Youth Block - (an open source education model)

Creating an open source model for our program Youth Block. This model will help both generate business value by our team's new educational model for youth. At the same time we will be contributing back to the Cardano community which in hand improves the ecosystem itself and helps onboard new users.

Youth Block is a program that helps onboard the youth 18-25 to the Cardano blockchain community. We will provide transformative education to youth who want to learn about crypto, blockchain, and Cardano. We will be providing guidance and a structured way to actively connect youth to the blockchain world. We want to build a community for the youth to connect, share, and build on top of their current skill sets to ultimately start to build a force of youth educated, and supported on their educational journey.

Purpose:

The Cardano community is increasingly growing and at an incredibly fast pace. We recognize that a lot of young people will join, participate and be part of this ecosystem well into the future. However, giving them a platform to discuss and voice their thoughts on blockchain, paradigms of decentralisation and new economic models is crucial to co-building a world for the future generations.

Our solution:

We lower the barriers of entry into the blockchain for impact space, onboarding youth into the Cardano Catalyst Community. By enabling youth and blockchain professionals to connect meaningfully, access professional guidance and expert mentorship, new opportunities are created for synergies that lead to catalyzing collaborative positive feedback loops.

The growth of Project Catalyst depends on meaningful participation from proposers, advisors, mentors and voters who are both eager and capable to fulfill their roles and understand their responsibilities.

We aim to provide a stream of resources in an open way by contributing back to the community by sharing our efforts in terms of our open source educational program. This is opening the youth to new accessible knowledge, and a resource to be replicated or produced again.

Why is it important?

We need to grow an entire ecosystem of experts to build and maintain the foundations of Cardano/Catalyst together with the current IOG teams

The Open Source Development Ecosystem Challenge

The OSDE challenge aims to provide a stream of resources to teams that want to develop their projects and contribute back to the community by sharing part of their efforts in terms of open source projects, open-source frameworks, and accessible knowledge.

The main idea is that projects funded by the community can both generate business value retained by the teams, and at the same time contribute back to the community by improving the ecosystem itself.

For example, a team can be funded to develop a project; generate business value by leveraging a profitable idea, and share the non-core-business part of their work in terms of shared knowledge or in terms of building frameworks or projects with other teams - such that is possible to solve complex problems by joining minds and dividing the efforts across different teams.

Open source impact:

Youth initiative can be open source in the sense of:

• The research of the process for impact learning and replication (Gitbook)
• The course content (Discord, Gitbook)
• Workshop recordings (Youtube, Gitbook, Discord)
• Framework and value chain is co-created and shared for open access (Gitbook)

Guiding questions:

How can we ensure future efforts benefit from the work that is funded today?

• The children/youth are our future, and we must invest in them if they are to be the equipped architects of the future! Our program Youth Block, will be the place for youth joining the blockchain space to get a good base knowledge of important topics, and communicate with others across the globe to co-produce new blockchain solutions.

How do we align between different open source community efforts?

• Youth Block is an educational open source initiative and is used in our core offering and service. No program/community tailored toward the youth like our program.

What are the next steps to fuse IOG development with the community?

• We will be creating a board, and plan to add IOG/CF members so we can collaborate to create the ultimate Cardano 4 Youth ecosystem. We are no one stop shop. Our goal is to build long lasting communication between the Cardano blockchain community and our greater Youth community.

How can we encourage experts to collaborate and share their knowledge and work?

• We will be onboarding professionals into our community to act as mentors, and provide valuable information to our community, and content we provide to our youth. Youth block will partner with other youth initiatives to create a greater impact. Youth Block will connect our ambassadors to business professionals so they can collaborate, and work together on ideas and projects. We will provide a networking opportunity for Youth Block members to speak with their fellow ambassadors. Also connecting them to network with our professional community to get the absolute best guidance, and support when navigating the blockchain space.

How can we develop a sustainable ecosystem while sharing knowledge and efforts?

• We will make sure we have all content presented to our Youth checked and verified by our professionals on the team to help create greater trust and allow validity of the content.Our goal is to ease youth into the community, and we are able to talor to any youths needs. Even though we are focused on educating the youth, all of our educational content will be open to all and for all ages.

Possible directions:

Education for development in the Cardano & Catalyst ecosystem

• We will be providing an overview of current tools and ways to use the blockchain and learn more about it. Alos creating new tools and courses to allow for further development of the quality of educational resources in our community so we can give our youth the best experience and, and the proper resources for multiple levels of development.

Developing common tools, frameworks, core infrastructures, or proof of concepts

• The tools/courses, and structure of our program will be constructed in a transparent and open way allowing other groups to use our proof of concept. To adapt it within a current model or replicate it all together. All of our educational content will be shareable and able to be used by anyone based on our open source model.

Incentive systems for development & hosting

• We are building an incentive system to give our youth voting power and equip them with the ability to have a part in the cardano community, and use the blockchain in a technical way. They will have the ability to vote on current and upcoming projects proposed through project catalyst.

Common audited repositories & overviews of existing solutions

• We will be sharing with the community all of our progress, and the process while creating Youth Block. Allo of our documentation will be shared on a gitbook/github, and updated regularly. We also will be collecting data to improve our program cohort to cohort. So that we can give our youth the best experience.

Organizing events to bring the development ecosystem together

• We will be organizing an event schedule, and youth summit to help bring the youth to the development ecosystem. These initiatives Youth Block plans to run will connect our youth with professionals globally who are big figures in the blockchain space, and get outsider guidance on how they navigate the community, and for our youth to learn new ideas/concepts from them.

Market Fit:

How big is the potential market?

Looking at the distribution of internet users worldwide as of 2019, by youth age 18-24 was 18% of the total internet users globally. This means that 4.1 billion of our global population are connected. 738 million youth make up our potential market.

<https://www.statista.com/statistics/272365/age-distribution-of-internet-users-worldwide/>

<https://www.itu.int/hub/2021/11/facts-and-figures-2021-2-9-billion-people-still-offline/>

French people under 35 years old's perspectives on cryptocurrencies 2019.

People under 35 years old's perspectives on cryptocurrencies in France in June 2019: “Overall, French people under 35 years old had a positive opinion on cryptocurrencies: 43 percent of them believed that cryptocurrencies were a good thing, while 31 percent of them believed they were a bad thing. Among those seeing cryptocurrencies as positive, 33 percent viewed them as a good thing and ten percent considered them as a really good thing.”

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1073810/cryptocurrency-people-under-35-opinion-france/

This is pre-pandemic. With Binance seeking to headquarter in France, and the creation of an innovation hub in France with the granting of 100m EUROS, the trends indicate that youth will most definitely play a pivotal role in shaping the future of blockchain and crypto usage. Cardano and the Catalyst community has an opportunity to position itself as a leading choice for youth who are increasingly aware and concerned with being actively involved in activities and projects that have a positive environmental and social impactful.

https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/b11c6f68e581478bae0867146af4c258

43% of men ages 18 to 29 say they have, according to a survey of over 10,000 U.S. adults from Pew Research carried out in 2021. -

<https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/11/16-of-americans-say-they-have-ever-invested-in-traded-or-used-cryptocurrency/>

Cryptocurrency is most popular with young adults: 31% of people ages 18 to 29 have used it, compared to 21% of people ages 30 to 49, 8% of people ages 50 to 64 and 3% of people age 65 or over.

We will meet our proposed solutions by onboarding our first group of youth delegates, and creating all the resources, and platform to officially create a space for these youth to learn, connect, and collaborate with one another through the Youth Block community.

We also will meet this by completing our Key Metrics to measure:

• Increase the number and the quality of Cardano Open Source projects
• Increase the number of contributors
• Increase of open source tools and frameworks from the community for the community (dog-fooding)

Other approaches exist and have been tried, to name a few:

These other approaches dont have the long term effect our program plans to provide. We want to create a community where we continue to onboard youth and people overtime. We don't want youth to come and go but rather use Youth Block as part of their long term crypto journey.

• Unite2030, Surge <https://www.unicef.org/innovation/SURGE>
• Crypto Kids camp (https://www.cryptokidscamp.org)
• Blockchain Kids (https://blockchainkids.net)

However, our competitive advantages are :

• We aim to offer a program for all youth, and plan to have a lead on each continent, multilingual program, transformative education

What is distinctive about our approach and team organization is:

• We aim to have a Lead on each continent, community members past 25, mentorship for each member while taking part in the program, and help accessing Project Catalyst.

This is supported and made possible through partnerships with:

• The Commonwealth
• UNESCAP
• 1 Million Mentors
• Catalyst School
• Wada

How will we ensure sustainability beyond Catalyst initial funding if successfully funded?

If successfully funded via Catalyst, we will continue our research within our network of mission driven stake pool operators, and scope the possibility too generate rewards every epoch (5 days) 5-6% of total stake each year (<https://cardano.org/calculator/>), and create a learn to earn model.

Road MAP:

Phase 1: Create gitbook to share open source educational resources

• Develop a model
• Collect all current resource we can reuse/ repurpose
• Create needed new resource
• Keep track and comment on the process in a gitbook/github repo

Phase 2: Develop a program that introduces youth to the technology, Cardano ecosystem and other developments in the domain

This phase includes:

• First entire Course creation
• Build on our current board of blockchain professionals.
• Create an onboarding process.

Phase 3: Establish a Discord Community to co-construct the Cardano Youth initiative activities for 2023

This phase includes:

• Create a discord community.
• Build a channel with our resources, and how to get more involved.
• Create a project catalyst how to get started guide (Including current content from Catalyst schools, and other education initiatives.
• Create a space for networking, and youth ambassadors to collaborate

Phase 4: Create a youth community that can represent the future of blockchain from across multiple countries.

This phase includes:

• Publish/Promote application

• Connecting with youth groups

• Promoting our program to schools and educational institutions via our partners

• Promote youth block

• Onboard members, and assign mentors

• Present the onboarding resource, and different ways to communicate with our community

• Provide education to each new member so we are all have a similar base knowledge

This proposal aligns with our proposal to ‘Onboard New Users’ continue developing and building on top of Youth Block.

Continued roadmap:

Phase 1: 1-3 months (TBC, potentially start Aug/September 2022) during Fund 10 to take cohort through a Fund moving from ‘lurkers’ to becoming active in Fund 11, as mentors, proposers, advisors, voters and more!

Cohort 1: Pioneers *10 youth (Byron)

Fund 10 finishes in November ( Aug - Nov) with the youth voting!

Phase 2: 3 - 6 months (Nov - Feb) during the Fund 11 cohort are active. Feb is graduation day!

Pioneers become ‘Shelley’

Phase 3: 6 - 9 months (Feb - May) Fund 12 - youth are ambassadors, and embedded in the Cardano Impact Network. Circle Youth Representative. External partners onboarded with youth coordination and facilitation.

Cohort 1 Pioneers are now Goguen. They bring a youth pioneer under their wing as a mentor now!

Phase 4: 9 - 10 months (Basho)

Phase 5 - 10 - 12 months (Voltaire)

By our ‘Voltaire’ phase, the initial cohort of 10 pioneers will have been part of the community for 12 months. They would have been mentors for the past 6 months.

Asia - 4 youth

Africa - 2 youth

Europe - 1 youth

N. America - 1 youth

S. America - 1 youth

Oceania - 1 youth

Budget:

Project team - $15,000

Marketing - $5000

Course creation $10,000

Youth Block Summit $5000

Social media and event management $5000

Stake pool for Youth Block long term $20,000

$60,000

Team:

Trishala Adwaine Suresh - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/trishalasuresh/>

Impact Lead at SmartChain, Impact Assessment Lead Cardashift, Active Cardano Community Member, Project Catalyst Proposer since Fund 7, Co-founder of YouthBlock and Debug Lab, a podcast series.

Cole Bartlett <https://www.linkedin.com/in/cole-bartlett>

UNITE 2030 Youth Delegate, a recent graduate in Economics & Sustainability, Founder of Sustainable ADA, Contributor for Positive Blockchains, Blockchain & Sustainability Researcher, & Social Entrepreneur, Ecoquest Education Foundation - Sustainability Research, B Impact Clinic part of UNH's Changemaker Collaborative - Kikori, Sustainability Splash Program Organizer, Bronze UNH Sustainability Award Winner.

Razali Samsudin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/razali-samsudin>

Educator, Editor, Digital Economy, Blockchain & Sustainability Researcher, Social Entrepreneur, Catalyst Proposal Mentor, Wada UN SDG and Education Coordinator, Co-Founder of Sustainable ADA, Contributor for Positive Blockchain & Catalyst School Core Member.

Cardano4Climate.com (C4C) community includes over 200 members and growing. C4C is organising weekly meetups and monthly events and collaborating with multiple impact communities (i.e. climateneutralcardano.org), companies (i.e. Veritree, Cardashift) and the Cardano companies (IOG, Emurgo, Cardano Foundation).

SustainableADA.com team is focusing on educational services, research and communication of impact projects on the Cardano blockchain, spreading the word of the work and impact of the Cardano ecosystem .

Cardashift - https://cardashift.com

Cardashift is a community-run launchpad that raises funds, builds and accelerates startups that are solving social and environmental issues. Cardashift supports this proposal via their Impact assessment team consisting of Vincent Katchavenda (co-founder of Cardashift), Anais Bouchet and Yannis Baala ( Impact Project Managers).

Vincent Katchavenda - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vkatchavenda/

Anais Bouchet - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anais-bouchet/

Yannis Baala - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannis-baala-39b912138t/

Catalyst School - Catalyst School is a place created to enhance the impact of Catalyst as a whole by improving the contribution of all its different players and roles. We onboard new members and help improve their skills along the way, in any way they decide to engage with Catalyst: as a Proposer, a Community Advisor, a Veteran Community Advisor or without any specific role within the process. In order for Catalyst to flourish and reach its full potential, all these roles need to give their best contribution within the process.

Catalyst School -

https://twitter.com/school_catalyst

<https://linktr.ee/CatalystSchool>

What is Catalyst School -

<https://player.vimeo.com/video/631847265>We are in talks with several partners and allies such as The Commonwealth, UNESCAP, 1 million mentors, Accelerate 2030, Wada, Beanchain Coffee and the Blockchain Learning Center about sharing resources for greater impact in delivery at scale, and avoiding duplication and working in silos.

<https://onemillionmentors.org.uk/about-1mm/>

<https://accelerate2030.net/>

<https://www.wada.org/>

<https://linktr.ee/BeanChainCoffee>

<https://blockchainlearning.center/>

• The Commonwealth Secretariat is a voluntary association of 54 independent and equal countries.It is home to 2.5 billion people, and includes both advanced economies and developing countries. 32 of our members are small states, including many island nations.Member governments have agreed to shared goals like development, democracy and peace. Their values and principles are expressed in the Commonwealth Charter.The Commonwealth's roots go back to the British Empire. But today any country can join the modern Commonwealth. The last country to join the Commonwealth was Rwanda in 2009.

<https://thecommonwealth.org/about-us>

• The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) is the most inclusive intergovernmental platform in the Asia-Pacific region. The Commission promotes cooperation among its 53 member States and 9 associate members in pursuit of solutions to sustainable development challenges. ESCAP is one of the five regional commissions of the United Nations. The ESCAP secretariat supports inclusive, resilient and sustainable development in the region by generating action-oriented knowledge, and by providing technical assistance and capacity-building services in support of national development objectives, regional agreements and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. ESCAP also provides support to partners at the national level. ESCAP’s national offer is rooted in and linked with the implementation of global and regional intergovernmental frameworks, agreements, and other instruments. The outline of the ESCAP’s Offer of Support at the national level is available here.
• ESCAP pursues this objective by carrying out work, in close cooperation with other United Nations entities and intergovernmental organizations in the region.

<https://www.unescap.org/our-work>

• Accelerate 2030, initiated by UNDP and Impact Hub, is the world’s largest program supporting entrepreneurs from developing and emerging markets to scale their solutions for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• They leverage the strengths and reach of the global Impact Hub network, United Nations organizations, corporates, investors and expert partners to scale entrepreneurial innovations while contributing to a shift towards a more sustainable economy.
• Operating in hubs across 20+ locations, Accelerate2030 provides one-of-a-kind scaling support to entrepreneurs through National Scale-Ready Programs across Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, followed by a Global Scaling Program for those with the highest international scaling potential.

<https://accelerate2030.net/>

All the information will be open access, and shared with the community.

We will have dedicated google folders where we will put together all the presentations, progress reports. Then to be uploaded to a gitbook. We will also open discord and telegram channels for communication and information gathering and sharing. The courses will be recorded, edited, and shared. These resources won't be just for the Youth, and we will allow for anyone to access them. There will be a monthly summary, accessible for all, explaining the work done, deliverables, and KPIs achieved during the month. Through this process it will be able to provide a value resource for all with a focus to onboard youth.

A growing number of experts join forces to build collaboratively on community owned infrastructure, tooling, standards, libraries and docs.

By meeting our key metrics success will be shown:

• We are helping increase the number and, quality of Cardano Open Source projects.
• We will Increase the number of contributors by onboarding the next generation of Cardano contributors.
• This increases the open source tools and frameworks from the community for the community by providing proper education and support with current open source models, and incorporating them into ours.

This is a new proposal. However, the proposing team have a track record of proposing proposals that connect with impact, education and sustainability. Examples of previously funded proposals are:

Add SDG ratings to proposals - AIM F6: Partnerships for Global Adoption

<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/367569>

Research in Applying Frameworks-AIM, F6: Partnerships for Global Adoption

<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/369294>

Global Sustainable Stories/Usecases F6: Grow Africa, Grow Cardano

<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/369883>

Proposal Framework Tool - AIM F6: DLT Entrepreneurship Toolbox

<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/369300>

Proposal Framework Tool - AIM F7: Open Source Developer Ecosystem

<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/383692>

Examples of affiliated proposals are:

Onboarding Under-represented Youth - F8: New Member Onboarding

<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398912>