Blockchain for Trustful Collaborations between Immigrants and Governments
It addresses trust barriers for immigrants seeking to support rural communities, though it is incremental in applying blockchain to a specific social domain.
This paper tackles the problem of limited pro-social impact due to trust issues between Mexican immigrants in the US and their home governments, by creating a blockchain-based system that addresses workflow transparency and control, resulting in improved collaboration mechanisms.
Immigrants usually are pro-social towards their hometowns and try to improve them. However, the lack of trust in their government can drive immigrants to work individually. As a result, their pro-social activities are usually limited in impact and scope. This paper studies the interface factors that ease collaborations between immigrants and their home governments. We specifically focus on Mexican immigrants in the US who want to improve their rural communities. We identify that for Mexican immigrants having clear workflows of how their money flows and a sense of control over this workflow is important for collaborating with their government. Based on these findings, we create a blockchain based system for building trust between governments and immigrants. We finish by discussing design implications of our work and future directions.