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
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
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.
articles
It Is Time to Re-Found the American Republic (Bitcoin Magazine)
The Dangerous Implications of Central Bank Digital Currencies (Bitcoin Magazine)
A New Bretton Woods Is Happening Far from Davos (RealClear Policy)
In the War of Ideas, Bitcoin Is Our Strongest Weapon (Bitcoin Magazine)
Now Is the Time to Think about Value
What is value? Why does it matter?
After the Petrodollar: Bitcoin and the Coming Monetary Reset
The Original Technologies of Trust (In the Mesh)
Net Neutrality as Generational Struggle
The internet empowered younger generations in ways older ones can't imagine and see as a threat.
Blockchain Records for Refugees
The world needs systems of record that can withstand war, economic collapse, and climate catastrophes — before they happen.
Arrival: The Work of Scientific Diplomacy
Identity and Digital Self-Sovereignty
A New Paradigm for Sovereignty on the High Seas
The Evolution of Trust in a Digital Economy (Scientific American)
The Time for Self-Sovereignty is Now
Blockcerts, Decentralized Identifiers, and Verifiable Claims
The EU GDPR and the Blockchain
A Declaration of the Rights of the Digital Subject
The Crisis of the American Sciences
Moving Beyond our Theological History
Towards a New Civilizational Project
Building the Next 1543 through the University and Beyond
