When we started the first set of conversations around what would eventually become Dhiway, we wanted to help everyone exchange information with absolute certainty. What we learnt from observing the market trends is that a significant amount of effort and investment went into determining the provenance and authenticity of information that was exchanged between parties. And reducing the friction in this process would enable businesses to scale – to be able to respond quickly, precisely and strategically.
Dhiway, #MARK Studio and Trust
Today as we near the milestone of the first 1000 customers on #MARK Studio it is obvious that what we ended up designing for is trust. The product design conversations have always been pinned around enabling digital trust ecosystems. This is an important phrase and it is worth exploring more about ecosystems and trust.
The Sovrin Foundation and Digital Trust Ecosystems
The Sovrin Foundation in recent conversations around the governance of an ecosystem defined the term as
“a distributed, adaptive, open socio-technical system with properties of self-organization, scalability and sustainability inspired from natural ecosystems. Ecosystem models are informed by knowledge of natural ecosystems, especially for aspects related to competition and collaboration among diverse entities.”
Ecosystems are dynamic – they are built around market forces and hence they respond to the shared goals which are held together through the self-organization and governance of the members and participants in the ecosystem.
eSSIF-Lab, a project that aims at advancing the uptake of Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI), explains the concept of Trust as:
And it further states that
“Trust is not something that is given, but something that parties (un)consciously assess, and decide about, and changes over time. Since parties are autonomous, their trust is highly subjective.”
The concept of trust is so uniquely human, contextual and relational that any digital system which seeks to represent this innate human reaction in the digital realm has to account for both the subjective nature of trust and the fact that is amplified over a period of time.
Conclusion
Systems such as Dhiway’s Data Fabric are designed to enable the creation of a record of trust-based transactions over a long period of time thus enabling the parties in the ecosystem to find and explore the fullest meaning of this concept. By building an immutable record of authentic data transactions we create a supply chain of provenance data. And this in turn helps the members of the ecosystem to trust the system to behave as expected and deliver the services as advertised.
We believe that it is possible to establish trust between parties in a transaction even when there is a difference in the appetite for risk and levels of assurance sought for participation. We see this being possible through the ability to provide robust governance for not just data but the entire infrastructure enabling a higher level of trust and assurance in the reliability of the system.
Trust is earned. Through demonstrating reliability and accountability. Trust endures as the participants in our digital trust ecosystem continue to grow and find new and innovative ways of doing business. Trust as represented within the digital governance and trust ecosystem is what we believe is the key to the adoption of a business model that relies on the authenticity of information and data provenance.
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