dutyof.care platform: proactive-prevention | permanent-proof

Using Ethereum network and blockchain to help organisations meet their duty of care and make vulnerable people safer

1) Problem

In Australia alone, more than five million people work/volunteer in over 10,000 human services organisations where staff/volunteers come into contact with vulnerable people (elderly, disabled, children). 

Globally, hundreds of thousands of such organisations are all bearing a heavy administrative burden to demonstrate compliance to multiple and increasingly stringent regulatory demands. 

Multiple layers of sub-contracting arrangements generate a tick-the-box mentality, everyone assuming everyone else is compliant.

Recent revelations of abuse (eg US Gymnastics and Oxfam) have highlighted the risk for clients, organisations, staff and volunteers of a system that is fragmented, burdensome, dealing with multiple jurisdictions, experiencing increasing levels of contract work and staff mobility.

In Australia in the past three years over 5,000 accreditations have been revoked, yet accreditation checking by employers is decreasing.

In the event of an individual’s accreditation (eg police checks, working with children checks) being revoked, the integrity of the verification data relies on regularity of checking. The current systems for organisations to ensure their compliance involves costly manual checking, inadequate frequency of checks, unreliable record keeping, and inability to detect errors/tampering or inconsistencies. 

Globally, organisations are under intense scrutiny; the risk of failure to adequately verify and ensure client safety is catastrophic for everyone involved, with legal and insurance ramifications and long-lasting reputational damage.  

2) Solution

dutyof.care is a secure online platform for managing and continuously verifying staff certifications for safeguarding and compliance. The solution was designed in response to the recommendations of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as a secure one-stop-shop, allowing organisations to automatically verify individual staff certification requirements such as working with children checks, medical registrations, teachers’ accreditations and other professional licenses and registrations.

dutyof.care uses blockchain technology to create a continuum of ‘verification events’ by storing data in an immutable, public and auditable ledger. Smart Contracts stored on the public Ethereum blockchain ensure the integrity of the data, forever. Alerts are sent out immediately through multiple channels when a compliance accreditation has been revoked, lapsed or expired. Organisations can earn free platform credits (“VDOC Tokens”) for taking an active role in the dutyof.care ecosystem.

The platform makes real-time data available to user organisations through easy to use dashboards, enabling proactive and responsive decision-making and prompt action to ensure client, staff and volunteer safety and protection. 

3) How

dutyof.care will transform the process of compliance verification by building a platform with decentralized data, accessible across every global jurisdiction, able to continuously verify all accreditation types across any databases, that is tamper proof, secure and auditable. Organisations in any sector that provides services and engages with vulnerable people will be equipped to dramatically reduce compliance costs whilst increasing data integrity, management responsiveness, and governance certainty that they are properly screening their people, to protect their vulnerable clients as well as their staff, volunteers and organisational reputation.

dutyof.care is in private beta with 12 organisations in health, education, aged care, disability and sport, and is seeking to bring the humanitarian aid sector onto the beta. 

dutyof.care leverages the attributes of public Ethereum blockchain to address the Challenge.

We use smart contracts stored on blockchain, embracing the trustworthiness of a solution addressing the trustless elements of the system in which the Challenge lies. 

we employ an innovative pay-per-use model allowing users to select level of usage according to their risk profile, brand perception and value drivers.

dutyof.care has a token economy eco-system associated with its use whereby (VDOC - Verified Duty of Care) tokens are earned by organisations using the dutyof.care platform and sharing verification outcomes, creating an internal ‘economy’, incentivising improved regularity of verifications.

we are using a publicly verifiable, distributed ledger technology as the storage mechanism for recording each time accreditations are verified. Without breaching privacy laws, other dutyof.care organisations can 'see' the validity of these accreditations. 

The permanent proof logged by dutyof.care is not dependent on the existence of any single organisation. This is enabled by blockchain technology.

The platform contains two major functional components - a centralised application that acts as an 'Oracle' and the de-centralized 'blockchain'. The solution automatically retrieves the live status of a credential and depending  on response (OK/not OK) will publish results to the Blockchain. 

Current private beta stage has 12 users and automates verification for seven unique accreditation schemes across three Australian states and two national professional schemes.  

dutyof.care will move to a public beta in 2 months time. 

our goals over the next 12 months are to

• expand the number of organisations covered to include the international aid and development sector
• expand the number of accreditation schemes covered to include pilots in international (non Aus) jurisdictions
• develop specific API's and webhooks to enable interface with all types of user organisation and their respective existing HR, CRM and volunteer management systems 

Potential reach of dutyof.care is global, delivering value everywhere vulnerable people are clients, and staff/volunteers’ accreditations can be accessed. 

Potential user organisations across Australia exceeds 10,000, with five million active staff/volunteers. 

Scaling will be achieved through integration of a wide range of global accreditation databases, opening a potential global market in the hundreds of thousands of user organisations.  

Impact in humanitarian sector can grow through embedding in HR systems and leadership development. 

dutyof.care's token economy will ensure growth through incentives and rewards; user peer organisations will be motivated to differentiate themselves by opting in to transparently publish their compliance status.

Our customers are the social services organisations. Awareness of dutyof.care will grow through engagement of peak bodies across social services, aid, disability, healthcare, sport and education. Part of the software will be open source and community driven.

Partnering with a university to undertake research into dutyof.care as a blockchain use-case, we will feature in thought-leadership papers, and industry conferences. 

We seek to make dutyof.care available for white-labelling, resulting in a common blockchain but a front end that can be customised, resulting in an agile and flexible product providing the best possible bespoke solution for the wide range of anticipated users.

Current beta partners (12) are providing services to over (est) 15,000 clients and for every client the risk associated with the services provided are significantly reduced as a result of the organisations' participation on dutyof.care. 

They have a total of 275 accredited constituents (staff and volunteers) currently on the DoC platform.

Each beta partner is already saving the costs associated with compliance admin and that translates into more resources available for staff delivering critical services in the community

Number of people served by the platform will be a function of the number of organisations that join dutyof.care, their staff and volunteer numbers, and numbers of their clients. Potential dutyof.care organisational users across Australia exceeds 10,000, with over 5 million active staff or volunteers. 

We aim within 12 months to have 100 organisations on the platform including pilots in UK, US, and Asia/Pacific; in 3 years to have dutyof.care become the go-to method for 1000 human services organisations, globally, to efficiently and effectively manage the increasing regulatory requirements for protecting vulnerable people.

Our MD has two decades’ experience providing leadership and insight across multi-million dollar projects for corporate clients, prior to starting Blue Bike Solutions 

The lead architect for dutyof.care has over 15 years experience as Senior Enterprise architect at major bank, and cloud migration consulting in telecoms before moving to NFP-focussed consulting 

Our senior partnerships consultant has 20 years experience in NFP strategy and organisational development with global experience across humanitarian aid, development effectiveness, social enterprise. 

dutyof.care has been motivated by personal experience of abuse by one of our team, so there is a high level of passion

dutyof.care will work on a ‘pay per use’ model allowing various control points for organisations to manage. NFP subscribers will pay for their use of the system through transaction fees. 

VDOC Tokens provide a mechanism to incentivise and reward behaviours which promote the usage and expand the user base of the dutyof.care platform. Credit accrues in value and can be applied to offset usage costs, while growing the ecosystem 

Being a tradeable asset, the number of Checkers (the atomic unit of a VDOC) required to support that usage will change as the asset shifts relative value over time.

As dutyof.care is pioneering blockchain use in the area of compliance and verification management with a focus on supporting the community sector and protecting vulnerable people, we regard SOLVE eco-system as a uniquely valuable community of support to help us test and refine the platform and business model underpinning it. 

Blue Bike Solutions also anticipates seeding other blockchain for social impact initiatives, therefore if we succeed to become a Consensys Fellow and receive residency and bootcamp support we anticipate building on BBS' for-purpose technology consulting to grow impact using blockchain innovation in the social impact space.

A potential barrier relates to privacy regulations which are evolving and may present risks for what can be stored on the blockchain. dutyof.care is addressing this by ensuring that the platform design is based on a log of critical verification ‘events’, not on personal information posted to blockchain. SOLVE can help by connecting us to global examples of blockchain use at the coal face of regulatory reform.

Another barrier relates to accreditation databases that have captcha installed, meaning they cannot be scanned. SOLVE can help us to engage and negotiate with government departments and IT providers in target markets.