Governance, blockchain
and public interoperability
Architectures for control, traceability and digital sovereignty in government organizations.
My angle
The central question I explore is governance in public digital systems: how to design architectures that ensure control, traceability and digital sovereignty for government organizations, while enabling interoperability between them.
This is not purely a technical challenge. It is a question of institutional trust: citizens and organizations must be able to verify, audit and trust the systems that manage their data and transactions.
Projects
Two public organizations may need to collaborate around a shared process without surrendering their autonomy, responsibilities or internal control. The need was to demonstrate a form of verifiable institutional interoperability.
Project VDE-23 explored how a shared process between Revenu Québec and the SAAQ could be modelled, tracked and presented to decision-makers within an inter-organizational trust framework.
The digitalization of public services cannot be conceived only as a citizen-facing interface. It must also preserve organizational accountability, decision traceability and audit capability.
This reference architecture proposes a model for citizen-centric digital public services that can support governance, verification and collaboration between institutions.
Publications
S.I. Sion, K. Zhang, A. April (2026). BRA-PS: A Blockchain Reference Architecture for Public Sector Citizen-Centric Applications. Preprints. DOI: 10.20944/preprints202605.0472.v1
Sion, S.I., Zhang, K., April, A., Lutete, T.M., Bouchard, C. (2024). A Comprehensive Review of Multi-chain Architecture for Blockchain Integration in Organizations. BPM 2024. Springer, LNBIP vol 527. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-70445-1_1
S.I. Sion, K. Zhang (2024). "A proof of concept deployed on a distributed ledger for public service: vehicle taxation and registration by SAAQ–Revenu Québec (certificate VDE-23)", pp. 33–67. Éditions Yvon Blais.
S.I. Sion, K. Zhang, A. April (2023). Towards Citizen-Centric Services using Blockchain-Powered Digitalization of Public Sector Processes. BCCA 2023, pp. 361–368. DOI: 10.1109/BCCA58897.2023.10338883
S.I. Sion (2023). Decentralized Service Composition Applications (dXapps): Towards a New Paradigm for Building Blockchain Applications. ACM Middleware '23: Demos, Posters and Doctoral Symposium. DOI: 10.1145/3626564.3629094
Ongoing research
Doctoral thesis: Directed Traceability in Distributed Systems.
Governance questions in distributed systems are at the heart of my thesis: how to ensure visibility, control and compliance in decentralized environments where no single entity holds complete authority.
Tools and environments
Grants and related distinctions
PAJ 21–24, Ministère de l'Enseignement Supérieur du Québec (CAD 5,000) – Youth Project Award in Climate Change.
WFF Transformative Challenge 2023 (USD 10,000) – Laureate finalist TRC, One Health.
Contact
For digital modernization projects, interoperability or public distributed architectures.
Contact me