VON
The Verifiable Organizations Network (VON)
The goal of the Verifiable Organizations Network (VON) project is to explore the design of an open, unified and trusted network of organizational data for use by people and services across British Columbia. The network can reduce the effort put forward by people looking to use services requiring data about their organization since it is readily available from trusted sources.
VON offers government digital service providers the possibility of dramatically improving their users' service experience. This is accomplished through open and simple access to authenticated organizational data so their users don't need to find and re-enter data the government already holds. Data is simply shared when its open, or shared with authorized consent.
Most up to date website vonx.io
Objectives
The overall goal of the project is to understand, design and de-risk the business and technology elements of the proposed Verifiable Organizations Network concept. One key objective of the work is to design and deliver a proof of concept reference Verifiable Organizations Network implementation.
Success includes creating the business and technological conditions for the creation of a unified, open and trusted network of organizational data. This network can have the following types of benefits to its members.
Organizational data is
- available to users so they won't need to find it and re-enter it
- shared when its open, or shared otherwise with consent
- a data platform available to foster innovation
Government digital services will have
- the ability to simplify their users' experience through access to a network of unified data
- decreased time to market and decreased costs as they won't have to re-create costly capabilities related to data collection and management
People representing organizations will
- experience less friction as the interact with government digital services
- will be in control of their digital relationship with government
Government will gain
- experience based knowledge of distributed ledger, graph databases and related technologies
- improve its sophistication as a consumer
- improve its capacity as regulator of digital economy
- insight to the operations of the economy through data
Documentation and Other Works in Progress
As we build out our understanding of what the Verifiable Organizations Network could/should be we are sharing the work products via a Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4DUXk_qFFhvb0otNlNHMVNvUzg). You are free to browse the documents and contact us if you have comments, contributions or questions. A GitHub Issue would be fine, as would GitHub pull requests to the VON repo, or comments in the Google Docs referenced above.
There is also another GitHub repo where we are working on a specific component of the VON codenamed "TheOrgBook (and now called "OrgBook"). You can read about it in the Google Docs above and checkout its repo - https://github.com/bcgov/TheOrgBook.
About BC DevEx and Devops
The BC Developers' Exchange and DevOps Branch (BC DevEx and DevOps) is growing an ecosystem of co-creation, commercialization and rapid adoption of innovation between the British Columbia's technology industry and the B.C. public sector.
It aims to foster growth in the British Columbia (B.C.) technology industry and the commercialization of it products and services by enabling:
- BC's technology industry to use the digital resources (code, data, application programming interfaces) of the B.C. public sector in their own commercial developments.
- BC's public sector organizations to become 'first customers' of B.C.'s technology industry by rapidly adopting industry-developed innovations for service and operational improvement.
- BC's technology industry and B.C.'s public sector to collaborate, co-create and co-develop new products and services export based market opportunities for industry, and service improvements for the public sector.
The BC DevEx and DevOps team is creating a lightweight set of enabling policies, processes and technical artifacts. The current releases of these are available at:
The BC DevEx and DevOps team uses lean-startup theory and has adopted the agile methodology. Much of the teams' work is being done in the open, on the Internet. As the BC DevEx and DevOps team gains exposure to the needs of the BC Public Service it is recognizing the opportunity to assist in the design and delivery of reusable technical artifacts. These reusable artifacts could take a variety of forms including shared open code, shared libraries, RESTful Microservices or similar reusable technical artifacts. The BC DevEx and DevOps technical artifacts, as well as the tools and techniques the team is using are being evolved in a dynamic, learn-as-you-go approach.
In line with the objectives of the BC DevEx and DevOps goals, the Verifiable Organizations Network is a concept aimed at exploring business and technology approaches needed to solve the long-standing problem of simplifying business users digital experience for government services.