ixo — Powering IDCC’s Core Data Flow
If IDCC is the microphone that captures the voice of Hong Kong’s Social Services Ecosystem, then ixo is the radio station that broadcasts our voice to the world.
At the heart of the Impact Data Consortium Chain (IDCC) is a group of social purpose organizations coming together to build a better way to use technology that listens to the pulse of Hong Kong’s social sector, its vitality, and how to continually support its growth so that its citizens may continue to thrive at all levels of society. IDCC builds digital impact measurement and management solutions for social development and social finance applications which are tied to the blockchain — the ixo protocol blockchain upon which IDCC is built.
In this article, we’d like to highlight and celebrate our relationship with ixo (a partnership that has grown in conjunction with Shanzhai City’s efforts to craft social development technologies) without which the very conception of IDCC would never have occurred in the first place; through years of discussion about how to create a social services civic data infrastructure bespoke to Hong Kong’s ecosystem using the basic principles offered by the ixo blockchain protocol.
Meeting Hong Kong’s Need for Impact Informatics
First of all, yes, ixo is three-letters all lower-case (pronounced icks-oh), and is building The Internet of Impact — a global network of interconnected blockchain networks particularly built for collecting, capturing, and validating the digital signals required for proper impact management and social finance deployment. It is becoming the international digital standard for how impact should be counted, digitized, and transmitted across different regions, sectors and use cases, providing an accountable data infrastructure, for “trustless” impact management. For IDCC, it is the foundation for building impact data management applications that provide the data sovereignty and accountability required to help bring Hong Kong’s social purpose organizations towards global standards for impact governance.
In Hong Kong, our impact community has arrived at the consensus to build stronger governance and measurement capacity for the entire ecosystem. IDCC is supported by the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fund (SIEF), a government run nonprofit ecosystem fund that is keenly interested in advancing seamless connection between social innovations and institutional support through digital transformation across its portfolio. Establishing a replicable impact governance framework that is scalable through digital tools to enhance the best practices was an important consideration when SIEF funded our proposal to them for IDCC.
Improving Data Literacy to Navigate and Command the Internet of Impact
IDCC is more than software built on ixo that enables and ensures Hong Kong’s best practices for impact management. It is tasked with building the capacity of intermediaries to understand the value and importance of auditable impact governance procedures as well as building the capacity of intermediaries to judge and mandate relevant impact metrics to their affiliated organizations. ICB is a third layer of intelligence that helps bring real cases, projects and stakeholders which not only helps them to utilize the system but takes their considerations and feedback to continually improve the system to address their needs.
Our vision is to decentralize impact measurement on a digital platform that engages with the entire social services stakeholder ecosystem; from government agencies, impact intermediaries, and social purpose organizations, to communities. This lowers costly impact management operational burdens while safeguarding potential risks of data exploitation, especially for marginalized and vulnerable communities.
How can ixo and ICB accomplish this together? The current implementation for SIEF in Hong Kong is a good example — it combines a high-tech and industry-specific backend, with low-tech frontline capacity building that listens and responds to the specific needs of grassroots communities. Our project busts the myth that next-generation technologies like blockchain are only for tomorrow. When we see all our social enterprises, foundations, and impact management intermediaries partners attending ICB workshops to learn and pilot how blockchain can solve their problems, we know that blockchain technology is for today, and ixo, most relevantly to social development, is here to build sustainable solutions for those that need it most.
Stakeholder Trust Requires Trusted Data
The role of Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) is to provide data collection and analysis that can assess the current state and wellness of a social purpose organization and its impact on its beneficiaries — with the sole purpose of building trust with its stakeholders for deeper and longer lasting financial, operational, or programmatic participation. The ixo protocol allows IDCC to build its solutions that inherently maintain trust that all the data transactions of impact claims are verifiable, consistent, and secure.
In the Hong Kong social services ecosystem, IDCC has been continuously developing further use cases and capacity-building programs for how blockchain can build near bulletproof IMM tools, with our recent focus on helping Hong Kong’s Impact Intermediaries to accelerate the country’s impact economy. The intermediary’s role relies upon trusted data sources that validate the impact their SPOs are making positive impacts and have the capacity to grow. Our next step will be to build further tools on the ixo operating system while developing community-driven capacity building programs for social purpose organizations and end beneficiaries. Our ultimate goal is to bring the decentralized empowerment of information that ixo promises directly to the grassroots communities, which can enable entirely new social development service delivery, social finance business models, and access to these greatly needed services and opportunities.
So now that IDCC is the microphone that captures the voice of Hong Kong’s Social Services Ecosystem and ixo is the radio station that broadcasts our voice to the world, we invite you — impact investors, donors, governments, social purpose organizations, consultants, academic institutions, and most importantly the communities — to be that VOICE!
