Almedina Blockchain Challenge
Blockchain as a solution for content production problems
Proposed by
Grupo Almedina (Almedina Group) was founded in 1955 in Coimbra in front of the famous Arco de Almedina by Joaquim Machado. Although a small bookshop at the time, in the last more than 60 years, Almedina has established itself as one of the most relevant book publishers in Portugal. By working closely with the universities and facing the need of publishing academic books, soon Almedina has gained its market place in the publishing industry.
Contributing to the diffusion of new authors and currents of opinion and research, the publishing houses of the Almedina Group are mainly positioned in the areas of technical knowledge not neglecting the publication of works that contribute to critical thinking and reflection. Edições Almedina, widely recognized as a leader in legal issues in Portugal, also publishes, among others, in the areas of medicine, psychology, education, economics and exact sciences. In order to improve and enhance these areas of action, the Almedina Group acquired two publishers, Actual Editora - in the areas of Economics and Management - and Edições 70 - recognized for publishing books in the area of Social and Human Sciences.
Along with the publishing business, the Group expanded its bookstore network, which emerged along the main academic centers of the country: Braga, Porto, Coimbra, and Lisbon. At the moment there are eleven physical bookstores and a virtual bookstore (available at www.almedina.net), with a general offer privileging the editorial quality fund. The Almedina Group has been particularly attentive to the CPLP markets, having created, in 2005, Almedina Brasil, based in São Paulo, and established partnerships for the markets of Angola and Mozambique.
Description
How can we use Blockchain to make content production and authoring more trustworthy and protect authors' content authenticity and safety online?
Contextualization
The Web as we know it is going through a critical stage with a number of trends threatening the principles in which it was originally developed. In some areas there is an increasing dissatisfaction with the amount of misinformation being shared online - a phenomenon recently identified as "fake news". Simultaneously, the original values of the Web in relation to openness and tolerance have been challenged by an increase in mistrust (cyber attacks and bullying) and copywright infringement. To conclude, the freedom which was envisaged for individuals and companies is being threatened by content authentication and security concerns, in some part driven by the business models adopted by some of the main commercial players. These concerns were raised by none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web in an open letter.
Content based products and services will play a vital role in creating a more open and tolerant Web, as well as showing how commercial value can be created by helping combat these concerns. For instance, Blockchain algorithms and AI could assign trust scores to websites based on the content reliability could cross-reference facts across the web, as well as predict the likelihood of content being “fake” based on other data.
We are particularly interested in solutions that leverage closed and co-created content to:
- Identify, define and predict “fake sources” as well as provide a means for fact checking information prior to publishing;
- Build tools and services that alert authors of authoring vulnerabilities;
- Create solutions which combat authoring algorithm bias;
- Provide means for checking compliance when new laws and regulations are produced; and
- Monetize content for distribution and curation.
Data
Examples of data include but are not limited to:
- authored content
- digital archives
- content from producers and consumers
- content from news agencies
- customer segmentation data
Expected outcomes
Examples of outcomes may include but are not limited to:
- new apps and services (web, mobile etc), publishing tools for news and online articles
- new algorithms (for information propagation, provenance mining, prediction, content recognition etc.)
- new technologies to integrate data sources
- new tools and business processes to support decision making that make insights of algorithms easier to understand
- new forms of content hardware (e.g. wearables, VR, AR).
Expected impacts
Participants will need to provide details on the impact measurement framework they would use to show how their solution:
- helps people produce, consume and get better access to high quality information;
- improves the accuracy of content, news and information online;
- improve awareness of misinformation online.
- make content producers feel safer online; and/or
- make content producers more aware of how their content is being used and where there are vulnerabilities.
Please check the full regulation in PDF for this challenge.
