A data commons for open educational resources leveraging IPC & ZK VM
Filecoin on it's mission to create decentralized storage, safeguard humanity's data and bring compute to the data has a huge potential to put things right for OER. Open educational resources (OER) aim to be teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The reality is that in a person-centric data economy most resources are actually hosted on platforms and reputation is build by resource providers to build a followership there. Web3 still lacks of decentralized reputation system that could offer a practical alternative to platforms right now. This hackathon projects has a focus on the data availability layer combined with some ideas to setup light incentive structures.
With IPC, decentralized apps bootstrap their own recursively scalable subnets tailored to dev requirements. It enables the creation of flexible, living networks of customizable sidechains or "subnets", which can achieve massive scaling by running parallel chains that interoperate with one another.
For the second part of the hack we just assumed that OER data is available and fairly shared on the storage network and implemented a simple use case that leverages ZK technology to achieve verifiable computation. In the JSON example provided by risc0 we can prove that we know some "critical data" inside a JSON without revealing the other records in the same JSON. In the context of OER this proves completion of a certain assessment task by a person without revealing other personal data.
Historically, the only method for confirming the correct execution of a software application was through redundant computation. ZK introduces a new option: verifiable computation.
It's now possible to pair a program's output with a self-certifying receipt, allowing a skeptical third party to verify correct execution β and the verifier doesn't need to repeat the original computation or even see the inputs to the program!