I am happy to be on this platform and to present my work and see how we could grow as a community.
INTRO:
I am Meena Mishra, an educator, and an award-winning author. I teach at school and also conduct workshops for students on Literature, Language, and Technology. Since 2021, we have introduced blockchain, web3, metaverse, and cryptos. I have been watching how Near Ecosystem works and would like to propose to onboard my community to get better reach, learn, and contribute to the system.
PROPOSAL:
Starting NEAR Students Community DAO / EDU Warriors
(EDU Warriors are a humble initiative of bringing experienced and selfless educators ready to give back to their profession. We are all set to send the first set of teaching aids to the schools to learn about coding, blockchain technology and boot camps)
1)These are ex-students (alumni) of various schools. We have a group of students who join in for various social causes and creative workshops. We had recently organized a technical workshop for these students at an Institute in Mumbai, wherein we had 250 students who took part and received certificates and goodies.
Since 2021, we have started EDU Warriors - boot camps and workshops on web3, blockchain, and the metaverse. Last month, we conducted a workshop on Blockchain and we had over 400 students in total.
We have lined up 4 boot camps and 3 workshops on Blockchain, Cryptos, and Metaverse.
We have 600 students already registered in total for these workshops.
What’s for Near?
We want to onboard all these students to NEAR ECOSYSTEM and teach them how L1 chain works and also help them mint NFT’s
We have also referred to the Near University Videos and Materials, which we will incorporate during the workshop.
We plan to onboard a batch of 1000 students, create an engagement and provide them with materials and teach them how to use the platform, NFT’s, and how to generate value for the ecosystem.
June 2023 - August 2023
We will organize an event for these students to have a LIVE experience of the Near Ecosystem.
We will focus on getting these students to create NFT’s, and DApps in future.
TARGET:
We plan to onboard 3000 students to NearEcosystem
3000 Students to the NEAR Ecosystem with their wallets, custom wallet names.
We plan to have bounties and contests to engage our community members.
We will have free NFTs for new people
Guild name: NEAR Students Community DAO / EDU Warriors
Funding scheme: Monthly / Quarterly
Initiative summary, be sure to include:
Expected impact and value you foresee for the NEAR ecosystem/community - Onboarding of new members and new nfts etc
Metrics for measuring success: We have plans of having over 3000+ students joining the ecosystem by June 2023
Estimated timeline and achievement milestones June 2023
Links to similar, previously funded forum proposals (if applicable) NIL
Funding Details
Total requested amount in USD and NEAR (price based at the time of posting) $2500
Yes, I had approached Near in October but then I didn’t get any response and then NEAR has already stopped the grants.
November end and early December, I connect with India Regional Hub folks, during the ETHIndia and they said they would update after they start with their new office in Bangalore. And then during Feb follow up they didn’t revert and still no update so I have posted this here again, as i want to take the mission forward.
Project Update:
We have onboarded new teachers, trainers and contributors all of these are working on part times/project basis and none of them are full time.
We have spent the last 3 months in 2022, connecting with various colleges and universities to see how we can take it forwards, many colleges have given us a soft commitment and we need to fix the dates and start the process.
We need a community support on this project and help in onboarding students.
@zubairansari07 Yes, these are the number of students who had registered earlier.
Earlier we had planned a common bootcamp for all students but then different colleges and universities have their exams planned and the event date was clashing with the camp. So we have planned it accordingly to conduct these camps.
We have a structure in place for these camps. The trainers/teachers are the ones who are building a program as per the level of understanding and engagement by the students. Eventually we are coming up with our own books and a whitepaper on how to take this entire project to the next level.
Well, I have a couple of questions for @ImpishLass
First, let me give you my experience in the education sector [I’m Dk from India, and I am creating student communities in each state in India(and working on this for more than one year), here is one of the graduate students [state community](GTUinsta | Instagram | Linktree) of India that I’ve managed for the last 18 months…
Here are my Questions & suggestions for this proposal:
Which level of students are you currently targeting right now? - It would be great if you cover the entire India by organizing an online Bootcamp and teaching them about NEAR, how’s L1 blockchain work, and it’s partner and helping projects… Like: Aurora is an EVM built on the NEAR Protocol Blockchain. It aims to be an Ethereum-compatible scaling solution…
How many states do you cover in India, after creating the Students Dao?
On which marketplace will you mint NFTs? - It will be good if you teach them to mint NFTs in different marketplaces, In the NEAR we have Great marketplaces Few & Far, Paras, and Mintbase… same in Aurora 3six9, Genadrop, OpenBisea
Thats good @Dk_51 glad that there have been such initiatives. Education is the first step.
Entire India seems a good idea can plan one bootcamp along the way.
We are open to any student who is interested to learn but most of them are 12th pass, 15th pass. While many students are still in college.
Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, AP, Telangana and TN. But Students DAO is a movement rather than been restricted to one particular region, state or community. We want it to be an open platform and eventually help students with jobs and, hackathons, events etc.
MintBase is one the marketplace we are targeting, but few of our students have started posting on opensea, foundation, etc. We want to have a dedicated marketplace at MIntbase to host all our NFT’s while we explore other mentioned NEAR market places.
Thanks for clarifying the state of the proposal and for carrying on work during the times funding was not available.
The general direction of this proposal is the correct one: onboarding more students that hopefully will become NEAR ambassadors (fall in love with the tech) and the next generation of Builders.
There are a couple of things that’d like to address before making a final decision:
1. What makes you/your team the right group to lead this army?
This point makes a distinction between the logistical and operational capability to organise workshops (IRL events) and the technical expertise and ability to teach and mentor others required to successfully Onboard and Train others into NEAR. Some questions:
Who is in charge of creating the learning curriculum?
What is the experience of the people in charge of designing curriculum and teaching?
Are there any senior mentors (founders or developers within NEAR) that can assist students?
2. How can the broader community track the progress of the program (how many students, what they are doing, what they are learning).
The second point refers to the challenge of going beyond the vision and aspirational goals to tangible value creation and momentum. This is partially due to the global nature of NEAR ecosystem, including current decision makers on Marketing DAO Council. Q:
Are there any systems in place now to track metrics, growth, etc.?
Suggestions
Here are a couple of things the team may want to consider that I believe could address some of the points above:
Shape the program as a Cohort-Based, incorporating some of the current learning resources on NEAR. Reasoning:
Research shows that cohort based learning - structured: begin and end date, have a group of peers at your same level, a support team around you - has much higher completion rates than unstructured learning (do it at your own pace). This is true even for online courses. This has also been confirmed by other NEAR communities that had much higher levels of success when NEAR Certified Developer courses were cohort based.
Hello @satojandro Thank you so much for your questions and for being patient with us.
In 2021, when the world was going through a partial lockdown, we started our team to work on the blooming technology of blockchain. We are a group of like-minded teachers who came together, and eventually, others joined us, including Computer Science teachers who are fluent in coding and other computer languages. Our team consists of organizers like myself, and teachers who teach coding/blockchain tech.
As for Near Senior members, we have spoken to the Near India regional team, and we are in discussions to bring in experts during IRL events, boot-camps, etc.
Currently, we use excel sheet and have basic metrics, as we wanted to have a hands-on experience. However, one of our team members, along with a few ex-students, is working on a website where we can have live tracking on the progress of the course, event updates, and boot-camps.
We really appreciate your suggestions, and we will definitely consider them as they are very insightful and will help us in the longer run. We had a similar discussion with the Near India team, and we will be incorporating their suggestions into our next IRL/proposal. Our next proposal will have all the details mentioned, and we will strive to bring more value to the Near Ecosystem.
In general, I think this sounds like an interesting project with the potential to reach many students. What I am concerned about is making sure we understand how you plan to track metrics and what metrics you will track to show progress, success, performance, etc., so we are able to evaluate the impact of the project (which is one of our responsibilities as council members).
Can you look at the guidelines and provide some details about how your initiative can track numbers that relate to the NEAR Foundation KPIs we have in place:
NF KPIs to track progress:
New Projects
Active Apps
Weekly Active DAOs
Active Wallets
Increase overall education, reach, and drive positive traction in the market
For example, how will you capture the number of people reached, wallets opened, transactions on NEAR resulting from this, new developers joining the ecosystem, new dApps created?
It doesn’t need to be a complicated strategy, but I would like your thoughts on this before I can give support. Thanks!
We have kept track of our students’ details such as their name, school/college name, age group, wallet ID, session date, and boot-camp in an Excel sheet. Our sessions are free, and we calculate our reach by the number of students approached and the number of students attended.
Although we use basic metrics on an Excel sheet to have a hands-on experience, we are constantly improving. Our team members, along with a few ex-students, are currently developing a website that will allow us to track the progress of the course, provide event updates, and manage boot-camps in real-time. Meanwhile I have forwarded the guidelines to my team and in our upcoming report we will have a detailed reporting done.
Once our website is ready we would be able to view these reports and other updates.
Hi @ImpishLass i have reviewed your proposal and your replies to comments from fellow council.
I like your approach and considering the target audinece i believe this initiative has potential for growth. Happy to Approve
Thanks for the reply and additional details regarding the metrics and your strategy for tracking those.
I’m happy to support the proposal, and I look forward to hearing about your progress as you proceed. You still need the support of one more member from the Marketing DAO council for this to be approved.
Encode x NEAR Horizon Collaboration that will include education series, hackathon, accelerator, etc.
I suggest this proposal focuses on attracting as many students as possible to these programs, supporting them as you see fit along the way, and then reporting back on lessons and achievements.
As such, core KPIs would be around the ability and success of being able to promote these learning resources, enrol people, and support them in person in your traditional format.
See also a post I did on Aurora Gov Forum calling for Aurora Regional Communities to rally around recruiting for these programs. I’ll be making similar suggestions to Regional DAO shortly.
Summary - there’s been a lot time and effort in putting together these top tier education resources. Now we rely on our grassroots community to onboard as many people as possible to them.
Let me know if this format sounds reasonable to you before I proceed to change the status of the application to Approved.
How many you can bring on NEAR Social and Active people on i-am-human
Can you give us approx numbers, then I like to have an open conversation with you and the marketing dao team on these.
Note: Near Social and I-am-human is our utmost priority at the moment to bring active and make a vibrant community on the Near & Near Ecosystem @blaze
Noting approval from three council members for the revised proposal agreed to in the most recent communication with @satojandro. Moving to approved. You can submit to Astro. Instructions below:
Choose proposal type “Propose a poll”, then include:
Proposal name: this is the project/guild/member name
Brief description of the project. It is helpful to copy/paste the same name used on the official Forum proposal post
Amount in $USD. If you would like your funding issued in either NEAR or, for funding under $5K, a stablecoin (nDAI, nUSDC, nUSDO, and nUSDT), you must specify the currency request on your Astro poll.
