Dear EASIG Leaders,

In my recent email exchange with both Phil Long and David Boswell, I was reminded by Phil of our original goals for EASIG as listed below:

• Create open-source, shareable assets to reduce barriers to entry and adoption for education stakeholders

• Explore and showcase key educational use cases of blockchain 

• Foster collaborations between academic institutions, policymakers, vendors, and other education stakeholders

• Develop and promote the alignment of important interoperability standards in open APIs and protocols for education use cases, including from open standards bodies such as: IMS Global Learning Consortium, IEEE, W3C, PESC, etc.

• Curate or develop professional development or technical assistance resources to support educational practitioners on approaches to applying blockchain technology across various educational use cases

I was also reminded by David of an email message that Sharon had sent last November right after our kick-off meeting:

"We missed this opportunity to discuss this as a larger community during the kick off meeting for various reasons, but in retrospect, this might give us all a bit of time to reflect on the goals we initially drafted and discuss whether those are this group could uniquely accomplish."

I agree and would also like to echo what Taylor has said in his recent message that "these are extraordinary times that require patience and empathy. That said, my view is that this work is even more important now than it was pre-pandemic. New infrastructure (for better or worse) is being developed NOW and imho this group I'd like to see involved in shaping it."

In some ways, this group is involved in shaping it since we have many members in this group who are leading the charges in many education blockchain initiatives: Sharon's leadership in ACE's Education Blockchain Initiative (EBI), Alex's successful creatiion of the blockchain/Hyperledger consortium among IBM, National Student Clearinghouse, CNM and other partners, Taylor's leadership in the C-Lab in Colorado and many other initiatives, as well as ASU's Trusted Learner Network initiative that Phil is leading. I am sure that there are many others but I am just listing a few to make a point that there are a lot of exciting things happening in education blockchain; there are also plenty of opportunities for this group to take on.

The question is, however, what role EASIG can play and how we can get engaged in shaping the future for education blockchain? 

Thanks!

Feng