The GovTechLab Knowledge Transfer Consortium was launched June 5th with the participation of key opinion formers from across central government departments, top academic institutions and industry stakeholders. “Digital Government Technologies: Blockchain” was chosen as the theme of the event. In the opening speech, Lord Holmes commented that, “Distributed Ledger Technologies & Blockchain have the potential to help give us the society we should always be with collaboration and partnership at its heart.”
The launch event also hosted thought-provoking presentations from David Shorthouse (Guartime), on the digital infrastructure of the pioneering Estonia example; Alex Crossley (Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport – DCMS), on HMG Policy Perspectives on Blockchain’; Darragh Kelly (Government Digital Service – GDS), on the ‘GovTech Catalyst’ programme; John Baird (EPSRC), on the newly formed UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strategy and the EPSRC Digital Economy Programme (focusing mainly on the DLT related projects); and, Alpesh Doshi (Fintricity) and Adi Ben-Ari (Applied Blockchain), on their recent products.
Dr Cathy Mulligan, Chief Technology Officer at GovTechLab, also presented the consortium’s pioneering software project – DataNet – which she described as “a global data infrastructure to do for data what the Internet did for communication”.
The launch event was closed with a discussion on future activities of the consortium.