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Simon Sällström
DirectEd
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Bio
Recently graduated with an MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford. Founder of the Cardano Oxford student hub. Founder and current CEO of DirectEd Development Foundation.
Community Reviews across funding rounds
Funding data last updated
Simon Sällström Proposals (20)
Employment Contract Dapp
<p>Lack of formal contracts in developing countries may leave both employers and employees up for exploitation.</p>
Direct Donation for Education
<p>Current donation services lack efficiency, transparency and security. ADA microlending may be difficult due to legal barriers and trust.</p>
Research dApp
<p>Crypto is seen as merely a speculative vehicle, and its potential for research purposes and policy impact assessment has not been showcased.</p>
DirectEd - Donations dApp
Solution: Scholarship/donation platform based on Atala PRISM enabling secure, low-cost, conditional peer-to-peer donations to students.
Oxford Student Hub
Solution: Created a student hub based at Oxford to further increase Oxford students’ exposure to Cardano through physical and online events.
DirectEd-Student Scholarship Portal
Solution: Scholarship/donation platform based on Atala PRISM enabling secure, low-cost, conditional peer-to-peer donations to students.
Oxford crypto valley: Cardano house
Solution: Establish a Cardano hacker house in the HomeDAO Oxford Crypto Valley alongside other major protocol and VC houses. Talented entrepreneur student tenants contribute to the ecosystem 25% of their time.
DirectEd- Funding Progress Tracker, Dynamic NFTs for Impact and Editable Metadata Quick Pitch
Solution: Plug-and-play integration to display real-time progress, purchasers metadata modification functionality, and an ability for impact organizations to update donors NFTs based on NMKR Dev APIs.
Cardano RealFi Consortium - Coordinator Role: Streamlining Synergies for Real World Blockchain Solutions
Solution: Establish a dedicated Coordinator to conduct business outreach, manage day-to-day operations, marketing of RealFi projects, foster synergies, and facilitate collaboration within the CRFC.
Alternative Assessment Process R&D and Experimental Implementation
Solution: R&D and experimental implementation of several alternative assessment/QA models for Catalyst funds distribution, one of them being the 2-stage proposal assessment process,
DirectEd- Coding Schools and Employers Governance Framework in Africa Quick Pitch
Solution: Our project seeks to establish a governance framework and trust registry that will ensure the quality of education, maintain standards, and build trust among students, employers and other stakeholders
DirectEd- Decentralized Tutor’s Marketplace (Uber for Tutoring) Quick Pitch
Solution: Decentralized Tutor's Marketplace: Uber for Tutorials. This will empower students to choose tutors, reduce monitoring costs, and ensure fund transparency through blockchain.
DirectEd- Crowdfunding & Milestone-Based Smart Contract Primitive and Audit Quick Pitch
Solution: Open source and audit a smart contract primitive that enables multi-party milestones-based distribution of funds to projects or individuals.
Oxford University student hub ‘CardanOx’ events and student onboarding
Solution: We will run Cardano events for University of Oxford students and researchers (including postdocs).
We have been operating successfully as a Cardano student hub for over a year now.
Uber for Tutoring - Decentralised Tutor’s Marketplace (DirectEd) Quick Pitch
Solution: Decentralized Tutor's Marketplace: Uber for Tutorials. This will empower students to choose tutors, reduce monitoring costs, and ensure fund transparency through blockchain.
Anti Research Fraud dApp: Qualtrics-Cardano Integration
Solution: A Qualtrics extension that hashes and uploads primary survey respondent data to the Cardano blockchain so that any accusation of data tampering of the raw data can be provably refuted.
General Purpose Crowdfunding and Milestones-based Distribution Smart Contract Framework Quick Pitch
Solution: Open source and audit a smart contract primitive that enables multi-party milestones-based distribution of funds to projects or individuals.
Cardano x African Blockchain Championship
Solution: A series of Cardano developer workshops and hackathon bounties integrated into the African Blockchain Championship to foster innovation and skill development.
Monthly Reports
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Technical side
- dApp has been successfully deployed
- NFT gated content on the website completed.
- delays in a smart contract but a token-based MVP is ready for open-sourcing and community feedback
Operations
- MOU signed with Kotebe University of Education
- First meetings with YALI East Africa, Kenyatta University, Derja, Power Learn Project, IO MOE team
- Recruitment of tutors started
- Visits to Kagumo High school and Bishop Gatimu Ngandu Girl's High
- Digital art collection completed
Technical side
- dApp has been successfully deployed
- NFT gated content on the website completed.
- delays in a smart contract but a token-based MVP is ready for open-sourcing and community feedback (this means that we have deprioritised the scholarship platform)
Operations
- MOU signed with Kotebe University of Education
- First meetings with YALI East Africa, Kenyatta University, Derja, Power Learn Project, IO MOE team
- Recruitment of tutors started
- Visits to Kagumo High school and Bishop Gatimu Ngandu Girl's High
- Digital art collection completed"
We will also submit a request to change the scope of our proposal. See separate document.
We have completed our initial phase of the project. We are now moving on to the next phase which was funded in Fund 8.
Hand-on Cardano, focus on onboarding members by direct hand-on activities like create wallet and mint NFT.
"A beta version of our dApp With working wallet connect on vercel
- new UI design
- 10+ user interviews
- curriculum draft design completed
- 8 student interviews/mock exams conducted in Ethiopia
- Analysis of 90 student questionnaires
- CTO Rohan participated in panel at London summit + interview
- CEO Simon at Lausanne summit, presentation on Monday 21st “impact as an opportunity for Cardano”
- Kotebe University of Education MOU to be signed week of December 12th
- soft commit of COTI sponsorship
A beta version of our dApp With working wallet connect on vercel
- new UI design
- 10+ user interviews
- curriculum draft design completed
- 8 student interviews/mock exams conducted in Ethiopia
- Analysis of 90 student questionnaires
- CTO Rohan participated in panel at London summit + interview
- CEO Simon at Lausanne summit, presentation on Monday 21st “impact as an opportunity for Cardano”
- Kotebe University of Education MOU to be signed week of December 12th
- soft commit of COTI sponsorship
We have completed our scholarship programme. The scholars of the programme engaged in learning Plutus and created project based outcomes. We weren't able to fulfil all the goals we set to ourself. The general community engagement wasn't high, but we were able to find a few passionate individual who will continue their Cardano journey beyond the scholarship programme.
Recent updates: DirectEd animated project video - we now have our animated video finished on our website that describes our mission and the problems we solve - check it out! DirectEd Development Foundation
New team members - Welcome Edmund and Kidus to the team! Edmund will be our website and dApp frontend developer, and Kidus will be working on our programme curriculum design
We have signed a MOU with Kagumo High School
Lido nation x DirectEd meeting in Nairobi!
Collaboration with Microverse, leading online course provider is proceeding to MOU
Initial collaboration discussions with OrcFax and Charli3
Studentreader-Prism-ADAO-Proofspace Ethiopia collaboration proceeding
Recent updates: DirectEd animated project video - we now have our animated video finished on our website that describes our mission and the problems we solve - check it out! DirectEd Development Foundation
New team members - Welcome Edmund and Kidus to the team! Edmund will be our website and dApp frontend developer, and Kidus will be working on our programme curriculum design
We have signed a MOU with Kagumo High School
Collaboration with Microverse, leading online course provider is proceeding to MOU
Initial collaboration discussions with OrcFax and Charli3
Studentreader-Prism-ADAO-Proofspace Ethiopia collaboration proceeding
General
-
Mailing list - monthly newsletter
- DirectEd's monthly newsletter covers all relevant news and updates about the progress of the organisation. Subscribe to receive monthly emails on the last Friday each month.
- Same information as here, but directly sent to you
- Sign up here: https://dev.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=5e91c1c90b58c84aad30e7ea3&id=8da05b2c45
-
Q3 OKRs
- Updated OKRs and KPIs for 2022 Q3 are now listed on Notion under progress updates
-
Team upskilling
- A few of our team members gathered in Morocco for a two-week work retreat with some team bonding, personal development and strategising. We might realse some vlogs in September!
Operations team
- User interviews
- Holding regular user focus interviews with Cardano users to hear what’s important for them and general feedback
- Collaborator meetings
- Proofspace
- Datacamp
- Springboard
- Catalyst After Town hall discussion with SSI alliance
- Poko
- Charli3
- Atala PRISM
- SALT.dev
- Kotebe University of Education
- Lido nation
- Gerowallet
- 180 degrees consulting
- Video presentation and pitch completed
- Website migration and emailing
- Salary framework
- Risk mitigation policy
Tech team
- Website, mobile and donation app UIX prototype completed
- Plutus Pioneers - 2 completed
- Atala PRISM Pioneers - 2 completed
- Technical specification https://directed.notion.site/MVP-Smart-Contract-Spec-5b22cb0037d5412f9e93e24a727fd45a
- Proof of Concept v2 in progress
General
-
Mailing list - monthly newsletter
- DirectEd's monthly newsletter covers all relevant news and updates about the progress of the organisation. Subscribe to receive monthly emails on the last Friday each month.
- Same information as here, but directly sent to you
- Sign up here: https://dev.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=5e91c1c90b58c84aad30e7ea3&id=8da05b2c45
-
Q3 OKRs
- Updated OKRs and KPIs for 2022 Q3 are now listed on Notion under progress updates
-
Team upskilling
- A few of our team members gathered in Morocco for a two-week work retreat with some team bonding, personal development and strategising. We might realse some vlogs in September!
Operations team
- User interviews
- Holding regular user focus interviews with Cardano users to hear what’s important for them and general feedback
- Collaborator meetings
- Proofspace
- Datacamp
- Springboard
- Catalyst After Town hall discussion with SSI alliance
- Poko
- Charli3
- Atala PRISM
- SALT.dev
- Kotebe University of Education
- Lido nation
- Gerowallet
- 180 degrees consulting
- Video presentation and pitch completed
- Website migration and emailing
- Salary framework
- Risk mitigation policy
Tech team
- Website, mobile and donation app UIX prototype completed
- Plutus Pioneers - 2 completed
- Atala PRISM Pioneers - 2 completed
- Technical specification https://directed.notion.site/MVP-Smart-Contract-Spec-5b22cb0037d5412f9e93e24a727fd45a
- Proof of Concept v2 in progress
Since the last report, we have kept in contact with the scholars of our scholarship programme, assisting their Plutus learning journey. We have also started to plan out the next steps we will take after this project is completed. Including seminars and social event that will increase the awareness of the Cardano blockchain.
As noted in the sister proposal, we were affected by the Nomad exploit. This should not stop the project from meeting its milestones but it does put us at an economic deficit nevertheless.
As our project very much revolves around transparency, we wanted to maintain our funds on-chain. Unfortunately, only bridged USDC was available and so we kept a large portion of the funds we had thus far received in madUSDC. Hence, we were severely affected by the Nomad bridge exploit. This may affect our ability to complete the project on time but that remains to be seen.
Scholars of our programme is engaging in plutus project based learning.
We have passed the 100 twitter followers mark! As we are now formally incorporating, we will soon be able to formally intitiate partnership talks with local organisations in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Loom Demo video recorded. We have formally filed the application to incorporate as a UK charitable organisation. Rohan and Simon admitted to the Creative Destruction Lab blockchain stream bootcamp (top tier incubator for deep-tech ventures). DataCamp partnership proceeding
Scholarship announced, applications reviews and scholars just started on their Plutus learning process.
We have been talking with RootsID and people working with Atala PRISM on how to implement our vision. We are also now finalising a basic sketch of how we want the design to look
We are 3 people who are commencing to work full time on this in July, so things will start to move much faster from now on!
We are looking to finalise our closeout report this weekend!:) There'll only be a brief presentation of our team members and simple demo of website and possibly the smart alpha smart contract
No
We will be closing out our fund 6 project now
We have published video and article. https://youtu.be/WE621Tz_1pQ
We are now in active discussions with Kenyatta University and Kotebe University of Education. We also have recruited a person with experience working with higher education in developing nations and a person to do our graphic design for our website. I pushed the "completion" status to May so that we could include a demo of this first demo in our project completion report.
A lot of event coming up next month. Not much done in April as this is a university based project and we aren't able to do much during Easter break.
The photos are from Kagumo High School in Nairobi that our Kenya lead Moses Kahure visited to discuss the DirectEd cardano scholarship.
Our devs are still finishing up Plutus and working on getting a very simple testnet version of the basic smart contract that we seek to use for the scholarship and we hope to submit a closeout report once that is done and once we have presented at Ideafest (as we are now proposing in fund8)
Organization of successful events including “Introduction to Cardano” where students were informed on Project Catalyst with detail on how to become a Community Advisor. Created many resources for the community. Expecting to reach target audiences through more events in the coming month.