ENVITED and their involvement in Tezos

In 2019 a work group was announced to explore virtual proof of validation of highly automated driving functions. This work group is called "ENVITED". Workgroup members include automotive manufacturers such as Audi, BMW, Daimler and Porsche, as well as other ENVITED Partners. 
ELI5: cars and related companies exchanging information like maps, traffic and other useful information in the form of digital data which is stored on a database.

ENVITED since then:

- Carlo van Driesten (Project Lead Virtual Test & Validation, BMW Group) and Pierre Mai (CEO of Algedonic Loop GmbH) have deployed a proof of concept that they presented in the beginning of December 2019 in the ENVITED ecosystem.

- In the end of January, the ENVITED work group visited Nomadic Labs in Paris to talk about their automotive use case building on Tezos. 

- In February, ENVITED announced their members will work together on a technological roadmap for the virtual proof of highly automated driving functions based on the Tezos Blockchain.

ENVITED gets involved in the Tezos community

Great news for Tezos: big companies exploring to build solutions on Tezos. But on top of that, EVNITED members have been getting involved in the Tezos community. This seems to hint at a possible deeper and more long term connection. This is one of Tezos' strong-points: anyone can get involved and suggest or possibly develop proposals for Tezos Core. Tezos on-chain governance system makes it possible We will see that more often: development teams that are building on Tezos, and at the same time contributing to the ecosystem. Like Arthur Breitman recently said in an interview: "You don't need to be someone with a lot of coordinating power over the network in order to propose upgrades." So this means that anyone that is interested in building something on a public blockchain can now add missing functionality or qualities. Or at least have a go at initiating an idea to be implemented to the Tezos mainnet. This is very inviting and creates a sense of community amongst developing parties. Additions don't need to be core changes, we've already seen that Tezsure started developing OrO, the decentralized oracle network that is being developed on Tezos. At this point, ENVITED is mostly contributing to public discussions. Niko Hildebrand, has been starting a bunch of subjects on agora. (Tezos Agora is a place to discuss and learn about the long-term direction of the Tezos project.)
And he just released the "ASCS Tezos Blockchain Fundamentals". (ASCS is the Automotive Solution Center for Simulations, which initiated the ENVITED ecosystem.)

When companies that build Tezos-based applications, become part of the Tezos community, something long term is growing.