Members of the MIT Media Lab have related in a Medium post what they have learned from designing a system for issuing academic certificates using bitcoin blockchain technology. The team released version 1 of its code under its open source license to allow others to experiment with similar ideas. The lab wants to share its ideas behind the design.
The team members who authored the blog include Juliana Nazare, a graduate student in the Program in Media Arts and Sciences at the lab, Kim Hamilton Duffy, a principal engineer at Learning Machine, and J. Philipp Schmidt, director of learning innovation at the lab. A Sharing Approach
The team learned a lot about the way technology can shape socioeconomic practices around the concept of credentials. By sharing its experiences, the team thinks it will help institutions and other developers make use of blockchain architectures.
The team noted that the most interesting challenges were not technical in nature, but they could not separate the challenges from the technology since small design decisions can impact behavior. Hence, the team took small steps, tested the system with users, and made changes based on what it learned. The team noted the blockchain is still a new technology and the long-term effects of design decisions have to be carefully considered.
The certification architecture’s design is fairly simple. An issuer signs a digital certificate and stores it hash in a blockchain transaction. The recipient receives a transaction output. Version 1: Starting Point
Version 1 is considered a starting point for other researchers. Institutions seeking to introduce digital credential systems are encouraged to wait for version 2. The MIT team has begun a redesign and will release future versions under the same license.
There are three repositories in the digital certificate architecture.
Cert-schema refers to the digital certificate data standard. Such a […]
