other approaches

1) A self-help credential verification website per educational institution using traditional database

• The cost of setting up self-help portal might not make economic sense for small institutions, especially private training institutions.
• OpenCerts provides a certificate store admin for all institutions to use. This means zero infrastructure cost.

2) A centralized self-help credential verification website across all educational institutions using a traditional database

• Given the sheer number of private training institutions, this approach will take humongous amount of time, cost and effort to align priorities, coordinate all parties and integrate systems to store certificate centrally, establish system/data ownership and apportion the cost of ownership, as compared to a decentralized approach using DLT.
• Consider the risk of putting all the eggs in a single basket and the high infrastructure cost to secure and fortify it with high-availability. With OpenCerts, institutions only need to pay for gas — transaction cost. High-availability is free, out of the box! 😀
• Using OpenCerts, only the hash is stored on the chain and educational certificate resides with the student. No confidential data is stored centrally — nothing to hack!
• Since there’s no need to build data exchange pipes across disparate systems to store data centrally, OpenCerts is at least a hundred times more cost-effective and easier to onboard than a centralized system!

3) Traditional digital signature with CA

• This works pretty well, until institutions need to revoke the recipient’s certificate due to plagiarism or wrongly printed name.
• Using traditional digital signature, once you sign and distribute the document, you can’t retract it. This limitation is inherent because you can’t distribute the CRL worldwide. Depending on your use case, this design can be a feature or a limitation. Here’s more info.
• In contrast, OpenCerts provides a certificate store admin for institutions to to revoke certificate. It uses smart contract as the CRL.

4) Other DLT implementations

• We intentionally avoided private blockchain to avoid this seemingly unsolvable problem. Public blockchain is chosen to engender a balance of power across participating nodes. This creates higher trust and hopefully, greater participation. :)
• Low-throughput and high-cost are common issues with other DLT implementations. The original method of issuing certificate will take approximately 4 seconds to 2 minutes to publish a certificate onto Ethereum. Using OpenCerts, institutions can issue arbitrarily large number of certificates in one transaction. Saving both time and money by factors of thousands.
• Other implementations tend to publish the entire certificate on the blockchain. With OpenCerts, student is able to prove the existence of her/his certificate without disclosing any information on the blockchain — more privacy.
• We are the first in this space to implement selective privacy filter with OpenCerts. This feature allows institutions to issue one digital certificate instead of issuing a certificate, a result slip (or transcript), a testimonial, etc… because privacy filter allows individuals to have fine controls of how much data they will like to disclose.

What’s more?

Now that OpenCerts is deployed at a national level for educational sector in Singapore, we are looking for partners who are interested to use and help us grow the adoption of OpenCerts — additional info here — in Singapore and beyond! 😊

To support adoption by private sector and overseas institutions, we have decentralized the identity resolution and renderer engine, and here’s how it works! 😊

Look forward to more collaboration with citizens and businesses, and spread the ❤️ forward! 🌈 😀

Part 2: Our adventure with IPOS on copyright registry

PS: We are looking for solid software engineers who are passionate about tech and want to help us build awesome digital services for Singapore! Drop me an email at steven_koh@tech.gov.sg (ゝ‿ ・)

Cheers! 🍻

For those with the patience to read this far. 😉

Distributed Ledger Tech for Public Good — Part 1 was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You accept every individual as a whole, as who we are, not nitpicking or pressuring us to be who we are not

You trust us with our work and give us space to explore better ways, instead of following traditional methods

You understand our challenges and constantly appreciate our craft, instead of taking us or our work for granted

You encourage and support us to do the right thing, instead of the easiest thing just to win others’ approval

You are courageous, always ready to stick out like a sore thumb, instead of following the crowd

You are remarkably hilarious and awesome, leaving your mark in all of us

We’ll continue your good work and bring your mark to bear in all we do

On behalf of Hive, we wish you all the best in future endeavor! 🇸🇬🏆

Be happy. Be awesome. Help many more others be happy and awesome! :)

A tribute to Mark because … was originally published in GovTech Singapore on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.