CommunityCredit

Ensuring equitable participation in community building through a distributed identification ledger.  

Many existing identity management solutions mistakenly focus on the individual with an alphanumeric value, biometric features, or technical protocols, such as email or phone numbers. These methods neglect a fundamental question. Who is this person and how are their lives intertwined with those around them? What defines an individual are their  relationships.These relationships create micro communities (family, jobs, hubs), which inform an identity. Community Credit believes that the people and institutions that know you best should be able to securely and effectively help verify your identity.

CommunityCredit empowers communities to identify and verify individual members. We are a social credit system that securely and effectively identifies citizens in developing countries. In order to build an effective solution for verifying identity in a developing country we first researched the limitations that many current  solutions entail; this ranges from basic vandalism of the hardware to complications that arise from the digital divide, such as access to current technologies that would enable identification. Our solution is a multi-pronged identification system that utilizes on community “vouchers”. We partner with five primary bodies to help capture verifying information on citizens: familial, educational/ professional, community/ religious, residential and medical. Examples include: a birth certificate, payment on a lease/ property, payment on a loan, a vote of confidence from a centrally verified community leader, a graduate certificate from any level of education, etc. By using multiple bodies, the system accounts for citizens who lack certain social networks or are without familial ties. Information is captured and tagged to an individual (predominantly through SMS, as smartphones have widespread pentration), which is then stored using distributed ledger technology.

CommunityCredit travels with the individuals. A community is not a place but relationships that span distances. Therefore, the CommunityCredit platform creates a system that captures  information to verify a person is who they claim to be. The platform ensures their credibility by pulling information from these varying parties and then ultimately approving or denying them access to certain rituals (voting, approval for micro-loans, etc.) according to these records.

One of the most important aspect is preserving the integrity of the individuals and communities involved. CommunityCredit is confident that its solution would not require a person to compromise their own identity in order to be eligible for grants, loans, or other services.

In our ideation stages, our team was inspired by the new startup, What3words. The company has taken a currently confusing and challenging problem, location and navigation, and has rewired it into a sustainable, simple solution. Similarly, we wondered how we could take the complex system that is identification and transition it from the ground up into one that is accessible to all members of a community. Our solution completely alters what it means to ‘prove’ your identity, and the mechanisms for doing so. Further, it effectively creates a system that is 5x more secure than the current system.

Currently, when a person steals your credit card or your ID in the United States, you are resorted to calling in to a regulatory agency and reporting the instance. This primarily results from the issue that in the United States, there is effectively one to two data points that your identity is officially tethered to- your social security number and/ or your ID/ Passport. By collecting images (either via SMS or mailed copies) of citizen’s documents, which are then ‘coded’, we are adding an additional four layers that protect an individual's identity.

The individual owns the data that is being produced. Backed by distributed ledger technology, community leaders are able to vouch for individuals without compromising the data of the community or individual. And since the community owns the data, the connectivity and sharing capabilities with outside organizations (i.e. NGOs, Banks, local government) are dictated by the individual and community leaders.

CommunityCredit is a complement to the systems already in place in the chosen geography. It is not a replacement of these systems, but humanizes the identity management solutions already put in place.

All the client interaction is through SMS, majority of people have phones with SMS capabilities and Unlimited plans. A text message with the community member and “action” completed all it takes for our platform.

CommunityCredit provides both a solution that is independent from outside systems as well as a complement to pre-existing integrations at the discretion of the individual and community. Our platform allows accumulation of credit within one’s community that empowers the members to uses this information to negotiate with outside entities on financial opportunities and services.

Our platform does not to rely on realtime updates, therefore information can be updated as connection is available and the individual's information/verification can be downloaded for offline use. The information is cached in the users phone with SMS messages which when connectivity is available, will update our platform. This opens us the freedom to focus on the security of the application and not depending on high connectivity environments. While literacy and numeracy will be a challenge to overcome, we plan to test the platform in several areas to optimize the platform for the most users. 

We are initially focused on the communities in the Philippines as we have knowledge and relations in the strong community infrastructure. CommunityCredit can be applied to communities worldwide as community leaders and issues with data protection are not exclusive to one geographic place.

In addition, we see the power of this solution in immigration and refugees. As a way for people to take their community credit with them across the globe to get verified. Instead of a need papers or number to go through borders, one just needs the weight of their community.

We are a small, agile team the have skills ranging from engineering to venture capital. With our technical prowess and ability to connect with engaged supporters, we have the ability to have an impact with CommunityCredit.

After building a base with communities, we will charge the use of this platform with NGOs and local gov’t.

Our group applied to this challenge because we are a group of young adults passionate about further understanding many of the epidemic societal challenges that our world faces. We understand that in many ways, we are fortunate to have many of the opportunities afforded to us in the United States, but recognize, that is not the case for a large portion of the world. By participating Mission Billion Challenge we get access to not only the other brillant teams in it, but the network with MIT Solve to propel this idea to a stage where it is impacting people’s lives.

Social Outcast/Disenfranchised: Due to to nature of this platform being community driven, there is concern that minority groups or individuals will be hurt by this model. However, by including five total touchpoints, we hope to will compensate this problem.

Participant ‘buy-in’: This approach requires citizens to either take a picture and send or make a physical copy of an official document and submit it to the Community Credit organization. However, we intend to start with a ‘micro-launch’ initiative, whereby we begin in 2 cities working directly with community leaders and growing the initiative from the ground up.