Weekly Links — Is the Blockchain Hype at its Peak? (Maybe…), Behavioral Sludges, Drone Rescues + more

A roundup of what we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week.

+Has global development reached ‘peak blockchain hype? The debate started from one blog post, “A really bad blockchain idea: Digital identity cards for Rohingya refugees.” Wayan Vota, co-founder of ICTworks, explained why blockchain is problematic in this case, including the lack of known impact and privacy concerns. Do the risks outweigh the potential benefits? Muhammad Noor, founder of The Rohingya Project, doesn’t believe so: “The world wants us to wait until the Burmese government issues us a government ID … but then what? We will do this in the meantime,” he said. “We are not talking about a state ID or eliminating statelessness, we are addressing the issues caused by statelessness.”

+Satellite images show how the tiny Ugandan village of Bidi Bidi became the world’s largest refugee camp. In August 2016, you can see Bidi Bidi was surrounded by green vegetation. By December 2017, Bidi Bidi now holds close to 300,000 refugees, mostly from neighboring South Sudan.

+A Meshnet Will Help This Inuit Town Monitor the Effects of Climate Change. Community members and researchers created the eNuk app, an app that allows you to track climate conditions and share that data with other community members. The big obstacle? Internet connectivity is very poor in this small town. So, they partner with Rightmesh, a startup that aims to create a decentralized local internet network (a “mesh network”) using blockchain technology (okay, so maybe we shouldn’t ditch blockchain yet 🤔). Users sell their unused bandwidth to other users who don’t have connection, and receive a token to buy connectivity later on, incentivizing people to keep this network running. They’re still in the early stages of piloting, but this kind of collaboration and problem-solving seems like a potential model for similar projects in other contexts where internet connectivity is an obstacle.

+Cure your bad habits with “sludge,” the productivity tip you’ve never heard of. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein are known for coining the term “Nudge,” small tweaks in environments or actions that promote behavior change. What’s the opposite of that? Apparently “Sludge.” Thaler is referring to the friction and complexity in situations like filing your taxes. But “sludge” can be beneficial in some cases, like preventing accidental transactions or placing unhealthy foods out of easy reach.

+#DroneInspo. Time posts a drone rescue on their Instagram — the first rescue of its kind.

We throw around think pieces, podcasts, research, and news in our Slack channels, and we wanted to open up the conversation to our readers as well. Please note that anything we post here is not an endorsement, we just hope these weekly digests will give you something to chew on over the weekend.

We’d love to hear from you! Feel free to start a discussion below, or reach out to us on Twitter or email us at airbel@rescue.org.