Blockchain Innovators - Conor Svensson and Dr. Naseem Naqvi

Hi, it's Conor Svensson here, founder and CEO of Web3 Labs. This is a conversation I had  with Dr. Naseem Naqvi, President of the British Blockchain Association. Naseem is a medical doctor  by training who created the British Blockchain Association to promote evidence-based adoption  of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. In our conversation we discuss how we went from  being a medical doctor to creating the British Blockchain Association and very importantly why  evidence-based decision-making is so important and how one can apply this thinking to blockchain  initiatives. Many significant breakthroughs have come from the combining of ideas from  multiple fields and given Naseem's medical routes, I'm sure you'll find his perspective  fascinating here. So, Dr. Naseem Naqvi, it's great to have you here on the podcast.  Yeah, thank you Conor, thanks for inviting me. So, I've spoken to a lot of doctors of philosophy  previously, people with PHDs, but this is the first time I've actually had a real doctor here!  So for our listeners, your background from what I could see on the LinkedIn file is that you're  a Senior Consultant, specializing in Hyper-Acute Stroke and Stroke Thrombolysis. For those of you  who are outside of the UK, consultant is obviously a senior doctor, well it's more than a senior  doctor, it's someone who's very well established within the trade. So I have to ask, how was it  that you went from being a doctor to getting involved in blockchain and then the British  Blockchain Association because it's kind of crazy, right? Yeah. So it's kind of interesting.  I think it was in the mid '16, I received a WhatsApp message from a friend about Bitcoin and  he said 'Look, look at this! This is interesting! This is a kind of a new new money!' and  I didn't get it! I remember I kept asking him 'What company is it and  if it's money, which government is printing this money?' And he went like 'No, no, there is no  company. There's no government. This is a fair based money', and I had to spend quite some time  getting my head around what this was all about! I remember a few weeks later, I was invited to  this crypto ICO type meetup in Manchester and there was this guy talking about blockchain. So  that was the first time I heard about blockchain and two things immediately struck me. One was this  complete lack of evidence that the claims that he was making - so many millions of users and  revolutionized this and that - I'm not new to technology, there's always a technology thread  running through what I did. I was involved in setting up a cardiac diagnostic service,  first of its kind, in the north of Scotland. I was also a part of the team that set up the first tele  health stroke search for patients in the northwest of England so I was not new to technologies. We  have had regular encounters with the med tech representatives and pitching all sorts of  stuff and devices and technology solutions to us. We have a framework that we go through - What's  the evidence? Is it peer reviewed? Do you have phase 4 data, real world data? - and so on.  So I have a very balanced view about them. That was the kind of thing that really struck me.  So the biggest challenge I thought at that time is to how to implement these technologies in a kind  of evidence-based way and the second thing I remember, he was mentioning about some  association in Canada. When I searched I couldn't find any blockchain association and a national  blockchain association in the UK so that's when I decided to do something with the blockchain. So  having come from a medical background as well, I can see the analytical approach that is embedded  in that and having gone through years and years of training to actually be qualified no doubt  that brought a certain amount of discipline and a scientific approach really to how you looked upon  the space. Yes, at one level there was all of the noise being made about ICOs, we've got all these  millions of users and everyone's gonna have these crazy returns from investing in this but you came  at it with your more scientific mindset. I think certainly what's fascinating as well is that  when people combine sort of multidisciplinary approaches together, the end result can often  be some quite significant jumps forward and so clearly that's what's happened there with the BBA.  You saw that there wasn't a British group but you went one step further and you said 'okay  well if there's not one created then I'm going to get one off the ground'. So was that a solo  effort? Did you find collaborators to do it? How did you actually get to that point of having the  British Blockchain Association up and running? So yeah, when I did some some research about  blockchain and also in particular the blockchain landscape in the UK back in 2016, the one thing  I could find was this Mark Walport report on distributed ledger technology. Mark Walport was  the government's Chief Scientific Officer then and he published report on distributed ledgers  and one of the recommendations was that blockchain applications should be research-backed  and peer-reviewed. Another recommendation was this formation of a neutral think tank  to advance distributed ledgers technologies in the UK by working with all stakeholders.  So that was the thing that really set this up, the Mark Walport's report and then you're absolutely  right, the evidence-based practice as a science has been around for more than four decades.  It started in medicine by a guy called Archibald Cochrane, he was Scottish and what he observed was  that patients were dying because of the treatment that was offered to them which was not based on  scientific evidence. Then it very quickly spread across all nature of scientific disciplines from medicine, to nursing, to cyber security. There is a  center for evidence-based cyber security in the USA and many other disciplines so this was kind of  the starting point for us. We felt that we should go ahead and set up this world's first  center for evidence-based blockchain advancing evidence-based adoption of distributed ledgers,  peer reviewed science backed. So that's how it began. And so we're free to touch a little bit  more on evidence-based blockchain as you said, with the evidence-based initiatives in medicine,  you're ultimately about ensuring that patients are getting the best quality of care that they  can and that they're minimizing the chances of something going wrong with treatments. What's  the downside or the protection of what you're trying to achieve with evidence-based blockchain? Yeah, so that's a great question. Evidence-based blockchain is essentially - What's the problem  that you are trying to solve? What is the evidence for the problem? So, not just what  the problem is but how big is it? Who else has solved the problem? What were the outcomes?  And, what are the other interventions that have been tried before to solve this problem?  What are the expected outcomes and how are you going to show that your solution, your project,  your idea is working? How would you define success? And it can be can be many things.  So this is in a nutshell - What it is and how I would like to describe is the PCIO approach  so problem comparison intervention and outcome - What is the problem that you are trying to  solve? What is your intervention? Who are the competitors? What has been done before?  What were the outcomes of those interventions? And what is new about your solution?  How is it different from your competitors? How is it going to be better from your contemporaries?  And what are the outcomes that you are interested in?  How you go about it is that you look for evidence for all these four questions so  what is the problem, where is the evidence for the problem, is this an evidence published in  scientific literature, do we have large studies/ systematic reviews/ problems highlighted national  reports/ in consortium reports or is it just based on some blog or something?  Then you apply all these principles of searching for the best available scientific evidence.  So we published a study last year looking at the state of play in blockchain and crypto  assets and what we found is about one half of the all enterprises and corporations we looked at (we  looked at over 500 companies) around 50 percent of them were able to clearly define the problem,  less than one third of them were able to cite the comparison intervention analysis and just  under two percent publish the evidence of outcomes in terms of the results 'what impact  they have achieved' and so on. So I think it's very important that if you have undertaken an  experiment you publish your outcomes, you describe your outcomes and even if you have not so positive  results, you should still go ahead and publish it because this is how to learn as an industry,  as an ecosystem. This is what evidence-based blockchain is, it tries to streamline,  define, describe very clearly a pictured certain way of what you are doing, how you are trying  to solve a problem and how is it going to benefit the community, benefit the society. So, thinking about it, compared with the more, I guess, traditional business-centric approaches  to finding new market opportunities and actually executing on those, I think you can kind of argue  that the evidence-based approach is underpinned by a scientific approach whereas a lot of  business approaches can often feel quite ad hoc in comparison. So  for people who are thinking about this from a business centric perspective, who  work in large organizations or organizations that are trying to drive change with the technology,  what's the right level of engagement or adoption or awareness that they  should embrace for this evidence-based approach versus the current frameworks that they might  be doing that have prescribed by say their organization or perhaps somewhat looser and  more just being driven by political initiatives in comparison? Yeah that's right, I mean this is what  I've been advocating for the last many years. It's not a huge difference in terms of how you approach  it in a traditional way versus an evidence based, it's very, very simple, straightforward. Anybody  can do it, everybody should do it from from c-suite executives to founders, owners, workers,  team members. It's a simple, straightforward approach - What are we doing? What are we  trying to achieve? What is the evidence for that? How are we going to show what we are  going to achieve? Is it going to be impactful? Is it going to be used for the society? How are we  going to go about reporting the results? How are we going to go about collecting the data? So the  evidence approach is not a huge difference from what enterprises do. It's just a matter of doing  it in a more systematic way, in a more structured way, in a more scientific way. Starting from the  what exactly is the problem that you're trying to solve and then going about it. Everybody should be  doing it, I think. We've seen that it is sometimes difficult because of the way, as you mentioned,  the political side of things, the organizational culture. Sometimes people don't know what it is  and how it works. But I think what's important to understand also is that, for example, funding...  so if you look at European Commission Guidelines and in the USA they looked at 10 programs,  community programs over the 10 years and what they found was that nine of them were not based  on scientific evidence. When I say scientific evidence it means what we call randomized control  studies. We look at multiple scientific evidences and studies to look at how you solve a problem.  And they found that nine out of those ten projects were not based on any scientific evidence  which led to a very major change. You may have heard of this Evidence-based Policy Making Act  in the USA in 2019, so a big law in the United States, and they found out that they were losing  around nine billion per project for nine projects it's over 80 billion  dollars they wasted because they realized that the programs were not working and they  weren't effective because they were not based on scientific evidence. So I would really recommend  everyone to go and read this Evidence-based Policy Making Act which became a law in the  United States. Evidence-based practices, as I said, are spread across disciplines now.  If you look at the European Commission Report from last year, they are talking about decision makers  to have an evidence-based approach to problem solving, this is the report on blockchain.  IBM blockchain for enterprise book, the very first page, I remember it's a have  a very clear understanding of what the problem is and have an evidence-based perspective of it.  More than two dozen papers have been published now on the subject of evidence-based blockchain.  There was one published last year on the PCIO framework, that I just mentioned,  on the use of that framework in agri-farming industry, it was featured by the BBC. So I think  people are getting to know about it but it's that some people have  not got a very clear understanding of the fundamental principles of evidence-based  blockchain. This is where we have been working a lot in raising awareness of this.  Presumably when you have blockchain being applied to industries that already use a  more evidence-based approach, there's going to be quite a natural synergy there but  where there's going to be more of a challenge will be in those industries which perhaps aren't.  You talk a lot about evidence but if someone is undertaking a project, what are the  resources that you'd want people to go to if they're following an evidence-based approach?  I think a lot of the time people look at things like news sites and so on to learn more about  press releases of work that companies have done that might be related to their industry but when  you talk about evidence, what is the golden source of evidence that you want you'd encourage people  to be looking for here? Okay, so the gold standard for all scientific disciplines is systematic reviews and meta-analysis. Let me explain to you what that means. When you conduct  a scientific project looking at whatever problem that you're trying to solve, you've got some data,  you put up a hypothesis, you work on a project, you did a case study, you've got some results,  you've got some data and you publish your findings in a scientific peer review journal so  it's been looked at. Maybe you have some contemporaries, they conducted their own  research and now you have over a period of time a collection of multiple scientific research studies  all looking at the same or similar problem. So over time you have this collection of research  studies peer-reviewed research studies and now what we have is this very, very valuable data set  and if we were to combine the results of those studies in a scientific way and there  are different ways you could do that, that combination of scientific studies it's what  we call meta-analysis. You may have seen that pyramid-looking structure that I keep on sharing  on social media, the top of that is a systematic review of meta-analysis, basically a systematic  review of all the published research studies on a particular topic and  combining the results of those studies to come to a conclusion what works, what doesn't work  and what we should do now because blockchain is relatively new scientific discipline. When I say  relatively new it means been around for a decade or two decades or so but there are scientific  disciplines that have been around for centuries. For those subjects we have got a a very, very, very, very rich data set of systematic reviews/ meta-analysis. We don't have that  now in blockchain but I think it is coming.  So you start your your search from - Have I got any systematic reviews or meta analysis on this  particular problem that I'm trying to solve? For example, search for 'new blockchain for Spain',  you probably won't find any systematic reviewer meta-analysis because I don't think anybody has  combined the results of multiple peer-reviewed research studies on supply chain to come to  a data set which is a combination, a conclusion, a summary of those research studies. So what we have  at present, there are very occasional systematic reviews and meta-analysis. I think there are some  in the use of blockchain in healthcare if you search. So your searching should start from,  yes you're right, not from news items but from where these research studies are published so  things like the Directory of Open Access Journals, you look at Google Scholar, you look at Microsoft  Academic, JBBA, other peer reviewed journals. So if you want to do things properly, this is  this should be your starting point - What is the problem that I'm trying to solve? Where can I find  the evidence? So the sources of evidence. You're an enterprise, you're a CEO, C-suite Executive,  look for systematic reviews and meta-analysis in scientific outlets such as Directory of Open  Access Journals and so on. Now, if you can't find one then the next best available option is  a scientific peer-reviewed individual research studies. There are many studies for example that  we've published in the JBBA on supply chain and healthcare and genomics and and so on and use  of blockchain for voting and for government and public services. So you have individual research  studies, ideally should be peer reviewed because it adds some rigor that somebody has looked at it.  Then you have individual case studies which are not peer reviewed and then you  go down in the evidence hierarchy ladder to essays and analysis and opinion articles.  But I would suggest that if you want to do it properly in an evidence-based way,  please do start higher up and then come down from systematic reviews, national guidelines,  meta-analysis, individual research, peer review research and then individual case studies,  non-peer review research articles, opinions analysis and so on. Okay. So if we were just  to simplify in terms of one step for someone, so instead of searching through news sites and so on,  should they say go to the Google Scholar and search for the term 'systematic review' and  whatever the topic they're looking at? I'm just thinking in terms of if someone's listening,  there's lots of different levels here but let's think in terms of if there's one step that will  get someone at least going in the right direction which would be better than where  they are now. Or would it be even going via the Journal of the British Blockchain Association?  I think if we can give someone one takeaway that we really want to emphasize here which will at  least get them on that path. Yeah, absolutely. So one take away is Google Scholar is absolutely fine  but you have to be careful sometimes. Not all research that is posted there is peer reviewed.  Peer reviews, like I said, are very, very important. I shared recently in  one of the Australian guidelines that recently published, they said they are not going to fund  some of the research if it's not a peer reviewed. Research is, I think, is a very abused word in the blockchain space, everything has been called research. What I like to call  proper research is research that is conducted in a scientific way as it should be done by  having a very clear problem, your hypothesis, your methodology, data  collection has to be very robust, your outcomes, your conclusion, your limitations of the study,  your directions for future development and then you have to publish your work in a peer-reviewed  outlet where it is looked by and reviewed by other experts in the field. So start from  Google Scholar but please do make sure it's not just a non-peer-reviewed, non-published  preprint. There are lots of pre-prints on SSRN and Research Gate and other places,  so make sure. If you're not sure, you can always go back to the author and ask which scientific  journal was this case study published in. So start from Google Scholar, start from Directory  of Open Access Journal. I keep mentioning Directory of Open Access Journal because  in order to be indexed in the DOAJ you have to already fulfill at least 40-45 very stringent  criteria. So JBBA is indexed in DOAJ and you can't just index your scientific journal in DOAJ,  you have to fulfill at least 40 plus a very stringent criteria. For example, one of them is  that your research has to be permanently archived somewhere. So all articles published are in the  JBBA repository which means that if tomorrow JBBA was to disappear or go down as an outlet,  then all the research articles will still be there on the portal. So this is just one of the  criteria you have to have, a peer review board. You have to have a very clear ethical policy  on scientific publishing. You have to have very clear peer review policies  so you can't just index a journal in the Directory of Open Access Journal unless it is very robust  and meets the highest standards in scientific publishing. I would suggest that you start  with DOAJ, Google Scholar is also fine, JBBA is fine, any peer reviewed journal but don't just  Google search it because you're going to find a lot of, what I call,  unfiltered information which means that it's not peer-reviewed and sometimes not credible.  That's where I would start. What I would also say is that when you're trying to solve a problem,  collect evidence both for the problem and also for the solution that has been proposed. So search  evidence for the problem - How big is the problem? What's the evidence that the problem exists?  Who is talking about it? If you have a problem and the United Nation is worried about that problem  then I would suggest that you probably look into solving that problem before someone else  says that 'I think this is a problem but you have got no evidence for that problem'. So search for  the problem as well as the solution when you are searching for high quality information.  Some very good points there and certainly one of the fascinating things about blockchain and  cryptocurrencies and all the projects and the ecosystems around that is that white papers are  like a core tenant of that and of course a white paper yes, certain things like say the Bitcoin  white paper and the Ethereum white paper, they've become in effect reference like academic pieces of  work because they've been such a success, they've been so influential. But by and large a white  paper is just put together by a team, it's not peer-reviewed as such, it's reviewed by the team  who do it and is it possible for a white paper to actually become peer-reviewed? Would it need to be  in a journal to do that or is there a way that it could actually be shown to be peer-reviewed?  Okay, so there are three very very important points here. First of all,  the Bitcoin white paper was not peer reviewed in a scientific way  as you would call a peer review but I think with the fact that the author or the authors,  they did not want to reveal their identity I think it would have been very difficult. If I receive  a very anonymous submission to my journal with no author identity and no institution identity,  I don't think any journal would be in a position to review it. I've recently shared a post,  just yesterday, if you look at the references that Satoshi cited in his white paper,  there are only eight references and five of them are peer-reviewed scientific papers of which three  are conference proceedings from Scientific Symposia. So I think Satoshi was an academic  because out of only eight references that he cited, five were from peer-reviewed research  papers, so that's an exception. Having said that, it was obviously quite extensively peer-reviewed,  not in a scientific peer-reviewed sense but in the community. Now is it possible  for a white paper to be peer reviewed? Yes of course. We have published many papers.  If you look at the paper that was presented last year on genomics NFTs, non-fungible tokens,  privacy laws and genomics in the JBBA, it was originally a white paper and it was presented as a  scientific research abstract at our International Scientific Conference in Edinburgh. The author  came all the way from America to present his work. It was peer reviewed at an abstract stage  so the abstract was peer reviewed. Then when he presented his work, it was reviewed on the day  by the scholars and then he published his full paper in the JBBA which was again peer-reviewed  in a double-blind fashion so the reviewers didn't know the identity of the author, the author didn't  know the reviewer. The paper was assessed purely on the basis of merit so yes, it was reviewed.  I would recommend anybody in the industry who wants to do things properly to go and read that  on non-fungible tokens in the JBBA. That's fascinating and this is great to hear how  really the connections between the white papers that are going out there and how  they can become peer-reviewed content as long as the authors... And what I would also like to add  Conor is that white paper is a business document. So white paper talks about  sometimes token distribution and how are we going to go about our business operations.  Scientific researchers are not interested in that. What they're interested in is  how robust is the underlying technology that you are using, your methodology, how did you  go about collecting the data for the problem that you are solving, what is the solution. So  they are going to look at the technical side of things and also the practicality - how are  you going to solve a particular problem and the claims that you are making in your paper.  But white paper, most of it sometimes, is just the token distribution and the future plans and so on.  If you have written a white paper it's great but I would suggest that you also write a blue paper.  So the Ethereum paper is actually a blue. Ethereum has two papers, the one written by Gavin Wood is a  blue paper which is the technical paper and then there is another one which is the white paper.  So I think with Bitcoin, they say it's Bitcoin white paper but actually it's  not a Bitcoin white paper, I think it's Bitcoin blue paper because it's got a lot of technical  details of how this thing would work and much less about the the token distribution. So,  when you're writing a white paper please do write a blue paper at the same time, the technical paper  on demonstrating how you go about actually the technology side of things rather than  just the token distribution model. This is an important point to clarify. Yeah,  it's funny that the notion of blue papers doesn't actually come up really at all in the community  because given the inherently technical nature of blockchain and cryptocurrency in many projects,  a lot of these white papers are presented more akin to a blue paper or a technical paper.  They're written using LaTeX or using a scientific markup language in effect and  it's quite technical the depth you go into there. Yeah, absolutely. There have been talks about,  you may have heard about it, talks about auditing the code and those sorts of things. That's what it is, so it's essentially looking at the technical side of things, the technicalities  of the product and not so much how many tokens you're going to distribute over what period of  time. So I think if you look at the paper I'm referring to, it's actually a blue paper which  was a white paper initially but then a blue paper and then converted into a proper research paper.  So yes, it is possible, I think, with some effort. I would really recommend the enterprises, and especially the startups, to look into. Because, the thing with the peer  review is that some people do not have a very clear understanding of what it is and I would  like to really emphasize the importance of when you submit your work for peer review  there is no ... to it. So your work gets reviewed in a double blind fashion,  now it can be single blind, it could be open where you know the identity of the reviewer  and reviewer knows the identity of the author but for JBBA, we have kept double blind so there is  no risk and there is no fee for a peer review. Journals like the JBBA would only charge you  a small fee for the publication of the article, processing charge only if your paper is accepted  for publication. So you could submit your work to the JBBA, it will get reviewed for free and  your paper gets better, your paper almost always gets better. We review papers and almost always they improve - the text, the language, the structure.  Methodology obviously you can't change, once you've got the results you've got the results,  but really it looks at it in a very, very scientific way - in a constructively critical  way and it just improves your work. So you can have your paper reviewed, there's no fee to pay  and then you can revise your paper and then resubmit and it gets published. It happens all  the time so I would really recommend enterprise and startups to write up a scientific paper,  submit it for peer review, it almost always gets better after expert reviews, resubmit it and there  you have a published paper. Yeah and while we're on the subject of peer review and blockchain,  one of the protocols that's really pushing for a lot more academic rigor with their approach and  putting out a lot of peer-reviewed research is Cardano. Has the work there sort of bubbled up  much into your world within the BBA? Because, certainly of all of the protocols, I think  what Charles Hoskinson, one of the creators there, is really keen on is this whole notion of applying  lots of academic rigor to it. He engaged a very significant number of people from the academic  community to help build out their work so I'd be interested to hear if that's come onto your  radar and what you think about it. Oh, not at all, I have not heard much about them.  Okay, he spoke with Lex Friedman on the podcast recently. It provided some useful context because  it was quite eye-opening to me because as someone who's coming at it more from the traditional  technology and business angle, they spoke a lot about, as you have here, the notion of why having  that review is so powerful and how it creates better quality work. So I think in terms of the  crossovers, it's certainly relevant. So, moving on from the evidence-based approach there, I  think people clearly will have an idea of how they can actually move forward and especially with the  Directory of Open Access Journals as well there, it sounds like a great starting point. Recently,  the BBA actually published the UK's National Blockchain Roadmap in collaboration with the UK's  All-party Parliamentary Group on blockchain. There are some really good takeaways there. I mean,  some of the things that popped up on my radar were things like evidence-based policy making, that the  UK can become Center of Excellence with DLT but also collaborate a lot with other countries, help  embrace the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as well which ensure that we build out the  right cyber infrastructure here and it's clearly a very impactful piece of work that you've done.  Would you be able to just tell us a bit more about it and why it's so important? Yeah, sure. So,  this is an Excellence Standards Framework. I think less than a dozen, fewer than a dozen  countries in the world actually have a national blockchain roadmap, the UK is now one of them.  The framework is an excellence standards framework set of recommendations to exactly position the UK  at the forefront of our DLT leadership and making the UK a Center of Excellence in Distributed  Ledger Technologies. It took us a few months. We had various consultations with stakeholders  over the past months to put together this document, a very futuristic - what  the vision 2030 would look like for blockchain in the UK and beyond. So the need for that was  when Mark Walport's report was published in 2016, we didn't have that much discussion on DAOs  or NFTs or DeFi and lightning network and others, there are many, many other emerging modalities,  so there was a need to kind of come up with a very forward-looking futuristic plan. So we have some  really key recommendations in the report. One is the formation of subspecialty groups and one  entire subspecialty group has been dedicated to emerging tech like NFTs, DeFi, lightning network.  Then there is allied disciplines, there's a lot of convergence, as you know, AI and IoT and others. Another important recommendation is quadruple helix ecosystem which is essentially working with  all stakeholders, government, academia, industry and society and why is it important - we have  seen recently with the infrastructure bill in the US that there seemed to be a disconnect between  policy makers in the industry. If you look at, for example, the bitcoin mining issue, the  industry is saying that bitcoin mining is green and 70 percent is green and renewable resources.  Then we have sociologists, anthropologists saying it is harmful for the society and so on. So  every now and then we have some disparities and disconnect in various stakeholders in  the ecosystem. It is very important that we work together. It was highlighted in previous  reports also societal impact are important. It is important that we now measure the societal impact  of blockchain applications, what we are doing - is it making an impact? You mentioned about  international collaboration. Yes, so that's a nation's collective wisdom supporting each other  and learning from each other and this is part of work that we're doing at the BBA. The Blockchain  Associations Forum which has 48 countries now is growing, we meet up regularly to discuss  issues that are faced by the technology of global nature. Sustainable development goals,  I think, is a very important topic. Recently we published a research in the JBBA looking at  how industrial symbols networks can help and advance the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.  So industrial symbiosis network is essentially using  the waste products of one industry as a raw material for another and just the IS sense,  if used on a blockchain, could generate about 1.3 trillion revenue over the next few years,  this is just one example. So sustainable development is very important.  Workforce planning, we have to make sure that UK remains a very attractive hub for talent and there are many others. Yeah, so this is kind of in a nutshell what we will be working on with  all stakeholders and I would like to invite all associations stakeholders in the UK and also  globally to come and join these sub specialty groups and work with us. We are planning to  publish the first report sometime end of next year and we will be publishing reports regularly  over the next decade. But the plan is to work on these recommendations and come up with some  concrete outputs. And the way in which the people achieve that, if they want to get involved,  would that be by joining the BBA or would it be through some other industry groups?  No, joining the BBA. All our members are already a part of it and all BBA members  would be invited to contribute to it. So if you are interested in joining a group,  what I suggest to enterprises and organizations. Because if you look at  the social impact recommendation and also the sub specialty group, it's quite broad, it's very  multi-stakeholder from governance, academia, emerging tech, public services, social impact,  healthcare and life sciences. So specify the domain  that you are working on or you wish to contribute, drop us an email and we will have a chat with you,  discuss with you, how you can make a meaningful contribution and then we take it from there. Awesome! And so one of the things as well that you mentioned was having a public  repository of successfully implemented use cases. Where would such a repository exist  because it sounds like an incredibly useful thing to have out there especially when you combine that  with being underpinned by an evidence-based approach as well. What would be the way that  you'd think that would be presented? Would it be like a web portal? I'm curious to hear!  Yeah, that's right. So a web portal. What we don't know yet, we know that we have a  successful use case. We've got some. We know through the JBBA  and some other resources but what we need is a database collection of all the  use cases of blockchain and cryptos that have been successful. Success depends how you define  it in terms of revenue generation, impacting the society and there are many others but  have a database for the UK so that we can go to, you can learn from it and others can learn  from it. Yeah, so it would be entirely like a web repository and we said that it will be  managed by one of the specialty, subspecialty groups. First of all, the first thing I think  is data protection, so if you are interested, or if anyone is interested in collecting that data we  will be very happy to have a chat with you because I don't think any such depository exists. So, it  would be good to have like a national repository of all the successful cases, A web repository  where we can add those cases which have demonstrated success, tangible impactful  outcomes, it's research backed, peer reviewed and there is no such repository that exists,  at least not to my knowledge. So I think it's important to have that and this is something  that we will be working on. So if anyone, if your listeners to this podcast would like to contribute  or help us in building that repository, I'll be very happy to have a chat with them. Awesome! So I think this is a great place to start to wrap up our conversation. As you've said there,  for people who want to get involved with the actual National Blockchain Roadmap, no doubt  joining the BBA is a great place to start. But also,  it's not just a, although the name is the British Blockchain Association, you certainly cater for  very much so an international community of academics, companies, members and so on.  I presume although there are some local initiatives there, it's the broader academic  blockchain and applying the right rigor that is the key underlying agenda that you have here?  That's right, yeah. So it's open to all as I said, you don't necessarily have to be in the  UK to join the National Blockchain Roadway because it's a very global technology and without borders.  You could be anywhere and still contribute to the Roadmap and you will be featured in the next  report. In fact, all organizations who contribute to the report whether it's through sub-specialty  groups, through building a depository or measuring the societal impact of use cases,  we will make sure that you will get featured in the next report and you can be anywhere.  So the best way is to just drop us an email, specify the domain, your area that you would  like to contribute to and we'll be very happy to have a chat with you. Yes, it's open to all. Wonderful! So other than getting involved in the BBA and people going to the BBA's website,  are there other places where people can find you if they want to reach out? Do  you need to use LinkedIn or Twitter? What's the best way for people to engage with you?  So yeah, if you want to engage with me directly you can reach out on LinkedIn, connect with me  on LinkedIn. I'm also on Twitter, I don't have a rich following. LinkedIn, I do have,  so I think the best thing is LinkedIn if you want to get in touch with me. We also host monthly  BBA forums which are open access, there is no fee to register or attend and you can meet me  and our advisory board there. So the next meetup is in September. It's usually held on the last  Sunday of every month. So you could connect and attend those meetups there and you can meet me,  'emeet' me, LinkedIn, BBA website and we are proactive on all social media channels and Facebook and Medium also.  Yeah, so if you want to get involved just send an email to me on LinkedIn.  Awesome! Well Naseem, it's been an absolute pleasure to host you and also from a personal  perspective, I'm a big fan of the work of the BBA as well. I think that the evidence-based approach  and following a more scientific approach to many different businesses initiatives  would pay big dividends for people in the long run. So it's been great to host you here and  have a chat today. Thank you very much Conor. Thank you for inviting me.