Please describe your proposed solution.
IOG and Cardano community are building high quality tools and Dapps to utilize Cardano in real world applications. Atala PRISM and other tools can be used to create DID's, and to issue and verify credentials which shows a lot of promise. The tools that are being built are technologically advanced but don't fully address the complex environments that people, who are supposed to benefit from these technologies, live in.
The idea of issuing or verifying "proof of"-credentials on blockchain for people to leverage and gain benefit in their daily lives is still quite unknown in the west as it is in the developing markets as well. Most businesses and service providers don't understand the concept and actually have no idea how to address these technologies.
Proof of Employment -credential is one of the most interesting use cases of this technology and also noted by IOG in the creation of Atala PRISM. ProofSpace’s implementation of PRISM means the technology is in place to issue and to verify Proof of Employment -credentials which can then be leveraged to gain better credit score for insurance and banking or maybe find a new job or apply to a university. The real challenge is to find the businesses willing to engage in the use of these technologies to use them to create Proof of Employment -credentials for their Employees. And on the other hand there are no tools that make it easy for ordinary businesses to read proof of employment (or experience) credentials in the recruitment process. The services currently provided to businesses don't make this process simple and more importantly, don't offer an incentive to do so, as the businesses responsible for issuing these credentials are not primarily benefiting from the process.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
This is where Fairway steps in. We provide recruitment SaaS to the Ethiopian market. Our product is currently run on private demo and will go public in Ethiopia later in Q2 this year. As our software is designed to handle the complete recruitment process and interaction between a job seeker and recruiter, it will also be used when the final candidate selection is made. Once the recruiting business and the selected job seeker both sign a contract, our software has the ability to use this information to issue a Proof of Employment -credential (see the diagram below).
With our approach, employees can access Proof of Employment Credentials despite the fact that businesses might have no incentives to issue credentials and no skills to do so. The proofs and validation required to issue the credentials is already handled by our recruitment and business onboarding flow. There are, of course, multiple approaches to solve the business adaptation challenge and the best practices for other more developed markets might be different. For developing countries the level of digitalization is usually still not very high and to accelerate adoption innovations are needed. This approach aims to provide the best solution for all the parties included. For the employees the ability to own their data as a verifiable credential and to leverage it in other aspects of life. And for the businesses the easiest possible way to participate in the process of issuing and verifying Proof of Employment -data from the decentralized network. In a country of 115 million people we believe this will be a big step towards the use of decentralized identities and VC's on a massive scale.
The technological output of this proposal will be a workflow, integrated inside Fairway SaaS recruitment platform, for issuing, receiving and verifying employment credentials. The diagram below provides a summary of the proposed output. The PRISM SDK is integrated into ProofSpace, who have wrapped this SDK with their no-code tools to make it easy and fast to build workflows and ecosystems using PRISM credentials. This also brings a lot of features to PRISM which are not currently natively available to PRISM, and will support the success of this proposal.
In regards to the SSI workflow in particular, there will be the following outputs in this proposal:
- Fairway will have a ProofSpace Dashboard, in which their workflow will be configured using the credential schema, definition and interaction editors. The workflow will look as follows:
- Employees use deep linking in the Fairway platform to download their ProofSpace App and SSI OAuth to link their credential wallet to their Fairway account.
- When an employee is matched with an employer, that fact is issued as a verifiable credential to the employee through the Fairway platform.
- Future employers looking to verify those credentials can trigger a verification request via Fairway, which sends the verification request to the employee.
- Fairway’s ProofSpace Dashboard will be integrated into the Fairway SaaS platform with webhooks so that:
- PS Dashboard can refer to the Fairway backend for issuing employee account credentials via SSI OAuth.
- Issuing and revoking proof of employment credentials can be initiated from the Fairway platform, with the actual issuing event taking place in the background through ProofSpace.
- Requests to verify the credential can be initiated from the Fairway platform, with the actual verification event taking place in the background through ProofSpace.
- SSI OAuth interactions can be configured in the Fairway platform for access controls.
In future proposals we may work to further decentralize and scale this approach by:
- Creating a Fairway Trust Registry, so that employers in the trust registry are able to issue credentials based on Fairway proof of employment schemas and verifiers in the Fairway network are able to rely upon credentials based on those schemas.
- Provisioning every new employer on Fairway platform with a ProofSpace Dashboard wherein issue/verify events can be managed from the Fairway platform. This would result in employers themselves completing the issue/verify function, instead of Fairway.
- Extending the range of credentials and interactions for Fairway employees and employers.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Ethiopia is a tumultuous market, where there have been wars and lack of digitalisation for some time. That means that there is a certain aspect of chance of surprises to the nation as a whole, that would affect the project. However, so far all the advancements are going in the right direction with digitalisation and politics and peace seems probable within the current political turmoil. Fairway is still fully focused on the Ethiopian market and confident with the progress our team will be able to achieve. The piloting of the software is done using the same processes and connections as any other development within our company. In the future we are keen on expanding to other African markets as well and these developments can be utilized wherever there is digitalization and growing adoption for Cardano.
The main risk of the process itself is making sure the model for issuing credits is securely built and has correct incentives in place. Our software has the ability to check that the person owning the DID is the same person that actually gets the job. This happens via KYC-type process where during the physical interview of the candidate the user account is validated to be the same as the interviewed person themselves. Once the candidate selection is made, both parties need to agree on the recruitment for the credentials to be issued. However, a process like this always has potential holes for fraud and that is why a Pilot Project is needed. Fairway will address all the potential hazards that come up during the pilot before launching on Mainnet.
In some settings the recruiter might not have incentives to approve the issuing of credentials. The clever solution we have come up with is to gather most of the important data needed for the credential is gathered already during the recruitment process, and additionally, make the credential issuing part of the validating employees to an organization inside Fairway SaaS. This information does not need to be inputted by the recruiter later because it already exists, but only validated to be correct once the agreement has been made. The needed data and the validation of agreement already exist in our platform as part of the recruitment process and therefore don't require much extra work, only validation after which the credential can be issued by Fairway.