Designing Blockchain Technology to Transform Rural Communities
Paste the appropriate copyright statement here. ACM now supports three different copyright statements: ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced in a sans serif 7 point font. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. Abstract Mexican immigrants contribute large sums of money to their hometowns. But, these donors' mistrust in their native government has driven them to work independently, and consequently have more limited impact and scope. Prior work has explored open government platforms to build trust and facilitate collaborations between citizens and governments. Open governments use audit institutions to revise transactions and provide transparency. However, these approaches assume that strong audit institutions are in place, which is rare. In the case of Mexico, although the government has made great efforts to have trustworthy audit institutions, immigrants are still wary of them. Instead, we explore the potential of blockchain as a way to enable financial reviews without requiring human intervention. We discuss how our approach powers collaborations between immigrants and governments that transform rural communities in Mexico. We conclude with an overview of the design implications of our work.