Daniela Barbosa talks life as a data junkie, the expansion of Hyperledger into India, and the importance of being curious

Daniela Barbosa serves as Vice President of World Wide Alliances for Hyperledger, where she is responsible for the full lifecycle management of Hyperledger’s membership community while overseeing the broader industry and business community outreach and network growth. Daniela has developed and led growth and innovation strategies for more than 18 years with a background working with financial services, media, and enterprise software. Daniela has led both partnerships and alliances teams as well as marketing and has been responsible for driving global partnerships, OEM integrations, market leadership, and global brand awareness.

How did you get into the blockchain space?

I joined the Linux Foundation a little over a year and a half ago. I have a Masters in Library and Information Sciences, and I’ve always been deeply interested in information and how it is used. Around five years ago, I got interested in Bitcoin and I was an early commercial user of Coinbase. I started going to Bitcoin meetups in San Francisco that were a turnoff to me because of the “bro” culture I saw in the space. I was a 40-year-old woman; there wasn’t any community for women, and certainly not for someone that wasn’t 20. Fast forward a couple of years, the company that I was at got bought by private-equity and I took some time off. I knew the fintech companies in the space, and I started with a search on LinkedIn with the word “blockchain.” I got this hit from the Linux Foundation on a project called Hyperledger. I did a lot of research around Hyperledger and the executive director Brian Behlendorf, a leading figure in the open source community and founder of the Apache Software Foundation. Because my specialty is in enterprise software, I wanted to be a part of this ‘grownup’ organization creating enterprise blockchain solutions. I made every effort to learn about public and private blockchains, and applied for the job, met the team and to my delight got the role of a lifetime!

Could you tell us a little bit about Hyperledger?

Hyperledger is a nonprofit organization that is part of the Linux Foundation. For the last 16+ years, the Linux Foundation has been building open source communities. Three years ago Hyperledger was formed with a consortium of 23 member companies, and today we have more than 270 member companies and many more contributing and building solutions. Hyperledger is focused on building enterprise-grade blockchain, essentially private distributed ledger solutions for multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare, telecom and supply chain. We started with one project called Hyperledger Fabric, which IBM contributed to the Linux Foundation, followed quickly by a contribution by Intel, called Hyperledger Sawtooth. Sometimes there is a little confusion about what Hyperledger actually is and who is involved, but today we have 12 different projects and Hyperledger technology is used at hundreds of companies that are also contributing and building solutions on top of the technology.

What is your role as VP of WWA at Hyperledger?

As VP of World Wide Alliances, my role is to manage member companies and to work with companies of all sizes and origins that want to support and join our community. We have three layers of membership. The first is Premier Membership, where members get a seat on the governing board, which is very active. We also have General Members, which are companies of different sizes that are working to create blockchain solutions, services and using the technology in their own networks. Lastly, we have Associates, essentially academic blockchain groups as well as nonprofits and government entities that are either contributing research, developing solutions or helping to educate their communities on blockchain. My ecosystem team is responsible for ensuring that members at all levels are contributing to and participating in the open source community and leveraging member benefits.

“Of the 70+ open source organizations the Linux Foundation has launched, Hyperledger holds the distinction as one of the fastest growing.” What changes have you seen in the foundation/membership pool in the time that you’ve been at Hyperledger?

There has been a huge increase in mid-sized companies that are building solutions using Hyperledger. These companies are using our frameworks and building value-added services on top of them. There are many different types of services being built on top of these DLT Frameworks, and more and more companies come to us because their customers are using solutions like Hyperledger Fabric or Sawtooth and they have to provide services that are compatible with this framework. To me, this is the marketplace saying that certain products are going into production that need enterprise services and products further up the stack. That’s very exciting; a company building a product just on the Hyperledger framework by itself is fantastic, but when we start seeing companies providing products and services on top of the production implementations, it’s very exciting because we know that these DLT projects are being implemented in production.

What use cases of Hyperledger excite you?

I tend to like the least ‘sexy’ use cases — like networks of banks doing millions of dollars of asset transfers with letters of credit on blockchain that no one talks about, because if there’s no hype then you know that the use case is actually solving enterprise problems. However, what is really exciting to many of us is how the technology is making people’s lives better, and we have some great use cases that really point to how these technologies can improve lives. One of the use cases I would like to highlight is a project for mine-to-manufacturer traceability of a conflict mineral using Hyperledger Fabric. It’s a joint project from a company out of the UK called Circular, a mining company and the government of Rwanda. Tantalum is a rare mineral used to make capacitors found in devices like smartphones and laptops that we all have in our pockets and purses. Although the industry is regulated, there has not been a foolproof way to prove the source of tantalum , and this project addresses that challenge. Another use case is bringing about transparency in supply chain in the coffee business with a solution built by Scantrust using Hyperledger Sawtooth and working with a coffee company in Peru. These are exciting use cases because they are really being driven by consumers, people like you and me who are demanding ethical and transparent processing for the products we use and consume. We have a Social Impact Special Interest Group (SIG) that is a great way for people to get involved if you want to work on these types of use cases.

What does the Hyperledger community in India look like?

There’s been a huge increase in app developers in India interested in learning about Hyperledger. The Kerala Institute has a crazy goal in regards to training engineers by the end of this year, and we’ve been helping them with resources. We have a new Regional Chapter we just launched in India, so there’s lots of good work coming out of the Indian Hyperledger developer community.

Do you see a lot of production implementations of Hyperledger?

Yes, we are currently tracking around 100 production implementations across all projects, and those just the ones that we know of. With open source, it is very hard to track who is using what in production, but we are pleasantly surprised, sometimes on a daily basis, when companies share their work with us. Enterprises tend to deploy andrun these systems and only many months later talk publicly about their experiences, if at all. Keep in mind that these technologies are not black boxes and enterprise deployments are complex in many ways. Companies don’t take a blockchain code base and deploy it and say “now we have a distributed network.” There is a lot of legacy work that needs to be done with their existing systems, but that’s no different than any other enterprise technology. Imagine you work at a big regulated company and you’re moving from one ERP system to another ERP system — nothing blockchain related, just a ‘standard’ enterprise migration. The legacy system has an existing budget, a budget owner (which in blockchain there is often no such owner yet and perhaps lot’s of politics behind who would own it), and known regulatory requirements. Maybe the new ERP system has some new bells and systems, but nothing major, that migration can take 18–36 months to happen. Then,even if they speak publicly about their new ERP system, their PR/Corp Comms teams might take another 3–6months to make it public. So with blockchain, not only are you talking about new technologies, you are talking about whole new governance model (yes, lawyers are not going anywhere…), integration with existing systems and lots of unknowns, so moving to ‘production’ is just time consuming in the enterprise. But, regardless, we are seeing these stories come out and track them through member case studies as well as our blockchain showcase.

Do you see permissioned ledgers or public ledgers being a bigger part of future blockchain technology?

From what I observe, I’d say it will be based on the use case. And, yes, we’re already starting to see solutions that both use a private distributed ledger and need a public token in order to achieve their mission. You would think that these two communities would be separate, but that’s not going to be the case for long and this is why we working closely with organizations like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

Hyperledger seems focused on fostering a global ecosystem. How do you ensure that the member community remains diverse?

Diversity and inclusion are important to us from every perspective — from a vendor perspective, a company perspective, and a developer perspective. We have a team that is in Hong Kong and China, which supports our AsiaPac members. We also make an effort to work around language barriers. For example, in China we have a Technical Working Group that’s a local Chinese language working group. This is important because a lot of developers in China prefer and need to speak local languages. We just launched a regional chapter for India, and we’ll be doing other regional chapters to help local communities grow. We also host global events. For example, we just had a Hyperledger boot camp in Hong Kong, and we’ll continue having these boot camps around the world. We have communities all over the world, in Europe, Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, and South America.It takes a village to keep them all connected, but that’s what we’re focused on.

You’re a “self proclaimed data junkie.” Why?

I’ve been really interested in information, data and apps, since the early 2000s when most apps were not mobile. I’ve always played with new tools as they came out like Vox, Flickr, and even early versions of WordPress. I would find the betas for all of these apps and participate in them. At one point, I got involved in a community called DataPortability.org, which was about discussing data ownership in the early days of Facebook and MySpace. Today, I wish that maybe some of these companies would have thought a little bit more about the issues that we see today with data privacy.Here at Hyperledger, projects like Hyperledger Indy are addressing the important topic of decentralized identity. But, anytime I can get my hands on products (I was also an early user of ‘Product Hunt’), I’m always interested in testing them.

How does this translate to your work at Hyperledger and in the blockchain space?

It helps because it is an indicator and builder of curiosity. When I’m hiring, I test for how curious people are, even about things that they don’t know. Personally, I can spend hours just looking through chat rooms to see how people are talking about things. This helps me because I know how to ask questions when we’re talking to new members of our community or even developers. Asking the right questions and being curious about other people, as opposed to always looking inwards, will help you professionally,.

How can people get involved in the Hyperledger community?

We have a lot of online resources (including free courses on edX) for people to learn about Hyperledger and enterprise blockchain. Our Hyperledger meetup community continues to grow; we have meetups in over 65 countries and locations around the world that people can participate in. Additionally, we go to a lot of global conferences, not just blockchain conferences, but healthcare conference and other types of events. Keep in mind, Hyperledger staff doesn’t develop code — it’s the companies and individuals in our community that are developing the code and building solutions. We’re here to help support them and promote Hyperledger, so going to wherever our community is, is very important. So we hope to see you all there, wherever… there may be!

Connect with Daniela on her Twitter and LinkedIn!

Write to Roshni Rawal at roshnirawal@berkeley.edu. The she256: Fireside Chats are sponsored by Upscribe.