The Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) hosted a public-facing webinar last week to celebrate the four years of its vibrant community and its path forward in the exploration of blockchain technology’s applicability to the challenges of modern supply chains.
Viewers from around the globe tuned in to hear about the community collaborative efforts around the development of open-source data standards that may be leveraged to create efficiencies for trade.
BiTA President Patrick Duffy was joined by professionals who continue to push forward the development of standards for the use of blockchain-enabled business processes. They discussed how the community has been working while facing the additional challenges imposed by COVID.
“While BiTA has always been a remote-first community, COVID, at least at first, really drained the bandwidth of the professionals that were doing some heavy lifting in the area of standards development,” Duffy said. “It also exposed the inadequate nature of the tech stack the community was previously leveraging.
“We’ve been very busy over the past year upgrading our collaboration tools and working on internal infrastructure to make sure we’re well positioned to move forward in executing against our mission.”
BiTA’s collaboration platform, a tool called Acuwize, will be the new workspace that the community and external standards development organizations and stakeholders leverage to provide feedback, iterate on work in progress and utilize to distribute the standards that are developed.
Rogers Stephens, the chair of BiTA’s Data Formats Technical Committee, discussed how it will now leverage OpenAPI 3.0 documentation and why it will promote interoperability.
Ben Kothari, chair of the Location Specification Work Group and one of the founders of Acuwize, detailed how the new collaboration platform will solve the challenges of modern standard development and how it will encourage collaboration with other groups working to create business process efficiencies through the development, or refinement, of data standards.
Data standards need to be applied for impact, and the webinar introduced the community to the next chapter of BiTA’s work – the Implementation Technical Committee. Chaired by professor Daniel Conway from the University of Arkansas’ Blockchain Center of Excellence, this new committee is working with top technologists across leading transportation and supply companies to frame up the business practices that are ripe for blockchain-enabled processes that leverage open-source data standards.
To learn more about BiTA and how you can get involved, you can check out the webinar here.