Hello all! I’m Jason Griffey, a librarian, technologist, author, speaker, researcher, and the instructor for the course. I’m currently an affiliate at metaLAB at Harvard, and a library and technology consultant with my LLC, Evenly Distributed.

I’ve been researching, writing, and speaking about Blockchain and Decentralized technologies since 2015 when I fell down the blockchain rabbit hole while a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

I’ve given talks about Blockchain at the Computers in Libraries conference, Internet Librarian, Library 2.018, NFAIS 2018 conference, and many more. I was lucky enough to be asked to deliver the Gloriana St. Clair Lecture Series on 21st Century Librarianship on the topic of Blockchain for Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar in 2018. I was an invited participant at the inaugural Decentralized Web Summit at the Internet Archive in 2016, and wrote an essay that was featured on BoingBoing about how libraries could be integral to the future of the decentralized web.

If you’d like to learn more about me than you’d ever cared to know, my web page has links to everything I do and have done. 

For this course, I’ll be joined by a quartet of fantastic SJSU students who will act as wranglers, problem solvers, instigators, and discussion leaders: Greta, Danielle, Ben, and Megan. 

My hope is that this course makes a fairly complicated technological idea a bit simpler, illustrates ways that it might be useful in the information professions, but also give you enough knowledge to be able to question claims made by services so that you are a more informed user of technology. 

Thanks again, and let’s go!