Announcing selection final phase eSSIF-Lab and maximum funding by the European Commission
We are very excited and proud to announce that our team has been selected to enter the third and final phase of the European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework Lab. In the last five months, we have done extensive research & development into a use-case to let employees regain control over their career-related data. Therefore receiving the maximum development grant of €106.000 (funded by the European Commission) to bring our MVP into production.
The European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (eSSIF) is part of the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI). EBSI is a joint initiative from the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP) and the European Commission (EC) to deliver EU-wide cross-border public services using blockchain technology.
About EBSI & EBP
As of 2020, EBSI is deploying a network of distributed nodes across Europe, supporting applications for selected use-cases. 29 European member states are now participating in the EBP, find a list here. After going to market with the MVP in the Netherlands, WorkPi & Work X will actively interact with all member states to expand the ecosystem and enable every citizen to regain control over their career-related data.
The SSI use-case
Jobs are rapidly evolving or disappearing due to technological developments. Before 2030, 1 billion people need to be reskilled (World Economic Forum). To measure skillgaps and provide the essential reskilling recommendations, innovative assessment and development solutions should be leveraged. However, the resulting data from these solutions have proven to be very valuable and privacy-sensitive.
We believe that work & education data should be privately owned and governed. Therefore, we enable users to store assessments, diplomas and training certificates in privately owned wallets leveraging Self-Sovereign Identity technology (SSI).
While exploring the usage of SSI in the employment environment, various other solutions such as federated learning, unbiased hiring and data-driven outplacement have been identified besides the data privacy case. The funding of the European Commission has allowed us to perform extensive quantitative and qualitative research within our business community, alongside the development of an MVP to validate that these solutions solve the data privacy problem. Also other problems such as scattered data within organisations, GDPR-compliance and integration costs of assessment and education solutions have been explored. Based on the first interview results the MVP has proven to offer a promising solution to the above-mentioned problems. The business community has strengthened its trust in our proposition and will remain as a partner in the ecosystem.
Next steps
The additional funding will be used to bring the MVP into production with the launching enterprise client to produce user feedback, improve the application and integrate with the Work X job platform. Also, we will be able to integrate with more assessment and education providers from EuroPass to increase the supply of tools for generating credentials. These steps are essential to achieve the bigger vision of establishing an ecosystem with a large number of organisations in various industries that can all learn from each other without having to worry about data privacy.
