BUIDL with The State of Colorado & The Colorado Governor’s Office for Information Technology at ETHDenver 2021
Curious about BUIDLing at ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021 with The State of Colorado & The Colorado Governor’s Office for Information Technology at ETHDenver 2021but wanting more details on their project? Get the scoop from their recent interview with ETHDenver:
Tell Us About Your Involvement This Year
“I came to the realization that without digital ID, digital identity, we really couldn’t take advantage of blockchain the way we needed to. And so it’s great to see that we’re able to with our successes, and just in the state, show the rest of the world what we can do. And I think that what we’ll do with ETHDenver is the same thing.
You know, we’ve all gone to, you know, these big conferences that have been virtualized and all it meant was, basically, it’s a big webinar, you know, and it’s boring, and it’s not, you know, it’s really not conducive to creativity; it’s cringy. It’s conducive to monotony, even when, even in the best of times, whereas this, you have a platform that’s basically Roblox for enterprise, you know, and it’ll be, if nothing else, interesting, you know, the periphery will be interesting, and hopefully, that’ll be engaging, and people will see, not only is it interesting, but they’re all these amazing people trying to make a big difference. And that’s why, you know, all the different things like, the Greenfield pitches that we have from the state are going to be awesome. With the big ideas, we’ll be taking those five minute presentations about potential solutions for those, and then all the different hackathon topics that we have; we’re super excited about that. And, of course, MyColorado has a bunch of those in a panel; that should be cool. We have our ColoradoJam day too, and then all the rest, where we’ll be running around in those days to it, it’s just gonna be amazing!”
What Else Should BUIDLers Know?
“Well, I think if you look back, hackathons, for a long time have been leveraged by governments, they’re trying to be progressive to move the needle forward in what they can expect. Where they say, ‘Okay, here’s our data sets, make it, you know, real, it came from that, you know, free your data, and you’ll make the world millions of dollars and be more useful,’ which didn’t really pan out. But, what did pan out is fast ways to leverage new technologies to create, you know, concepts, concept projects, and things like that, that showed people. And by people, I mean, decision makers and stakeholders, that there was a different way of doing things. You know, otherwise, we’d all still be in sort of old Windows ’98 user interface method of doing everything.
Web three technologies, blockchain technologies, are not something that you know, your standard developers are doing. And when we can show them, ‘Oh, in a matter of days, we’re able to come up with this; a small team is able to stand up something with minimal requirements, that actually works, and can potentially change the way that the government delivers IT services or the government manages its services. That’s a huge win. And nobody, I think nobody can disagree with that. For DAOs, and especially like The Opolis Employment Commons, with the populace and things like that, we don’t have a framework yet with government, right? We don’t have a framework where we can really leverage them within government, yet. So what we want to do is get these concepts in front of as many people as possible, and figure out how we can change our framework in a way that allows us to leverage these new things, right?
I mean, if you think about this, you back it up to electronic signatures, everybody wanted blue ink, right? Pay on a piece of paper with blue ink, it took a long time, and still some states don’t do it, you know, to take an electronic signature, something as simple as an electronic signature, when really, legally all you need is the intent of a signer. It took a long time to get that going. So I think in Colorado, we’ve got a whole lot of really forward thinking. Directors and certainly the Governor, you know, from the top down at the Secretary of State, and a lot of the legislators really want to move this forward. And so what we need to do is, it’s easy to tell people what you want, what the way things should look, and they won’t hear it. They can’t see it, but if you can show them, right, if you can show them what it means and what it could mean, that is when communication really happens. And that’s when people have that eureka moment; their eyes dilate. They’re like, ‘Oh, I get it, right.’ And so that’s what we can get out of things like ETHDenver, letting the stakeholders and decision makers say, ‘I see the path forward.’ When you can see the path when you see this is how it would work, and you see examples of that, then suddenly, it works!”
Meet the team and learn more about The State of Colorado & The Colorado Governor’s Office for Information Technology at ETHDenver 2021 at ETHDenver & ColoradoJam 2021, February 5–12! Apply today at ethdenver.com.
