NataliE SMOLENSKI

FOUNDER, SCHOLAR, SPEAKER

I have founded and led both private-sector technology startups and policy-focused nonprofits. I specialize in taking organizations from zero to one. I am also deeply convinced that it is time to re-found the American republic on the principle of “liberty, not domination”.

I am both an executive and a PhD social scientist who grew up amidst multiple languages and cultures. These unique experiences inform my perspective on the intersection of identity, technology, and government.

The Path of Freedom and Sovereignty (What Bitcoin Did)

National Perspectives on Adoption of DLT and Web3 (The Hague Conference on Private International Law)

How Is Truth Related to Community and Justice?

other speaking

I am an experienced public speaker and educator comfortable connecting with very different types of audiences. I break down complex topics like the blockchain and digital self-sovereignty in a way that people from all backgrounds can understand by connecting them into the larger story of what it means to be human---and how that is changing. I love the edges of what we know, and I leave audiences feeling challenged and inspired to think differently about our shared world.

2021

Texas Blockchain Summit

Media, Technology and Education in a Post-Truth Society

NTX Inno: State of Innovation
Blockchain & Cryptocurrency

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Blockchain and the new credential ecosystem

2020

Texas State Library & Archives Commission
2020 e-Records Conference
Blockchain-Enabled Document Security & Verification

World Bank & ASEAN+3 2020 HRD Forum
Skills Development and Employment during/after COVID19
(Starts at 2:23:55 mark)

OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum
"Education credentials on the chain"

HylandWIN
"Blockchain: The Connection between Truth and Value"

Hyland CommunityLIVE
"Blockchain: The future of verifiable documents at Hyland"

Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning
"Self-Sovereignty and Digital Credentials on the Blockchain"

2019

Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning
"Understanding the Post-Truth Society”

British Council - Going Global
"Structuring Knowledge and Decisions - Is the Truth Out there?”

World Economic Forum
"AI and Digital Identity," AI for Good Global Summit

Michigan State Medical Society Rhoades Lecture
"Blockchain and the Promise of Physician-Owned Credentials and Patient-Owned Medical Records"

Philadelphia Consular Corps
"Blockcerts for Economic Development"

British Council - Going Global
"Structuring knowledge and decisions – Is the truth out there?"

World Bank/ID4D Mission Billion Challenge Winner
"Blockcerts: Self-Sovereign Digital Records"

KNOW Identity
"Shifting the Business Paradigm for Data and Privacy with a Race to the Top"

Shorenstein Center / Harvard Kennedy School
"Good ID: What's policy got to do with it?"

2018

Inter-American Development Bank
"Blockchains and Self-Verifying Digital Credentials."

DELTA Summit, Malta
"The Anthropology of Blockchains"

The World Bank
"Practical Lessons from the Use of Blockchain in Education"

Blockchain, Credentials, & Connected Learning
"Towards True Self-Sovereign Learner Records"

Global Education and Skills Forum, Dubai
"Education and the Power of Blockchain"

Understanding Blockchain, Nassau, Bahamas
"Understanding Blockchain Technology Applications"

2017

The Economist
"Digital Self-Sovereignty" with Kenn Cukier

Groningen Declaration Network
"Innovation and Standardization" with Matt Pittinsky, Parchment CEO

ZEST Malta
"Who Are You? Can We Trust You?"

Blockchain in Education
"The Value of Open Standards"

Southern Methodist University
"Sovereignty in the Age of Digital Capital"

Educause
"Why the Blockchain Will Revolutionize Credentials"

2016

National Association for College Admission Counseling
Panel Discussion with MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Make Magazine

2015

The Richards Group
"Deep Listening: How Anthropology and Psychology Help Us Understand People from the Inside"

2013

The Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna
"The Living Subject: Towards an Interdisciplinary Social Scientific Method"

American Anthropological Association
"National-European Theology"

books

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How might digital technology, and notably smart technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI), learning analytics, robotics, and others transform education? This book explores such a question. It focuses on how smart technologies are changing education in the classroom as well as the management of educational organizations and systems.

Chapter 11, "Blockchain for Education: A New Credentialing Ecosystem", provides an overview of blockchain technology and spotlights its use in education to create portable, interoperable, user-controlled digital credentials.

ACADEMIC CREDENTIALS

IN AN ERA OF DIGITAL DECENTRALIZATION

Increasingly, the credential has emerged as a transnational, interdisciplinary signal of capability and skill in an environment where other characteristics—language, nationality, religious identity—cannot be presupposed. The essays in this volume give an account for the social functions served by the achievement, trust, and credentialing technologies that Learning Machine is producing. They ask what capability means and what credentials do in the social collectives that find them significant. Finally, they highlight the importance of individual self-determination under informational and organizational conditions in which issues of data invasiveness and control are central, if often technologically hidden, to the social fluidity that characterizes our time.