Education session: outtakes & list of resources

Protocol Calls & happenings Council Sessions
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Notes on the discussion session. Pls feel free to correct if smth not captured or needs edit.

Goal: EIP on Education aspects

  • Educating ourselves
  • Educating the rest of the world
  • How we bring devs to Eth opensource

Onboarding in the fun & friendly way. Having a single source that will provide the info on Ethereum dev. Basic question – how to fund those initiatives and make them open to contributing. One of the best examples here is Wikipedia.

Is the Ethereum foundation such a resource?

Better to see more community-driven initiatives. Centralization feels good in the beginning but can be a risk afterwards. If people see that it goes from the community it will be much more welcoming.

Still, really ambitious projects like that can need more guidance and support.

There’s already a lot of resources there. Can we create a way to merge and rate them?

Centralization can be good for onboarding newcomers, but it doesn’t exclude the further community work on that.

Not many people have access to info. We (status) tried to solve that. We understood that it’s not only a code but also a philosophy needed to be taught.

Many people assume Ethereum.org should contain all the info and don’t look at other resources. Giveth can support the purpose-driven initiatives.

Documentation is important and lacking. Elephant in the room is the incentivizing. There’s a lack of resources, there’re few developers that can do that and they are not excited about writing it. There’s a new consensys spoke https://kauri.io/ project that puts bounties on documentation.

Many orgs want to sponsor. Money is there, but there’s a distribution problem. They did a RUST bridge workshops to educate people on why it’s good. People love the brand and space. One thing usually missed, expect of funds/tokens it can be social capital.

Another example is RUST, by Mozilla. They pay to run the community, but people show up and do work without incentives.

Alex is doing a project on dev education, made to teach refugees. With 2 lines of code, you can get a list with lots of videos and articles and a small workshop. Every community can use that to run and maintain their workshops. Also thinking about incentivizing. We tried to use sources like gitcoin, to put workshops/tasks for education with bounties. The dependencies are maintainers, if they can make a great workshop they can also get some part of the revenue. Source: wizardamigos.com

You want people to make the transition and while it takes the time they may need some financial support to do it.

We may need some tagging for materials (e.g. authenticity, level of expertise needed).

Most important things are the keys management and developer tooling. Curation of different communities to go. There’re so many communities out there, we can help people to find the one that excites them. Also, Ethereum has a lot of money and we need to use it.

The size of bounties is hard to measure. Best contributions (gitcoin story) were without the bounties. With bounties, people try to close them asap. In Wikipedia, the maintainers are so motivated and strict.

Why do we need to artificially create a demand? This knowledge is important for the future work, why don’t we create a market out of that.

If you’re trying to solve a complex problem, there’s no cool element around the docs. We may need to put that in the culture, so people would be proud to do that.

Wikipedia is built in a democratic way and there’s a good review process.

Not just Wiki, also StackExchange/StackOverflow. Top 5% contribution mechanics are interesting.

Would be great to share qualitative research, as well as design prototypes.

A lot of the events are new, that’s why it’s hard to curate. Also, who should choose?

Best resources for learning

Also

  • Following people on twitter
  • Face to face events
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Just dropping the mozilla openbadges link here: https://openbadges.org

I mentioned this shortly in the discussion. Not as a learning resource, but as an Idea that could highly benefit from Ethereum as IMHO the goals there are nice but there are technical barriers to adoption that could be lowered by Ethereum.

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My side project ethereum.network was actually planned as a one stop, community education guide for many Ethereum things like dev resources, event list, projects database, and so on.

The Ethereum space and ecosystem just grows so fast that it got too difficult for me to keep track of everything happening and to keep it up-to-date. I’m happy to open it up in any way to make it more inclusive and cooperative.

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Awesome notes and recap!

At least three topics that arose for further discussion/ potential working sessions:

  1. Incentivization schemes for driving new documentation
  • Should this be financially motivated? If so, who can help support this?
  • Should this be driven by community based gamification (badges structure)? If so, how do we balance this level of centralization?
  1. Who(m) should house these resources/ be the authority to point to for new people on where to start?
  2. What is the process for adding new material to these materials and ordering/prioritizing the information?

Who has more ideas for these three points?

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Great notes!

Strongly agree with designing a badge system to help promote / incentivize developer + broader community education. This is something we’ve been thinking a lot about in the context of open source incentivization with Gitcoin alongside how to strike a proper balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I do think there’s a role for financial incentivizes (grants, inflation funding, bounties) especially for continued maintenance (the number one problem in open source code and documentation), but the value of distinct accolades on sites like StackOverflow or a feeling of community between editors on Wikipedia can’t be overlooked. Anyone who wants to collaborate on this please let me know!

Regarding who should house the resources and how they should be prioritized, I think that building a signalling mechanism into a site hosted by the foundation itself is probably the best way to go (and seemed to be the consensus at the meeting) but it would be useful for some resources to go into cleaning up existing resources as well (given how many are still front and center when searching but wildly out of date). Happy to be a part of both of these efforts.

Also super interested in working with initiatives like wizardamigos.com to reward learning, that idea really appeals to me and I’d love to help in any way I can.

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If anyone is interested in wizardamigos project, here are some links


Alex (@serapath) and I are now also working on a new lightweight editor that we would like to connect with the workshop module Alex mentioned http://wizardamigos.com/workshop_app/.

Current module uses Codesandbox as a tool for learners, since it’s made for teaching Javascript. And because there is no simple lightweight embeddable editor for blockchain, we jsut started working on it 2 weeks ago. It will be published on play.ethereum.org as soon as we have the first mvp.

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A couple of other resources I realized we left out of the list above:

  1. Blockgeeks.com (great education initiative by Ameer Rosic, Dmitry Buterin and others in Toronto)

  2. Weekly recaps like

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Here is the video for this session:

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Our internal dump o’stuff. We’ll clean it up at some point

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