PR Audit SummaryJune 2016

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Table of Contents

PR Audit Scope Page 3

Hyperledger Project PR Summary Page 3

Highlighted Hyperledger Media Coverage Page 4

Key Finding #1 and Recommendations Page 4

Key Finding #2 and Recommendations Page 7

Key Finding #3 and Recommendations Page 8

Key Messages Page 8

Hyperledger Project FAQ Page 9

PR Audit Interviews – Selected Responses Page 10

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Scope:

To better understand the Hyperledger Project (HLP) and the communications opportunity, we interviewed 10 HLP stakeholders between April and June 2016. In addition, we audited a majority of media articles including Hyperledger to date as well a significant sampling of articles relating to blockchain. From the interviews and research, we’ve highlighted three main findings as well as detailed PR program recommendations to address the findings. In addition, we’ve drafted a few deliverables that support the research:

1) Three key messages2) Press release boilerplate3) FAQ

Lastly, we’ve included selected quotes (without attribution) stemming the audit interviews that answered the following questions:

1) What is the Hyperledger Project?2) What is the vision of the Hyperledger Project?3) What problem does Hyperledger solve? 4) How have companies solved the problem without Hyperledger?5) Who is Hyperledger Project’s audience? What do you want them to do?6) How do you measure Hyperledger Project success?7) Why should members join Hyperledger Project? What’s in it for members?8) Why should reporters care about Hyperledger Project?9) What should be Hyperledger project’s main PR/marketing goals in the coming year?10) What is the current perception of the Hyperledger project?

This PR audit is not necessarily the final word with respect to Hyperledger Project PR messages and strategy. It is a recommendation based on a culmination of stakeholder interviews along with the current media landscape. The Hyperledger Project communications team welcomes feedback and additional recommendations. Our aim is to best reflect the communication goals of the membership and understand that it will likely evolve as the project matures. As a result, this document will be revisited very six months to reflect changes as relevant.

Hyperledger PR Summary:

In December of 2015, The Linux Foundation announced a “collaborative effort to advance the popular blockchain technology.” Meltwater reports that between this initial December announcement and the following announcement on February 9, there were 458 global mentions that included the word “Hyperledger”. On February 9, the newly minted Hyperledger Project a nnounced 30 founding members, a formal open governance structure as well as initial code proposals. Between February 9 and March 29, Meltwater reports 1,300 global mentions of “Hyperledger”. On March 29, 2016, Hyperledger Project announced the elected Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee chair as well as 10 additional members. Between February 9 and May 19, Meltwater reports 1,117 global mentions of “Hyperledger”. On May 19, In addition to announcing eight new members (brining the total number of member organizations to 48), Hyperledger Project announced Brian Behlendorf as executive director. Since Brian’s announcement, there have been 651 global mentions of “Hyperledger” as of June 4. In all, there have been 3,526 “Hyperledger” mentions.

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Highlighted Hyperledger Media Coverage:

Bloomberg – “Internet Heavyweight Joins Open-Source Blockchain Consortium” (5/19/16)http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-19/internet-heavyweight-joins-open-source-blockchain-consortium

CoinDesk – “Apache Foundation Founder Named Hyperledger Executive Director” (5/19/16)http://www.coindesk.com/hyperledger-appoints-first-executive-director-apache/

Newsweek – “Bitcoin Goes Corporate, or at Least the Blockchain Does” (5/10/16)http://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-goes-corporate-or-least-blockchain-does-457716

International Business Times – “Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project trumpets code contributions from across 30 founder members” (2/9/16)http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/linux-foundations-hyperledger-project-trumpets-code-contributions-across-30-founder-members-1542803

WIRED – “Tech and Banking Giants Ditch Bitcoin for Their Own Blockchain” (12/17/15)http://www.wired.com/2015/12/big-tech-joins-big-banks-to-create-alternative-to-bitcoins-blockchain/

Fortune – “IBM, J.P. Morgan, and Others Build a New Blockchain For Business” (12/17/15)http://fortune.com/2015/12/17/ibm-blockchain-for-business/

KEY PR AUDIT FINDING #1: In these early days of the project, there is incredible interest, hope, hype around the Hyperledger project.

There is an insatiable amount of interest around blockchain and its potential impact around the globe. When an organization like The Linux Foundation (and their track record for stewarding, governing and growing some of the world’s most important open source projects including Linux itself) announces a collaborative effort created to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally, the world takes notice. That notice is further validated when some of the most innovative global companies are actively engaged including the best and brightest in Finance, Banking, Internet of Things, Supply Chains, Manufacturing and Technology.

The hype around Hyperledger is a double-edged sword. While interest in the project has obvious benefits as it provides validation and supports project momentum, their is also a danger that the project is misrepresented or that the hype gets too far ahead for the project’s well being. While members are well-intentioned in their involvement with the project, most also have a commercial self-interest in blockchain and may promote differing messages that may not be representative of the projects messages and goals. Additionally, we’ve noticed that many of the journalists that cover blockchain-related news have never covered open source which can lead to misunderstandings on how open source projects and the open source community tend to operate which can lead to further misrepresentation.

The PR audit interviews clearly revealed the need over the next 12 months for further market education around Hyperledger. While we will discuss remedies to combat market and project confusion in the third finding, we’ll discuss some program recommendations to take advantage

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of media interest around Hyperledger while making sure to be tempered and strategic in our approach.

PROGRAM RECOMMENDATIONS:

1) Hyperledger Project Blog

Within 60 days, Hyperledger Project will be launching a blog on a Hyperledger.org. It will serve as an important channel for education. It will also serve as an avenue to highlight human interest stories around developers and other participants in the project. The blog will be open to member submissions as well (subject to specific guidelines and editorial approval) to further demonstrate the breath of involvement in the initiative. The HLP marketing / communications team will manage the blog and its editorial calendar. If your organization is interested in submitting posts on the Hyperledger blog, please contact Jessica Rampen (jrampen@linuxfoundation.org) for information around blog submission specs and guidelines.

2) Hyperledger YouTube Channel

Video will be an important component in promoting and educating the community about Hyperledger Project. A Hyperledger YouTube channel will be used to showcase Hyperledger-related presentations, video snippets and interviews from conferences and meetups, as well as a channel for thought leadership related videos featuring executive director Brian Behlendorf and other member participants. Within 60 days, a proposal for a Linux Foundation professionally produced Hyperledger Project video series will be circulated for consideration and approval.

3) Hyperledger Project Social Program

Program Goals (What we want to achieve):

- Position Hyperledger as the leading open source project driving cross-industry collaboration for blockchain technology that will support a variety of use cases across different industries

- Position Brian Behlendorf as a thought leader in open source, software development, blockchain, distributed ledgers, and smart contract technology

- Improve engagement, increase visibility and build relationships with key analysts, press and industry influencers

Program Strategy (How we are going to achieve it):

- Develop a regular outreach and communication cadence on Hyperledger project milestones, new members, announcements and industry trends

- Develop a mixture of 80% industry news and 20% content related to Hyperledger to share on social channels, as appropriate

- Monitor and track influencer conversations. Engage and follow influencers, as it makes sense

- Create hashtags to drive engagement and sharing during Hyperledger related events and speaking engagements (#Hyperledger)

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Program Metrics & Reporting (How we will measure success and if we reach our goals):

Frequency: Report delivered 1X/month along with PR metrics report.

- Twittero Number of followers month over montho Number of impressions month over month with Hyperledger brand keywords

(Hyperledger)o Number of engagements month over month (retweets, @mentions, URL

clicks, replies)- Facebook

o Number of Likes month over montho Number of page impressions month over month

Activities (Specific everyday tactics):

- Facebook o Post frequency: 1-2 times a week, as it makes senseo Content: Visual tends to work better, pictures, blogs, Infographics

- Twittero Post frequency: 2-3 times a dayo Content: 80% industry news and 20% subjects related to the projecto Content can be pre-scheduled at the end of each week, for the following

week. However, “news and industry” tweets will need to be done Ad Hoc, as news hits. This involves active daily monitoring

4) Media Process & Media Spokesperson Bureau

As communicated previously, please route all media inquiries around Hyperledger Project through the communications team (Ray George, Jessica Rampen) at pr@hyperledger.org. This will help ensure messaging consistency and will help to quell misperceptions that the project is dominated by only a few member organizations (see key finding #2).

On a weekly basis, Hyperledger Project receives numerous requests for interviews. While Brian Behlendorf is able to fulfill a certain number of interviews, he does not have time for them all. Additionally, with such a wide variety of industry experts among member organizations, there is a great opportunity the spread the media opportunities around for the mutual benefit of the project and the project members. That being said, the HLP communications team will be starting a Hyperledger Project media spokesperson bureau. Participants will be provided media coaching and key messaging for media opportunities around Hyperledger Project. Member participants in the HLP media spokesperson bureau will be expected to represent Hyperledger Project and as such, commit to being vendor-neutral on Hyperledger-related media briefings. To nominate someone (or more than one) person from your organization to be included in the Hyperledger Project media spokesperson bureau, please contact Jessica Rampen (jrampen@linuxfoundation.org) for information and guidelines. Please note that the HLP communications team will do their best to be fair in spreading opportunities across the pool of member spokespeople.

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5) Conference and Event Spokesperson Bureau

Similar to media opportunities, there are a number of opportunities for Hyperledger representatives to speak at conferences and events. By leveraging the vast and global membership, Hyperledger has a great opportunity to educate and provide throughout leadership at a myriad of differing conferences and events, whether they be industry focused (financial, IoT, government, etc.), technically focused or otherwise. While Brian Behlendorf will be representing Hyperledger at a number of events, it’s important and mutually advantageous to open up opportunities to represent Hyperledger to the wider membership. As with the media spokesperson bureau, please contact Jessica Rampen (jrampen@linuxfoundation.org) for information and guidelines regarding nominating someone (or more than one) person from your organization to be included in the Hyperledger Project conference and event spokesperson bureau. Please note that the HLP communications team will do their best to be fair in spreading opportunities across the pool of member spokespeople. This bureau will also provide Hyperledger the opportunity to submit Hyperledger-related panel abstracts for relevant events.

6) Analyst Relations

As Hyperledger Project matures, the communications team will launch a formal analyst relations program that includes periodic and consistent outreach and briefings with the relevant industry specific and technology analyst communities.

KEY PR AUDIT FINDING #2: There is a perception by some both internally and externally that Hyperledger is dominated by IBM. A number of quotes stemming from the audit interviews reflect this:

“At its extreme, the perception is that IBM is basically regurgitating its internal proof of concept code or academic code and trying to buy credibility for it or buy respectability when really, they should have just thrown it away.”

“Hyperledger Project is perceived as another attempt by IBM to own an open-source community and do that by smothering it with development resources and press and take credit for it.”

“There is a lot of perception in the market, in the industry today that this is an IBM-only thing, that’s just not the case.”

“The people that are close to the project perceive the Hyperledger project as an IBM client advisory board and that it’s being run in concert with IBM's commercial aims at the detriment of everyone else participating.”

PR PROGRAM RECOMMENDATIONS:

The hiring of Executive Director Brian Behlendorf on May 18, 2016 will go a long way in making sure this perception is not perpetuated. Brian has extensive experience working with open source communities, some of which had a similar perception of being heavily influenced (true or not) by a few big players.

Brian’s role at Hyperledger Project is to help accelerate project momentum. He will be looking for more open source developers who want to join the project. He will try to nudge the project towards using the best practices and the best techniques from the open source communities

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that he’s been a part of from Apache to Mozilla. His efforts are focused on driving this towards a product that people can deploy and start using in production.

Brian will also serve as a buffer between the developer community, the contributor community, and the funding community. Hyperledger Project provides a neutral ground for the collaboration to take place. He will work to empower developers and foster a culture of "do-ocracy" amongst those who participate.

Beyond Brian’s role, there are three PR programs (mentioned in key finding #1) will serve to highlight the activities and participation of the larger membership base. By having both Hyperledger Project media spokesperson and conference spokesperson bureaus, the HLP communications team can make sure a wider number of members are represented and associated with the initiative. Additionally, the Hyperledger blog will offer a channel to the wider group.

KEY PR AUDIT FINDING #3: There is confusion about what Hyperledger is and aims to accomplish.

It is still very early in the life of Hyperledger Project. Until recently, the project did not have an executive director. Due to the high-profile nature of the project and its membership base across a number of industries, there exists some confusion around the project.

At this point, Hyperledger Project is focusing on honing the various contributions down to a shippable product, expanding the range of plug-ins and use cases, and growing the developer and user community. The message coming out of the project at this stage needs to be pragmatic and practical. It is not useful, for example, to predict how the technology will disrupt or revolutionize entire industries.

Hyperledger Project is an open source project in code and process and spirit.  The roadmap, schedule, and product design still need time to emerge. The energy and interest in the project is growing, and everyone is eager to get to a shippable product soon.  That being said, it’s important to get the architecture right, to decide on the most important use cases to address, and make sure the community is collaborating the right way.

The biggest challenge now is to make Hyperledger Project approachable and accessible. We need to make onboarding into the community easier. We need to focus on education along with a number of practical steps including keeping the issue tracker fresh, creating a getting started document and providing great example code.

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Key messages

1) The Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort created to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally. Blah

2) The Hyperledger Project is still in its early days. The roadmap, schedule, and product design still need time to emerge.

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3) The Hyperledger Project is neutral ground for the collaboration to take place and is not dominated by a few vendors. The initiative serves to empower developers and foster a culture of "do-ocracy" amongst those who participate.

Proposed boilerplate (to be included on the bottom of press releases)

Hyperledger Project FAQ

What is the Hyperledger Project?

The Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort created to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally. Designed for collaboration, Hyperledger allows anyone to create their own blockchain shared ledger for their own company/industry/personal use case.

Why was the Hyperledger Project created?

The application of emerging distributed ledger technology shows great promise in the enterprise. Blockchain technology can provide a more secure, more reliable, more transparent and more automatic way of exchanging and tracking data and assets. The project was created to form a collaborative effort to advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features for a cross industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally.

What is the mission of the Hyperledger Project (HLP)?

The mission of the HLP is four-fold:

1)      To create an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework and code base, upon which users can build and run robust, industry-specific applications, platforms and hardware systems to support business transactions.2)      To create an open source technical community to benefit the ecosystem of the HLP solution providers and users focused on blockchain and shared ledger use cases that will work across a variety of industry solutions.3)      To promote participation of leading members of the ecosystem including developers, service and solution providers and end users.4)      To host the infrastructure for the HLP, establishing a neutral home for community infrastructure, meetings, events and collaborative discussions and providing structure around the business and technical governance of HLP.

How is Hyperledger different from other blockchains?

Privacy, confidentiality and auditability are front and center in the design of the Hyperledger project. In addition to this, Hyperledger is open-source under the Apache 2 license, allowing anyone to permissively use the code and adapt it to their needs. What are the IP or patent considerations here?

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The source code contributed to Hyperledger is contributed with an Apache 2 license that includes a patent grant. For more specific information, please read the Apache 2 license. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

What is The Linux Foundation? What is the relationship to Hyperledger?

The Linux Foundation is the non-profit organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. The Linux Foundation provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company.

The Linux Foundation hosts Hyperledger Project as a Collaborative Project under the foundation. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral stewardship of the project and enables the project to take advantage of its scale and capabilities for helping open source communities.

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Select PR Audit Interview Responses

What is the Hyperledger Project?

The Hyperledger Project did today is a collection of code initially a few other contributors that is on its way to a production release. We’re still pre 1.0, but it’s intended to be a toolkit for implementing permissioned Blockchain.

Hyperledger is a platform for building permissioned chains, potentially even non-permissioned chains. smart contracts on top of these chains that allow us to solve a whole class of problems we couldn’t previously solve.

Hyperledger project is something that will be developed openly under open governance, where there is no single vendor that’s totally controlling everything, and where everybody has an equal say in where this thing is going ahead from a technical perspective. There is a lot of potential to do another Linux, another web, like the Apache Web Server initially.

What is the vision of the Hyperledger Project?

To create a business friendly blockchain. To provide a way to keep databases in sync until everyone can share the same record, so that’s applicable across a lot of different real world use cases.

To create a sort of core kernel and then modular choices around consensus and around encryption and and various other components. That's really a key differentiating point from other blockchains.

Hyperledger has the potential to make distributed database applications much, much easier.

To focus on the common layer of the stack, the core plumbing, aligning on a single approach, maybe not a single technical code base, but a single approach at least that will be helpful to build large-scale solutions that address a wide range of use cases.

To take the emerging technical area of innovation around blockchain and putting some professional wrappers around it to make it an industry type of solution.

To deliver an enterprise quality open source blockchain with an initial target of financial services.

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What problem does Hyperledger solve? How do companies solve the problem without Hyperledger?

So today, we currently solve the essential problem of the distributed ledger by maintaining a ledger independently on each side of a transaction, where we manage the debits and credits, of any sort of business transactions. It’s complicated, prone to error, and then of course you have to deal with how do you get the payment from one side to the other? You go through some sort of an intermediary of banks and clearing houses and God only knows what else.

This distributed database gets us out of the “cloud trap” where typically in an ecosystem, you need to trust one central provider and one central organization to be the center of that database. With Hyperledger, we don’t need that one provider. We can build a really decentralized database, a decentralized ledger.

Hyperledger is a way to take a lot of natural structures that today are written using purely legal code or business code and turn that into software code, that can go independently and autonomously execute these agreements in response to changing market conditions, in response to other data.

The shared distributed ledger ensures that everybody has exactly the same picture of the truth of that ledger, because of the nature of the blockchain itself. When we add things to the blockchain, everybody gets exactly the same transactions added to their blockchain and it’s cryptographically bound to all the previous transactions that went before it, and so it can’t be falsified, it can’t be changed without essentially invalidating that whole ledger. And so by everybody having essentially the same picture, it makes it a lot easier. it eliminates a lot of the unnecessary complexities of having to manage checks and balances, and credits and debits on both sides of a transaction.

I think there is a great case to be made that an open source collaborative project like Hyperledger is the answer. If there is this core skeleton that’s been hardened out and secure and tested really well, and that everyone can build on top of, I think it will really speed the development of this technology rather than having everyone try to build their own, having lots of interoperability issues, and lots connectivity and interoperability problems.

There are lots of shared ledger solutions in the market today. For the most part, a large number of those creations or those solutions in the market are built on their own stack. Hyperledger creates a kernel that you can build shared ledgers from and that kernel is really the heart of an ecosystem of solutions that are built on top of it. The goal of that kernel is to be as widely applicable to as many of the use cases, but at the same time be a unified kernel that a lot of people use so that you get solutions built on top of that kernel that form an ecosystem that creates a whole that’s bigger than any single solution could be.

Depending on the direction of the project, which is still in flux now, Hyperledger could solve part of the interoperability problem that companies and participants have today, and that is interoperability not just amongst new technology, but potentially into existing infrastructure.

Who is Hyperledger Project’s audience? What do you want them to do?

We want any software developer and eventually any member of the IT staff who is chartered with building a distributed ledger project. To be able to turn up this code, download it, install it, run it, get up to speed and build a prototype and take that prototype to production.

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Financial services and financial institutions are the largest transferrers of value; trillions and trillions of dollars a day, so that’s where we think the most interest is and applicability is, although the goal of the now Hyperledger is to cover all kinds of different industries.

Hyperledger should be attracting all of the various stakeholders who think that they want to build solutions based on blockchain technology.

Audience is those that need a distributed database or would like to replace some sort of less convenient architecture with a distributed database that potentially makes things much more efficient.

The network fact is the fact that we have both vendors and users in this equation - actual end users who are participating in sort of the co-creation of this plumbing to make sure it works.

One of the things that I am hopeful for is that the project leadership helps define the audience, because right now the audience seems to be everyone.

Right now the key audience is really executives and maybe a little bit less sort of developer community. I hope that they key audience will be developers within large organizations.

Why should members join Hyperledger Project? What’s in it for members?

The members of the community are essential to maintaining the core of this project, maintaining the developer momentum, maintaining the events that we host, the hack-a-thon, the talking to the press, that sort of thing. That membership is our stakeholders in the community. We hope that they participate and contribute not just in the form of being members of the organization for which they have representation up to the board but also in the form of developer talent.

Companies join the project and help make sure that there is a common standard that everyone can agree to use, and help foster momentum around that one standard. Also, they join to give influence over how that standard is shaped as well.

There is obviously a lot of benefits to open source in that you are leveraging the development resources of an entire community rather than one single company that you are paying or trying to do it internally.

There are some members who aren’t sort of actively contributing code or ideas, but who are actively participating in and learning a lot from the experience because there is a lot of extremely knowledgeable people who have been in this space for a long time.

There’s marketing value in being associated with the Hyperledger project. There are some companies that want to show that they are taking this seriously and just being part of that community, it helps.

Blockchain technology is potentially very disruptive. As a result, everybody has their hair on fire and they want to know what is this blockchain stuff and how is it going to disrupt my business and how can I use it to disrupt my competitors? It’s that simple. And as a result we have an awful lot of interest in the work that we are doing here, because we are promising essentially to deliver an open blockchain.

I think this open source core is something everyone can benefit from. It’s something that many of the project members would have to build for themselves if there wasn’t Hyperledger. Having everyone collaborate means that it’s likely to be robust, it’s likely to be more secure, it’s likely to handle more use cases, and it also allows a piggybacking of efforts.

They support the mission of an open source project that has a well-defined scope at the common layers of the stack, that needs to be worked on together and hopefully standardized. It may be into one implementation, it may be into multiple components that

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everybody agrees upon, but at some layer there needs to be some reduction in the number of available options and work done to improve one common one that everybody can build off of.

It’s in everybody’s best self-interest to come together and build a common framework that reduces everybody’s operational cost.

Larger organizations are joining because they have a bit of a fear of missing out and want to be able to try and influence the direction of the project that marries to their commercial aims

How do you measure Hyperledger Project success?

I think success for Hyperledger is not just ready to make, ready to ship, ready to use code, but also integration into as many other interesting technologies and projects as possible.

Why should reporters care about Hyperledger Project?

Hyperledger represents a coming together of a wide array of important organizations in the information technology space, in the financial technology space and other industrial sectors. And this coming together is indicative of the growing commercial acceptance of the concept of Blockchain technologies. We aim to build a platform that gives the companies, the user and the developers that use it a choice in how they’d like to deploy the Blockchain, their choice of consensus mechanism, their choice of smart contracts platform because different use cases will drive different choices there.

The Linux Foundation is a tried and tested foundation obviously for governing open-source projects whereas none of the existing initiatives actually have that formal structure in place - they are either trying to create their own formal structure or they have none whatsoever.

Hyperledger is mixture of big tech companies, small startups, big banks, regional banks, exchanges, and then companies doing Internet of Things, companies doing Digital Rights Management for music. It’s a good blend, which makes it interesting.

It’s open. I think that’s the biggest selling point. Anybody can pick it up and run with it and do whatever they like with it. They can build solutions with it. They can build applications with it. They can be sure that they can get interoperability and portability as long as they use that.

Blockchain technology or distributed ledger technology has the potential to replace or supplement a lot of existing databases.

Hyperledger is a lot bigger than the story that cryptocurrency has changed the world and will destroy world order. Hyperledger is about taking that early stage, emerging technology and maturing that to the point where it becomes a real and powerful business tool separated from the use cases that it’s applied to.

They should care if it’s part of a new computing paradigm and a new developer paradigm. If there can be an example of large competitive organizations working together, they should probably care about that too.

What should be Hyperledger project’s main PR/marketing goals in the coming year?

We should not lead with wild-eyed ambitious giant visions for what the future looks like 20 years from now via Hyperledger. Rather, we’re focused on building plumbing and

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infrastructure for the set of existing use cases that would be substantially enhanced by the adoption of blockchain technologies.

The first goal is to make sure that the public is accurately aware of our role and our vision. A second goal should be that wherever blockchain technologies are discussed and there’s mention of more than one chain, we should be one of those mentioned.

Publicize the growing momentum, the commercial adoption, the inevitability around what we’re doing. At the same time, we need the press to defocus a bit from the personality of the participants, of the contributors and of the companies. Why? In these early days we need some separation from the developing community as developers already feel like they have a very hard job, which is making a choice between contributions and between directions. The less that the press or public pressure can influence or affect those choices the better.

Until we ship a 1.0, until we ship and point to public instances, we should pursue a bit of a human interest angle on the things we’re doing. Highlight individuals who are contributors to the project or using the project in some unique way.

Make sure there is more focus on the code announcements and conveying that sort of press; really differentiating it from the other initiatives.

There is going to have to be a sort of core kernel and then modular choices around the consensus and around encryption, and various other components that are picked and choose. So I think that's really a key differentiating point.

General education is still needed. Use case education as well. I think the best thing to do is explain the technology and explain the advantages of the

technology and why it's different than existing solutions. Promote the message that this is a multi-party thing - multiple players, multiple

participants that are collaborative. To educate the world that Hyperledger is a new type of database, and let them

understand what problems it evolves so that it gets separated from all of the applications of that database. The challenge is going to be disassociating what Hyperledger is doing from the actual applications. This is not going to be a single purpose or a single set of use cases-driven project.

In order to get around some of the competitive sensitivities and to demystify things, we may need to boring this down a bit as there is a lot of confusion around what Hyperledger actually is.

The number one goal should be educating in the right way where it’s very much less technical and less libertarian and more about what are the potential benefits to a broader population. Secondly, it’s getting the messaging correct around what specifically the aims are of the project, the audience and the scope.

What is the current perception of the Hyperledger project?

Negative perceptions

At its extreme, the perception is that IBM is basically regurgitating its internal proof of concept code or academic code and trying to buy credibility for it or buy respectability when really, they should have just thrown it away.

It’s another attempt by IBM to own an open-source community and do that by smothering it with development resources and press and take credit for it.

Concern is that this is a corporate-driven project that is foisting corporate built code, throwing it over the wall and assuming that a community will emerge not easily just to support their code.

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Hyperledger project is focused more on building its membership base and its cash-basis than it has on building code.

One misconception that people have is that Hyperledger is trying to be this single code base, a one-size-fits-all solution. There is no way a solution that works for Internet of Things is also going to work for financial institutions.

Some are trying to put down the project by saying, it's for that, it's not for this, or they are trying to do too much. This code is too large. There is no way it can be suitable for everything.

There is a lot of perception in the market, in the industry today that this is an IBM-only thing, that’s just not the case.

The people that are close to the project perceive the Hyperledger project as an IBM client advisory board and that it’s being run in concert with IBM's commercial aims at the detriment of everyone else participating.

The Bitcoin community looks at it as foolhardy. As in, why don’t you coalesce around Bitcoin or Ethereum?

Positive perceptions

This project is a clear indication that the business community is ready to take Blockchain technologies seriously, that there is a potential for these resources to be put towards building something production quality and not academic.

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