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Hello, Ethereals. I am Mihai Alesione of Ethereum foundersFor the past year, she has served as Vice President of the Ethereum Foundation and Director of Ethereum Switzerland.
In the early days of the project, I focused my attention on the community aspect and worked on… Holon idea For distributed physical infrastructure. Over the past few months, I have been thinking about the next step(s) for the project and how we can create enabling conditions for a thriving community and smart contract ecosystem.
In this post I will propose an experiment for the Ethereum community – in a way, going back to the things I wanted to work on at the beginning of the project. The main idea behind this experiment is to create a self-organizing knowledge exchange network with potential ramifications in a variety of other fields. We’ll explore some use cases at the end of the article, but only to provide a starting point in this exploration – no To put it in a box.
Hopefully the proposed idea will spark an interesting conversation, and who knows, maybe even some cool projects in the near future 🙂
Enjoy!
Ethereum project transfer(s).
Freedom, when it begins to take root, is like a fast-growing plant.
-George Washington
As with any successful idea, the Ethereum project has transformed several times and evolved into what it has become today. Growth occurred in different ways while available resources were directed to strategic areas.
Initially, much of the focus was on legal hacking and creating the infrastructure needed to complete the Genesis sale. As we made our way through the legal bushes, and got to the point where we felt comfortable with the setup, the focus shifted toward security and monitoring the entire Genesis selling process.
Before launching Genesis Key Sale, we conducted in-depth security audits and created a complete DDoS protection strategy with multiple layers and courses of action. As we approach the end of Genesis sales, as expected, the focus has shifted primarily towards platform development.
After months of intense development, the focus is now shifting towards the immediate release of the configuration, smoothing out the rough edges and reviewing the software in order to uncover any security flaws that may have escaped us.
Soon, Ethereum will be released and all attention will be on monitoring how it behaves “in the wild.” The question now is what will happen after It’s “there”? What is the next phase of the project and what should we do? now To prepare for that?
The educational aspect is considered by everyone in the project to be extremely important in the short and long term, especially since one of the points of this platform is to create a rich ecosystem of DAPPs, DAOs and other smart contracts that live on it.
Everyone agrees that in order to have a thriving ecosystem, we need to create favorable conditions for curious developers to play and experiment with Ethereum. It also means providing the right tools, resources and educational programs – in short, making it as easy as possible for interested people to learn, collaborate and share knowledge.
Suggested experience: Ethereum builders
“In times of change, educated people inherit the land, while educated people find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
– Eric Hoover
While exploring the idea behind educational portals (i.e. Code Academy) and researching the effectiveness of different approaches, I I stumbled in studying For students taking online courses.
According to this study, students in open online courses tend to take a passive approach to learning, avoid cooperation with others, strive only for passing grades, and thus do not retain new knowledge. Even if students were initially motivated by acquiring new skills, as they progressed through the courses, their focus shifted toward grades and course completion.
Following this somewhat disappointing result, the researchers suggested that when planning online courses, providers should develop engaging courses. Requires Immediate peer interaction and use of new knowledge.
This led me to think that for something as radically new as Ethereum, perhaps looking for new methods of education and collaboration is key to unlocking the potential in the already formed Ethereum community.
After trying out a few approaches, the idea behind the Ethereum Builders project began to take shape.
As a project, it consists of multiple components, but in this article I will focus only on the education area.
In current form, this is how things were thought to be:
By combining screen sharing, an open source voting interface, and Bitcoin, we are creating a way for the open source Ethereum and knowledge sharing economy to self-organize, self-sustain, and distribute information toward the edges with maximum impact and at virtually zero cost. Special thanks go to Linda From Code Buddies to hack this together and to Uriel Iancu For invaluable help.
For lack of a better option, Google Hangouts will be used with screen sharing as Interactive method For Ethereum sessions. The web interface is an open source voting system, in this case used as an upvote system A self-organizing peer-to-peer knowledge sharing network. Bitcoin (and soon ETH) can serve as a tip/donation mechanism for course/hackathon organizers – tokens of appreciation for the invaluable knowledge shared. If the quality of the sessions is good, Hangouts can also be recorded for screen sharing and used in video lessons and other educational content quite easily.
For documentation and guides, GitBook seems like an interesting option. With it, you can pull content directly from wiki pages on different repositories (e.g. ethereum wiki, cpp wiki, go wiki, etc.) and display it in a beautiful web UI or eBook format. By pulling content from wikis, whenever documentation is updated, GitBook is automatically updated as well. Overall, it seems like a good fit for what we need right now, given that documentation is evolving at such a rapid pace in the Ethereum world.
You can see the initial proof we hacked together here.
As for badges and reputation, we will currently track organized sessions and community contributions in a spreadsheet. When the Ethereum network is up and running, we plan to transfer contributions and earned reputation to the identity of the user’s choice. This would then facilitate the following:
- Get appreciation for the things you learn
- Get/give appreciation for the things you teach
- Skills verification
- View and use your badges via etherwebz (and not only)
Again, this is just an experiment and we’ll be trying some of these things out in the coming weeks to see what works and what doesn’t. So please be patient if something does not work as expected and report it before then Open a case.
If well received by the community, Ethereum creators could unfold in several ways:
- Multilingual Ethereum study/hacking sessions for local learning
- Convert it to DAPP (Proof of Concept in Progress)
- Crowdfunding module(s) for projects, hackathons and workshops
- Ethereum reputation system for code whisperers, sharers, builders, etc.
- Asynchronous, self-organized global hackathons, competitions and workshops
- DAOfication community
- ______________ Insert great idea(s) here
Knowledge exchange fractals and open collaboration
You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve and those you create.
—Mike Murdock
In its current form, ethereum.builders is an open source tool that enables the Ethereum community to coordinate, collaborate, and share knowledge. Users are likely to discover new ways to use it for things we haven’t discovered yet.
However, I would like to go over some use cases to provide a starting point on this journey.
Explore some use cases:
- Connecting Ethereum builders to each other
I’m thinking of TwitchBut in order to hack Ethereum. Instead of watching other people play games, you can watch people create cool things on Ethereum, gaining new skills and knowledge along the way.
From learning how to install an Ethereum client on your device to creating and demoing your first DAPP, there are a whole host of interactions to explore.
- Connecting Ethereum builders to knowledge repositories
Organizing information and facilitating access to it. Currently, the Ethereum knowledge base is fragmented between various wikis, forums, and blog posts. As an alternative to this madness, I suggest using GitBook as a tool to organize information and make it available in web, pdf, mobi, and epub format.
- Decentralized hackathons and breakathons
We have been dreaming of organizing a global, distributed hackathon for some time. Now we have a way to do it. Not only can we organize it, but at the same time, thanks to Hangouts On Air, we can stream the event live on YouTube. If you are interested in participating or sponsoring an event like this, please contact us.
Breakathons are on the other end of the spectrum: instead of creating things, they try to break things. In our case we are talking about testing Ethereum and seeing if anyone can crack it. Instead of being punished, people who are able to break things will be rewarded, because thanks to their work Ethereum becomes stronger. You can think of it as a crowd security audit with prizes 🙂
- Decentralized Joint Working Sessions: The Rise of Intolerance
Besides organizing hackathons, hangouts can also serve as a global coworking space(s). You can think of it like a place where you can go and work on building cool things on Ethereum with other people from all over the world. Energy builds up when you work together.
- Blockchain Research Sessions: Academic Communication
Use available channels to reach minds interested in researching the possibilities and problems faced by blockchain technology. Make it easy for these people to coordinate and exchange ideas in a highly interactive format. The rest is up to them.
- Ethereum project updates
Along with the blog, this can serve as an interactive channel to communicate with the community and developers roaming around the project. They are not mutually exclusive tools, but rather complement each other.
- Sync Ethereum Meetups
Physically – With meetups.com’s decision to start charging meetup organizers based on group size, some have already started looking for an alternative.
Online – By design, you can remove bottlenecks such as having an “X” organize a meetup call in a closed Skype room with only a few select members. Open the floodgates and allow communities and their members to interact, get to know each other and synchronize. Think of it as a descriptive layer on top of actual encounters, allowing local communities to become part of larger communities (continental, global, etc.).
Now, to bring all of these ideas into one, here’s how it currently looks:
*Some of the sessions mentioned above are just examples.
Feedback and help welcome
For those who find this experiment interesting, have a question or want help, you can see it in action ethereum.builders or Join us to chat On Jeter. If you discover an error or something that is not working properly Please open a case And if you want to contribute code or create prizes for specific features Please drop by our repo ^_^
The experiment is underway!
