Cyberinfrastructure for Social Good: Ensuring That No Homeless Individual Stays Behind

Abstract

We present a prototype decentralized transactional platform designed to improve the transparency of homeless serving organizations and facilitate their accountability and oversight. In the proposed system, the complete history of transactions between organizations offering homelessness services (e.g., shelters, transitional housing) and individuals seeking such services is stored in a distributed ledger. Using smart contracts, the proposed tamper-proof framework can automate the exchange of information between clients, organizations and government agencies, and allow government agencies audit organizations without violating the privacy of homeless individuals. We begin by describing the goals and concepts, the stakeholders’ requirements and the corresponding desirable system properties, and identified challenges. We continue with an in-depth description of the overall architecture of the proposed system designed to achieve these goals, and lessons learned towards transitioning this system to the real-world.