Project Name:
Flying Swallows-Many talents serve like flying swallows to ordinary people’s homes.
Hacker ID :
Zhang Xu @ DoraHacks BCH Beijing Hack 2018
“How to help migrant workers and casual workers recapture bargaining power? Why can blockchains be used to build trust systems in the employment relationship of odd jobs?”
It’s hard to imagine that guy, who is closely watching such groups and exploring technical solutions, is a junior who was born in 1998 and was born in Nanjing.
When most college students are still immersed in ordinary university life, Zhang Xu has participated in several national-level entrepreneurial competitions and technical hackathons and achieved excellent results. Moreover, Zhang Xu has been able to make a complete English business plan, make a smooth product demo and express a set of increasingly mature ideas.
Zhang Xu is the Hacker of DoraHacks, who won the silver prize in the Bitcoin cash-themed hackathon competition in July 2018. “It was amazing during this period. I met a lot of people who were really interested in what I did and were willing to help me, so my initial heart has never changed,” he said.
To further understand the project carried out by Zhang Xu, DoraHacks conducted a telephone interview with Zhang Xu on a Sunday morning:
Q&A follow-up
Q1: Can you briefly introduce the project you are working on?
A: We have a team of more than 10 people from Nanjing University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Qinhuangdao, who are working on a recruitment platform for migrant workers and casual workers from the construction and engineering industries firstly. The specific implementation of the recruitment platform is to complete the ERP system for engineering with the alliance chain, open the business with the public chain, and then implement the recruitment function.
Q2: What are your projects, product problems, and difficulties? Can you tell me in detail?
A: Our project can solve difficult problems in traditional engineering projects and open up Internet recruitment channels for migrant workers.
Typical problems are:
Problems such as excessive subcontracting, default subcontracting, information asymmetry, capital misappropriation, etc., which lead to hidden dangers in engineering safety quality; the real-name system of migrant workers, contract problems, difficulty in safeguarding rights, low recruitment efficiency, and inability to get wages in full and on time.
Q3: What are the main problems of the existing recruitment system for migrant workers and casual workers? What are the existing solutions on the market?
A: Most of the traditional migrant workers and casual workers are recruited in a very primitive and inefficient way through the introduction of the contractor and relying on personal experience and contacts; and engineering management also involves subcontracting. Then a qualified subcontractor will subcontract the project again and even subcontract the project illegally.
A: The process is from engineering to subcontracting units to contracting workers and finally to migrant workers. During this period, there are a large number of excessive subcontracting behaviors and illegal subcontracting.
A: For the workers, they have little choice and bargaining power; some workers leave their homes for higher salaries and their rights are also not guaranteed. Although China attaches great importance to the protection of workers’ legitimate rights and labor arbitration, there are still many problems existing:
A: Many migrant workers do not sign contracts with employers because of their weak legal awareness and their concern for high salaries, which leads to the inability of their rights to be protected;
A: The original bookkeeping method has made it difficult for workers’ account books to be used as the basis for labor security.
A: We also know that governments such as Xiong’an New Area are actively trying to solve problems with new engineering management. Other Internet companies are also exploring, but they can only only classify and organize the information of workers. These platforms cannot establish and maintain credit and are not convincing for workers.
Q4: What is your solution? Where is the advantage?
A: Our starting point is to solve the problem of the difficulty of recruiting migrant workers and safeguarding rights for migrant workers. The difficulty in solving lies in the asymmetry and unreal information in the project management, as well as the actual problems of excessive subcontracting and illegal subcontracting generated.
A: We use the blockchain technology to manage project projects, establish the trust system of recruiting upstream and downstream, realize the true traceability of data and information disclosure, and provide workers with more bargaining power and choice.
A: In addition, we have made an engineering-centric alliance chain ERP system, and used this system to complete the contract signing and project progress confirmation between the packager, subcontractor and workers, and the implement the direct control, which breaks the relatively isolated situation of the information of the various parties in the project management.
Q:- Has anyone completed a similar alliance chain?
A:In August 2018, Xiong’an New Area launched a blockchain-based project management platform, but this platform only completed the control of upstream projects without new exploration in recruitment. Our engineering ERP system is mainly used as a means of cutting into the market, and is essentially to build a recruitment platform.
Q5: What is the biggest challenge in the process of product launch?
A: The process of market validation will be a test, and the product is expected to be available in June 2019. Before this, we have to accumulate a lot of resources. At present, we have begun to find potential partners in Jiangning District, the manufacturing district of Nanjing, and Suzhou, the second largest industrial city in China.
Q6: What specific preferences or intentions do you have for investors? What is the progress of financing now?
A: We are now partially supported by the university, but the financing has not yet begun. We also got the attention and interest of some investors in the course of the competition. But the investors we really want are the investors who have accumulated in the traditional investment field and have a certain layout and understanding in the field of engineering real estate and blockchain.
Q7: Can you tell us about the team?
A: There are 5 full-time partners and 7 part-time members in the team. The team members come from Nanjing University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, City University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University and other universities. Members like our core developers from City University of Hong Kong and Tsinghua University are all recognized by participating in DoraHacks hackathon (laughing).
A: In addition, we have professors from the engineering field of Nanjing Forestry University as our legal consultants in the engineering field. The team members also have resources and experience in engineering.
Q8: What inspired you to launch the project/products?
A: I have long wanted to build a platform for the recruitment of migrant workers. On the one hand, there are migrant workers in the family, so I am more concerned about the group of migrant workers. On the other hand, I have had several experiences in the factory, I have a deep understanding of this field in the factories in the Baoan District of Shenzhen City in Pearl River Delta as well as the factories in the Yangtze River Delta.
A: In fact, before I entered the university, I wanted to use technology to build an Internet platform. I wanted to establish a credit system between employers and odd jobs. However, such a credit system that is difficult to achieve via Internet thinking. The reality is that the migrant workers have limited academic qualifications. Their professional level is not guaranteed by credit, so there is no way to do it.
A: In 2018, we explored the blockchain. In June 2018, we conducted market research on some migrant workers in Suzhou. From the perspective of migrant workers, they have a higher acceptance of products. However, the real difficulty lies in the problems involved in the closed-loop industry, which needs to go deep into the project management link to truly open this market.
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