Next Steps, January 2018
Now that the UNite Ideas challenge has completed we have a reference, meaning both a visible project and personal contacts with UN personnel. Moving forward we're planning a three pronged approach:
Contact support entities Development Contact reporting orgs
Support Entities
This entails building relations with altruistic minded organizations with the intention to get support for the project in some form, either financial, technical, or advising. The core focus will be the UN, especially the UN Statistics Division, which would be Chaîne's prime user on the global level. Related organizations like the World Economic Forum Blockchain Council need to be approached as well. Commercial entities with an altruistic bent, such as ConsenSys with its http://blockchainforsocialimpact.com/ coalition, are next on the list. If anybody has any suggestions for other parties we'd welcome the input. Technical initiatives, such as IPFS itself, will play a pivotal role in making the project come together and we need to cement relations with them.Development Our Proof of Concept was minimal with only one IPFS instance. We need to setup an infrastructure that mimics the global structure of 195 nodes. Probably we should choose a continent, like the 28 countries of Europe, and create a network fractal of 28 IPFS instances. Then load them with example content and see how it all interacts. We need to figure out where the holes are and to do that we need to have running code. To do this we'll need to get some developers and/or devops people on board (on a volunteer basis).Reporting Organizations
The intention with Chaîne is to create an infrastructure for collecting data. Analyzing the data is out of scope and there are already numerous organizations playing that role. An example is http://climateactiontracker.org/. There are undoubtedly many more, often connected with the UN. We need to compile a list. It would be ideal if we can use data that has already been collected by these organizations in the network fractal setup.