Federal Blockchain Infrastructure for German Asylum Procedures (FLORA)

Project Description:

The German asylum procedure requires close collaboration between various authorities at the municipal, state, and federal levels. To support this cooperation, Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) is developing FLORA, a blockchain-based system for the efficient and secure exchange of process information between competent authorities. The FLORA project has attracted considerable attention on a national and international level. For instance, it has won an award as the best digitalization project at the federal and state level in the 2019 German eGovernment competition. Moreover, it acts as an essential point of reference for the European Blockchain Partnership and its working group for the management of European asylum procedures. Recently, the FLORA project has also started looking into using blockchain and Verifiable Credentials to digitize asylum procedure certificates.

Together with the Project Group Business Information Systems Engineering of the Fraunhofer FIT, we act as scientific advisors to the BAMF's blockchain activities. In particular, we support the BAMF’s work on the national FLORA system and its activities the context of the European Blockchain Partnership.

We regularly publish updates on our joint work with the BAMF in white papers, academic outlets, and books.

White Papers:            

• https://bit.ly/2S2IRdS         
• https://bit.ly/2QsIqck

Academic Outlets:

• Amend, J., Fridgen, G., Rieger, A., Roth, T., & Stohr, A. (2021, January). The Evolution of an Architectural Paradigm: Using Blockchain to Build a Cross-Organizational Enterprise Service Bus. In Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii, USA. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2021.522
• Guggenmos, F., Lockl, J., Rieger, A., Wenninger, A., & Fridgen, G. (2020, January). How to Develop a GDPR-Compliant Blockchain Solution for Cross-Organizational Workflow Management: Evidence from the German Asylum Procedure. In Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii, USA. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2020.492
• Rieger, A., Lockl, J., Urbach, N., Guggenmos, F., & Fridgen, G. (2019). Building a Blockchain Application that Complies with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. MIS Quarterly Executive, 18(4). https://doi.org/10.17705/2msqe.00020
• Guggenmos, F., Lockl, J., Rieger, A., & Fridgen, G. (2019). Blockchain in der öffentlichen Verwaltung. Informatik Spektrum, 42, 174–181. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00287-019-01177-y

Peer-review book chapters:          

• Rieger, A., Stohr, A., Wenninger, A., & Fridgen, G. (2021). Reconciling Blockchain with the GDPR: Insights from the German Asylum Procedure. In C.G. Reddick, M.P. Rodríguez-Bolívar, & H.J. Scholl (Eds.), Blockchain and the Public Sector. Public Administration and Information Technology, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55746-1_4
• Amend, J., van Dun, C., Fridgen, G., Köhler, F., Rieger, A., Stohr, A., & Wenninger, A. (2021). Using Blockchain to Coordinate Federal Processes: The Case of Germany's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. In M. Röglinger, N. Urbach, R.A. Alias, K. Kautz, C. Saunders, & M. Wiener (Eds), Digitalization Cases, vol 2. Springer, Cham. Forthcoming.