Project Title:
Stellar’s Blockchain Academy, a decentralized center for Technical and Functional Knowledge Exchange.

Summary:
The Blockchain Academy will be a not-for-profit decentralized center focused on collecting, maintaining, and sharing technical, functional, and general knowledge of the Stellar ecosystem.

This NPO will embody the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) mandate and will be created to foster and empower the stellar network through open source collaboration and continued improvement in partnership among Stellar members, schools, regulators, and industries chambers of commerce.

Category:
Resources & Content

Goals:
To develop collaboration and the sharing of knowledge on 3 initial fronts or workstreams:

  • Create and broadcast Seminars
    Develop the infrastructure and materials required to instruct new technical and functional talent in the classroom and virtually.
    Encourage new comers into the ecosystem to join the community, participate, learn, and master Stellar’s Blockchain technology.

  • Facilitate Regular Showrooms of blockchain use and success cases
    Present success stories across the ecosystem
    Carry out of both presence and online meetings to discuss and analyse different blockchain-based future use cases and brainstorm about real-world implementation.
    Promote the participation of Companies to show how Stellar’s Blockchain could be useful for their industries.
    Space for internal crowd funding, alliances, and partnerships.

  • Facilitate collaborative Think-Tank forums to gather input from the ecosystem brainstorming solutions for:
    Untapped spaces in the blockchain space as a whole that could warrant investigation;
    unfulfilled needs and wants from the ecosystem and brainstorm solutions; and
    regulatory issues and challenges

Timeline:
Initial Milestones:

  • Register the Non-for-profit organization : April 2020
    We will establish a non-profit organization to start operations immediately, it will be established in the province of San Luis, Argentina.

  • Set Up the Academy’s base of operations inside the Technology Park. : April 2020
    Our team has already been approached by PILP (Information Technology Park at Universidad Nacional de La Punta). The have offered free infrastructure and university resources to have Stellar by part of their intended IT Cluster with the objective to strengthen the relationship between the academic profile of students trained by the University and the needs of IT companies for highly qualified professional developers.

  • Build seminars : June 2020
    Build specific training seminars around technical aspects, architecture, protocols and solutions provided by Stellar’s Blockchain. Current participants in the stellar ecosystem will be encouraged to contribute by sharing their inputs and knowledge.
    These seminar classes will be broadcasted online so any member of the global community or new comers can participate.

  • Create Think Tank and Thought Leadership forums : May 2020
    Develop and manage brainstorming forums around current and future challenges and disruptions to the banking system by identifying high-impact areas and subjects of interest.

  • The goal is to understand the current and anticipate the future evolution required from Stellar’s ecosystem with the support and buy-in from supervisory and regulatory bodies.

  • Set Up SDF Governance as a Design Authority for all initiatives : on going.
    Blockchain Academy will aim to align itself under the governance of SDF in order to initiate and manage all initiatives with the required alignment and support from SDF’s leadership.

  • Community Engagement for Open Collaboration : on going.
    The key deliverable of the Academy is to manage open collaboration in and for all matters. In the same spirit that today projects are reviewed, criticized, and selected for Community Fund awards, Seminars and Thought Leadership will be requested or proposed, developed, reviewed, criticized, approved, published, and further improved in open collaboration with a clear governance structure and quality assurance process in place.

Description:
Stellar’s Blockchain Academy will be a not-for-profit decentralized knowledge exchange center that will provide seminars and facilitate forums to help share and expand Stellar's Blockchain know-how.

This not-for-profit entity will embody the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) mandate and will be created to foster the stellar ecosystem, committed to driving blockchain innovation by providing education, promoting research and entrepreneurship among Stellar participants and perhaps with other schools, universities, regulators, and industries chambers.

The base of operations will be based inside a well-known Educational and Technological Park of Argentina, located at San Luis state and named PILP (Parque Informático de La Punta). This park contains several well established technologic companies that join together to leverage and exploit their synergy and is one of the most technology advanced educational centers (Universidad de La Punta) within the country. Dozens of developers and IT professionals graduate every year, starting their careers first in the companies within the region.

Initially, we want to start with virtual seminars for the ecosystem while hosting face-to-face workshops and seminars for local students and developers. All seminars will introduce the technology and key concepts of Stellar’s protocol allowing remote participants to interact and collaborate.

As a next step, we will continue with Stellar’s Blockchain Use Cases workshops, focused on showing how this technology is being implemented to solve real world problems, and how it could be used to help other industries. We will encourage companies to get involved, share and learn so that they can pull ideas and resources into their own projects for implementation of improvements or development of new solutions.

Stellar's Blockchain Academy will aim to align itself under the governance of SDF in order to initiate and manage all initiatives with the required alignment and support from SDF’s leadership.

Links:
Information Technology Park at Universidad de La Punta (San Luis, Argentina)

Tags:
KnowledgeBase - TrainingCenter - ThinkTank - ProjectIncubator - NextGenDevelopers - OpenSourceCollaboration -

5 days later

With everybody confined, have you try to make content and education to provide more visibility to what stellar can do in this time of Crisis? If you affirm that it’s decentralized, people should be able to develop it actually to its Pick because nobody can get around each other. How Is your growth during this period ?

    Fred Hi, We state the Academy will be decentralized because in spite of the fact that we are building the Academy on a strategic physical building, it will be also open and available for the community as a whole, both for attending and for participating as senior collaborators. Our seminars, its contents and topics wont be defined by us only, we will shape them in collaboration with whoever want to participate from the world community. We will do that providing the right tools to jointly develop and enrich its contents. Those tools (github, videoconferences, videos, voting systems) will help a lot to reach foreign participants, and also locals that can't physically attend.
    The ThinkTank space will be a less technical environment, but brainstorming and experience sharing sessions where we all could debate and look over potential new projects suitable for situations like COVID19 for example. This unexpected and atypical situation give us the opportunity to raise new perspectives to solve the problems that are really top priority today; the food supply, its traceability, the payment methods, etc. We can do it together collaborating through this space.
    We have started this initiative, formally signed agreements with PILP and shaping the launch of the Academy to successfully achieve our goals.

      AdamMenary Totally agree with you Adam! We would love for everybody get on board and participate with us working on solutions as soon as possible.

        Hey Guys,

        I am leading the blockchain efforts at William & Mary Blockchain Lab.

        https://www.linkedin.com/company/william-mary-blockchain-lab

        Much of my goals are in alignment with your vision. One of my goals at the university is to get experiential work within blockchain to count as credit through our lab and University. My hope is to work with two or 3 high quality protocols and leverage our collective effort to provide high quality education, development and research to everyone.

        Would love to stay in the loop and see how we can help.

        We do have physical space at our lab for incubating projects like this and intellectual resources to share.

          Education is important and a key tool for the growth of Stellar. Have you created in tutorials, medium posts etc in the past so that we can get an idea into your style and what you all will bring creative to the table? Is there a draft syllabus? Can you provide more detail on extent of the University partnership? Thanks

            samuelconner Definitively, developing a qualified workforce is highly important to continue expanding the community. But it is also necessary because the market and companies are increasingly interested in these technologies. We have the opportunity to respond to those needs training them and providing resources they can even then become entrepreneurs of the ecosystem.

            We have started with two parallel tasks;

            • The first is to sign the agreement with the university that will provide both the physical space and its educational resources to carry this out; done! We only need to select the offices within the facilities, but it is delayed for COVID19 reasons.
            • The second is to outline the study program and syllabus based on 3 types of roles; developer, functional analyst, architect. In progress...

            Although we are going to publish our initial proposal for the agenda, we are proposing that we will make the necessary tools available so that the agendas are finally modeled, agreed upon and strengthened by members of the community who wish to participate. We even consider it highly useful to carry it out in conjunction with initiatives such as the one Troy is carrying out in the USA.

            Regarding partnerships, we are working with the Fintech Chamber and local companies that have shown great interest in having access to trained technical resources in these areas. They offer paid internship programs, provide resources to train their own staff and also offered their own facilities to carry out courses. It is evident that there is a shortage of blochchain training offers in the region, and based on the interviews we have conducted, the need for training is directly proportional.

              a month later

              We thank everyone who wants to help us and has contacted us! We continue moving forward with the university authorities to be able to launch the courses on its official virtual education platform. Due to the COVID-19 situation, we have had to wait a little start shaping the proper adaptations to be able to give the correct education for more than 1500 students attending regular college careers at the university.

              Although this context generates difficulties, it also generates new opportunities! There are a lot of projects being born these days thanks to the entrepreneurs working together with local organizations. We hope, and we wish the best for all who want to collaborate, you can write to me on Keybase.
              Argentina is a very important region for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and that is why having a place focused on stellar blockchain can be a starting point to see more projects based on this technology. We are more than welcome and fully available to anyone in the region who wants to join this project. You can reach me directly at Keybase. Greetings and success to all!