Education Across Cultures

foreign [Music] thanks for being here thanks to the panelists um I guess let's just kick it off with a quick ground of introductions um let us know what you all do and what the projects you're working for do okay so my name is Camila Ramos and a prophecy was saying you know we all have like 17 jobs so I'll name the relevant ones here I'm the head of developer relations at fuel Labs I'm a core contributor at women build web 3 which is what we're going to be focusing on today from my end and I'm a lifelong educator I've been in education for seven years now and that's what I did before becoming an engineer and then eventually before kind of transitioning back into education via devrel hey thanks for having me my name is divyanshu I work at the folio where we have built the biggest web3 Dev community in India we do a bit different programs such as hackathons fellowships we do grants and a bunch of other stuff we are also co-host of eth India which is scheduled to be the biggest uh web 3 ethereum hackathon in Asia so yeah hi good afternoon everyone my name is Ian and I'm from China I'm a Divine developer last year I build a developer community in China called adapt learning which is a sponsored by either in Foundation twice thanks yeah [Applause] hello I'm Lush I'm here with itu blockchain which is biggest and first blockchain Club in Turkey we do lots of educational and event stuff and we are granteeing ESP which are open source bootcamp for smart contract developing also I'm smart contract developer in Italian studio and I'm the biggest supporter of the Constable proposal [Applause] awesome thanks guys um what got you all motivated to start an educational series why is it important to educate um and how did you all get involved with it I can start we as a University Club we want to be different from the other University Club in our school in our country and we want to be a club which Wheels which produce which makes lots of beneficial stuff as a public goods and in first we couldn't do anything because we are very started at the first times and first we educated ourselves then we realized that we need more friends to Bear build together then we do a few groups to make hard people to learn something then it failed then we thought we should do more open more accessible content and so that we can help people to join web 3 development then we we see lots of people from Turkey are learning with us then we see we are joining kakatons and tape only the top tier folks who get access to premium institutes they get a lot of opportunities while the other folks really don't uh also so what we we thought that some BS what we did was we started doing our programs and what really got us into the ethereum system was the ethos of decentralization being accessible being permissionless so we started off with ethena in 2018 uh and since then we have done a bunch of eth India online hackathons uh like I said we have done fellowships and yeah we have been doing since then uh we are now at 250 000 Dives in our community so now we're still going strong and yeah we'll talk about more about it okay thank you uh last of May and I will help my friends to hold a hackson in China and work that the advisor and during today's competition I found I'm fan and found many Developers there there was a huge gap among the developers uh most of them know how to code with solidity but many of them do not know the base components of depth development such such as using Channing graph ipfs yeah then um few of them know the famous project scaffold eth which can save them a lot of time developing their MLP in hacksaw and so on the surrender too much time on Google yeah so it is at the same time my friend Julie who wanted to learn blockchain so I authorized authorized to him to learn Dev development directly yeah if you can show the save you a lot of time then I had the idea to build a open source project to help developers to learn Dev development we recorded the open source project learning directly so that's my motivation thank you yeah so women build web 3 is a community for intermediate and advanced developers and you know I came from a web 2 background I was an engineer at PayPal and I kind of started experimenting with crypto and blockchain development on the side and when I was ready to dive in there weren't really that many communities specifically for my type of person I found a lot of communities were onboarding women and we're doing kind of zero to one stuff and I was looking for where can I go from like one to ten how can I actually start building given that I have all of the the Baseline things to start and it came together around web3con which is the hackathon that developer Dow organizes and we were all kind of like how do we find teammates who are women that are kind of On My Level so we can build something dope and we realized there really didn't exist that community and I just happened to tweet out this was back like six months ago before I had Twitter followers and I just happened to tweet is there anyone who wants to be on my team who's like an engineer who's a girl I can build something cool and I expected maybe two or three people to reach out and maybe like 45 women ended up reaching out and being like I want to participate like I've been looking for something like like this so that's how we initially got together we hacked uh we shipped a bunch of cool stuff and after we looked around and we're like all right we have this really cool community of Engineers what should we do next and as we were experimenting you know potentially expanding the program that we built or the project we bought the hackathon we realized there really wasn't a lot of high quality educational resources that were up to date that weren't like Blaine shills so there's a lot of you know platforms out there that have kind of like their own type of course but they basically just keep using their thing over and over and it wasn't we really couldn't find anything where we could kind of level up for blockchain development and as we got together we decided let's build this open source course called building full stacked apps where we walk people through everything from writing a smart contract writing API writing their front end doing off-chain storage and kind of just getting through the full stack and not just putting the education out there but really walking people through it because our goal was less about teaching you how to code like we're not going to sit there and teach you like what a struct is and what an array is we actually just give you the code and we kind of focused on bigger picture thing where it's like now you have this architectural reference for how to build adapt and then you can tweak it and you know go back and learn the things that you maybe don't know but now you have this thing that you can fork and always build something that works from and uh since we launched it we we launched it in English and Spanish over 10 000 lines of curriculum and over 2500 devs have taken it so far and that was kind of part one of our initiative and then we started thinking okay how can we support the teams that come from this how can we like stick to our mission of you know supporting the growth of developers so then we worked with the EF and a bunch of other amazing organizations who contributed to our project to start an accelerator where we're deploying 150 000 directly to teams with no strings attached just to support their projects and kind of just be like we just want to give money to people building dope stuff and that's where we are now we just accepted our first cohort or the accelerator like this week and it launches officially on Monday that is awesome um thanks to for everyone um for the work that you're doing and for all the people that you've already on boarded to the space um it's something that's incredibly important so something that you've all sort of touched on in in this last part the title is education across cultures so how do you all think about the cultural nuances or the language barriers or something specific to your region or Community when creating educational content we are trying to prepare our contents that's how by thinking how we can learn by these contents we had too much time to learn them and maybe we see lots of contents and we can combine them and create the contents like how we can learn and our friends are similar to us and how they can learn it's one of the key are what we try to do also we prepared our lots of contents coding comments or namings are in English we are not pushing them to doing everything in Turkish just we are trying to tell what is the main reason on what we are doing that and it's just only Turkish parts we are preparing them to do really sexual stuff and have done by their native language as a Banning to barriers so um thankfully like we don't have to translate language of the content given that ending in India English is uh normally speaking and also the language of education but how we go about educating folks and onboarding them to web3 is and our motto is never stop building so how we go about it is even in our fellowships where we take them through a curriculum everything is focused on building so every module has a task where you have to build something out and the entire eight week course finalizes culminates into a final building Sprint so as long as a building we believe if you build you'll learn so that's what we have been focusing on as so any any program that we do is kind of centered around building projects okay most content over our GitHub is here uh Chinese yeah fighter I want to want to introduce is that our government rules that is very interesting we attract most of the Chinese excel in the developers and oversee Chinese developers yeah our so first of all or our community is a non-profitive organized organization yeah core members are driving by interested in a patient yeah we we have funded by Grant and the donation brand such as either information Foundation granted coin Grant donations such as Chinese famous projects like blueprint squirrel novels yeah uh our governments has three points uh the first one is that people who submit a poor request or give a shiny meeting in our community can join our developer group so it helped me got gather many talented developers in our community and to have us Build Together yeah it is the same time they can enjoy high quality communication with other developers so the second one is that with more and more developers join our community with data limit of 120 people but we build a new communication communication group that there is no thread and Resort yeah the last one is interesting one that we are a high quality qualified developers so many many guys wanted to authorized or other other otherwise or poster or recruitment in our community so we we at the rules that you must submit uh you must keep a sharing machine yeah to show your technology level yeah okay you can send a recruitment Post in your community yeah that's the one thank you yeah I think for us um we ship like I said initially everything in English and Spanish and that was important to us to not have it be later translated as like a second thought but rather you know we want to be inclusive and obviously like that's not every language in the world we're not impacting all the developers in the world and you know the culture of our community is shaped by those in it and it just so happens that some of our core contributors are Latino so that's how it worked out that way but I think there's a really special kind of nuance about Latin America that isn't really understood by developer communities focus in North America and Europe is that similar to kind of hacker culture 20 30 40 years ago before computer science was really something that you could take in school people who learned how to code just like learn on their own they were hackers so you know right computer science people weren't always academics and it's a similar story in Latin America where if you're a coder it runs the possibility that you actually don't speak English because you might not have gone to college you might have just learned how to code by yourself and for us that's like a huge problem because we're missing out on all of the talent that is actually good engineering talent but everything is in English so that's something that we keep in mind where in Latin America the way it kind of works is that if you go to a good school and if you go to university and you get the privilege of being educated you probably know English because they teach it in school but if you come from you know that background where you're not offered that opportunity but you somehow get to teach yourself how to code which that in and of itself is a huge feat uh where like we as a community are giving them more blockers where everything's in English all of the ethereum conferences are in North America and Europe where they can't get Visas so this year for me was really special to see Defcon be in Colombia this is where I'm from but outside of that East Global also focused online America this year doing a bunch of hackathons here for the very first time and I think just this was a really good place for us to get together because I think more people are starting to think globally and I are starting to think about the what happens when we don't think of others and not just from a moral perspective like we should do this because it's good because we should but we should do this if we want Innovation and if we want the best talent from all over the world we have to be able to reach them and um what do you think needs to happen for us to reach more people either globally or in your local communities what is something that's missing that we need to reach and educate more people from the secretary hey okay when some newcomers see some experts from the sector for example some good developers from ethereum they are more willing to do something or they are more willing to learn something I think some events or hackathons or little educations that focused on some little regions can be more effective to take more newcomers to the Real Worlds I think the answer is pretty straight [Music] F it's not scalable for us to be like we're gonna go to every country and do an eth hackathon and like you know try to translate everything in Spanish it's more sustainable to instead Empower people who are already leaders in their communities give them money give them resources give them support and just let them do their thing and that's exactly what we've like Ito is a great example of that they are from Istanbul and they just decided like hey we want to see a change they got support from the EF and other people and now there's a growing Community to the point that Devcon might be there next year like simply because this one group of kids decided that they wanted to start this community and you know a community like us happened to get behind them so just give money I agree um so giving EF has been great uh giving support to all the programs and everything that has been happening across the globe uh but also heading to his point I think we need more Advocates uh we need more Educators uh and the reason why also we are calling because Asia's biggest ethereum hackathon is uh there are not a lot of events happening there like Camila mentioned it's a lot of events in North America now in latam as well uh but not that much in let's say Asia so the idea is to bring bring in more Advocates bring in more exposure and I think for further stf has been great supporting us okay our community is another or only a developer Community we also translate MIT open course blockchain and money and third by grandstiller FCC chairman yeah it's a very wonderful course that we translated to Chinese and summarize it yeah to help more people to know blockchain and the website yeah uh once more we we also translate the uh solving interviews this book yeah is also a very wonderful book help to help people know cryptocurrency here so so this is the way we attract the many unknown developers to join our community okay another where does it work yes it does what are some of the biggest no I was just testing testing testing so uh what are some of the biggest challenges that you have faced in getting to this point and how do you see your projects evolving moving forward like I said uh so what we do is we work with a bunch of Educators and mentors uh it has been a challenge to find a lot of them are folks like Austin Griffith and Patrick Collins have been of help but I don't think we have enough so I would ask people to get more into education and get more into education advocacy um but for for our community couple of challenges that have been there um one is that in India while web3 and ethereum is going mainstream in the dev Community it's still not going mainstream for the for the for the end users so oftentimes what we see is uh the devs who are building for the community whose building is not the end user so that's a problem that we have faced and we are kind of trying to solve for and again with web 3 and with the ethereum uh a lot of folks are in it for I would say not the right motivations so we have been kind of focused on finding that right signal compared to all the fluff that is in the ecosystem so that's something that we have been trying to tackle and focus on I think two biggest challenges are motivation and sustainability we should motivate our Educators to to do something in continuous way they should do their responsibilities on time it's one of the biggest problems and how we are dealing with them is showing some results some we are showing some people who learned with us showing our resource in some other places and the sustainability on about that we we cannot do everything in each year we some new Commerce should take our place and give some more better things than us if we can find some newcomers and we can help them to do some real things it will be great and we are dealing with damage doing more educations more meetups more workshops and I can't say we deal with both of them but we are working and we are talking with our friends to how to deal with them there are two challenging so we have we are fancy now the first one is that how to internationalize our community yeah we are not the only one to be a local community but also meet the global developers yeah we we have invited the many and famous uh projects uh developers to give a shiny meeting in your community like Stockwell infra and Mina yeah but you know I'm Fender interested in phenomena is done in China and I see many talented developers who are good at math and coding but uh their English is another so well yeah it is is there limited yeah so we are trying our best to do translating our project and imagine more uh International project to give us any meeting the the second one is that with our projected motor military accumulating uh is becoming more random more harder for for newcomers to join us to to make a contribution and uh becomes a cone contributor yeah yeah we never wanted to be a community that was funded by grants because that's just not sustainable and we actually came together around April like Peak bull market and it was really easy to get support from organizations but we kind of knew that just wasn't the path we wanted to go out so we had this idea to be a service down where we would do Deborah and that's kind of how this idea of the open source course that we did came from or like you guys need Deborah you can't hire devrel we're Educators who are willing to you know create this content as a public good so pay us for it and that's what happened and it went amazing but now things have changed companies it turns out you actually have to keep working to do it and we're like wow we just did six months of work to build this course we're exhausted we don't really want to do this again because where is the time to then work on our own skills and kind of tend to the mission that we first set out to be um so for us I think we're thinking through how can we sustainably stay alive and fund our core team who's working and you know make sure that they're taking care of fun all the things that we need to pay for which which aren't much right it's like but we do need money to continue the projects that we're doing and um it's really a matter of like how do we split up our limited time between being a service now and making money to sustain ourselves and then actually serving our members and serving ourselves by using that money and putting it to use and in this first iteration that looks like the accelerator but now we're kind of like all right we're gonna spend all the money in our treasury which is good that was what we wanted we wanted to deploy all the money uh the goal is not to build up a huge Treasury and just have it the goal is to deploy and now we're thinking through how do we do this again without doing six months of work because that was scary and it was a lot of work and you know I mean imagine it was a team of like 30 people working 10 to 20 hours a week for four and a half months to deliver to deliver like the highest quality content in English and Spanish and then like coordinating speakers coordinating um the VCS that we wanted them to talk to coordinating the supporters according the mentors so that's kind of our problem is like what what's next for us how do we do it sustainably and still stay true to our mission that you said I guess is how do you all think of forkability and open sourcing the content and everything that you're working on yeah no all our stuff is open source we encourage people to make PRS against it keep it up to date as a community part of our treasury goes to paying our contributors to make sure that that stays up today because obviously we don't want to be those projects we were kind of trying to solve the problem for which is that there is a lot of education but if you leave it alone for a month it's already out of date if you leave it alone for a week it's probably already out of date and when you build something like we did with literally like six or seven protocols that thing like you need to work on it every day if you want it to still work so it's open for contributions women build web 3 on GitHub go update it when we start to create our contents we have a few promises between our team one is being free and never accept any money from our Learners and other one is being open source to be to reach more Audience by our contents if if someone can fork or education and do something better we will be really happy also if someone use our content and makes another content it's really good for us it shows our work is really beneficial and we can reach lots of people with them and we always think everybody can use our education everybody can add our education to their contents also we get some offers to add our educations to their learning schedule and we say it's it's not hard it's only open source and it's every once and we are open for everything quite a while uh our fellowship curriculum is not open source right now uh we are planning for it we want to open source it currently it's maintained by our team which is a task but yeah the plan is to open source it so the communicate Community can drive it and yeah we can go from there in my opinion yeah is necessary our if someone wanted to join our community you can a poor request yeah our core contributor we have you your perfect question and merge or not yeah uh yeah if someone wanted to give a shiny meeting in our community you just write down your schedule on our Google doc and we will arrange your meeting for you yeah so it's very decentralized and easy for compilation yeah and so the second one is we are trying our best to translate our content into English yeah we force our developers to learn English too yeah yeah so as someone working spending most of my time on an open source project which is ethereum.org um I can also say that open sourcing stuff can lead to massive improvements a lot of why ethereum.org is a great resource is because anyone can contribute to the code or the content or the design or the translations um all the aspects of it really so um yeah um I think we're approaching time does anyone else have any questions I'm coming um hi hello thank you for this panel I really agree with most of the thing that the panel is said um so I just want to like a bit background weird group of uh Farsi speakers that we studied in 2014 and working on blockchain education and non-prof all non-profit we even like translate ethereum.org to Farsi and one of the main challenges we have is we never got any reply from any of the funds you know EF included just because of the keyword Iran I think and we even got our Bitcoin grants for non-profit education done by women blockchain Farsi and suspend that just because of the keyboard Iran and we're really challenging we're self-funded for the last eight years um and I would say it's our last breath and we really need the support like even motivational support just like saying hey we got like you guys doing well or something and not even just funds um just want to say this is a unique challenge we're facing and I really want the community to talk about this rather than just um do the sanction treatment which is that not do not engage and um yeah that's maybe thanks for bringing that up really thank you um I don't follow I don't have any rules so apply for a grant through women build web three uh we deploy Capital directly to teams doing cool things like you guys so happy to talk after I'm sure the EF team I don't know what their response is but I'm sure you could talk to someone in person today and I'm sure they're super grateful for all of your contributions and yes let's please talk after this anybody else have anything to add Rob uh I was wondering uh do you find there's like a content like the subjects of the examples of your tutorials or your or the technology in your tutorials that are uh culturally specific or motivating uh like something in one culture wouldn't work in another in terms of the examples we also thanks farther up are one of the first tutorials in our club was with rope from remix and thank you for again um we are preparing the our contents like thinking how its benefits to persons to work in a global project and create a global impact with their knowledge so we don't do any cultural specific contents but we think cultural specific things only on thinking about how our friends can learn by our contents we don't do any cultural specific things by like geographic region but as a community of women and non-binary people we have noticed and through just my career as an educator I've noticed work that has to do with improving real humans lives is what writes to generalization okay but women tend to be more interested in things like that where it's like we an example of I don't know minting a token hasn't really been that impactful but when we talk about how this can actually affect real people in real communities people are a lot more excited about that in our community specifically so for our course for example instead of doing some like Financial use case which is good uh the group kind of decided to do this web 3 version of Eventbrite if you know the platform it's like an event creation and management platform and then from there all the teams that have applied to the accelerator and I know because I've read the applications they're all like solving real world problems and then it's just funny as like a hackathon judge and an educator then you go to like a hackathon and see the projects by men and it's like one thousand percent yield farming cryptodigbutt.com it's like all the craziest things so not like region specific but I do think there's like a cultural piece there amongst like women versus men thank you we have one more over here two minutes um last year also we worked on creating some learning content and I have some credentials uh working with a community of close to 17 000 developers so just a suggestion for all of you to think about the framework in which you're building your learning content in communities so the way we looked at it is running is not a standalone Silo like you know you have in the web pre World specifically if you are looking at making Learners weapery Builders uh you should look at it as learn collaborate build and earn all the four are important uh you know if you want uh your learners to get tangible outcomes so the most important thing here that a lot of people live out is a collaborate part how can you look at your learners immediately finding something Avenues to collaborate with people and working on so typically learning starts a lot of people attempt the 101s but beyond that you know the real stuff fun starts when people start looking at intermediate to Advanced uh learning that's where you start building and for that you know when you have a group of people collaborating as they can build they can start building great stuff and this is where contributing to the ecosystem getting some grants all those things come into picture so when you are looking at now uh improving or expanding your communities please look at the collaboration part and it will take it'll contribute to the entire ecosystem in a large way well actually that is something that you're right that works very well uh because for our fellowships we're usually on board 25 to 50 divs and what we have seen is after the cohort as well this check to the whatever communication medium they are at and it's great where they are bouncing off ideas they're building stuff together so collaboration is also a key part I think we don't have card storage stations in the terms but we have small developers group in our university community and we are trying to motivate them to build something together this can be a little groups projects or this can be attending some online or physical hackathons and we do the earn part by motivating people to when they create something beneficial for the club for the community they will get its Revenue by earning the profits of earning the grants of the are all of the stuff all of the education by maybe going another hackathon in another country maybe reaching some educational content it's our way to motivate people to collaborate and earn something thank you I think we're just about time now and before you guys leave I just wanted to have two quick announcements well and one other thing Luca didn't get to introduce himself whenever he started this panel and I just want to mention that him along with the ethereum.

org team has been able to get the website translated into 50 languages um I mean I mentioned that earlier on her talk but I just think that's an amazing feat snaps there