Education remains as one of the largest problems LATAM faces. Especially when talking about specialized education.
Web3 is a rapidly emerging technology, enabling disruption across industries just as it's predecessor, Web 2.0, did. If LatAm arrived late to the party with only a handful of successful Internet companies in the first 20 years of this century, we cannot allow that to happen again with this new technological shift.
So a question arises: How might we build the educational infrastructure much needed to prepare the Latino workforce of the future? How can we leverage web3 techonology to craft a solution?
Let's imagine a Decentralized University.
Many projects are already attempting to answer this question. A term coinned by Crypto, Culture and Society describes these types of Organizations, themselves a subtype of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Learning DAOs. They are learning communities that attempt to explore and learn together about a particular subject. In the case of CCS, they want to become the Liberal Arts "Faculty" of Crypto. Some other DAOs take a generalized approach, such as Odyssey DAO with their Learning Paths for web3 and Invisible College with their diverse set of contents in web3, too.
Besides Learning DAOs, another concept that can help us picture a Decentralized University that is web3 native (which means a solution built taking advantage of features made possible by web3 tech) is that of DAO2DAO relationships. Just as Business can focus on having other businesses as Clients, DAOs can cultivate beneficial relationships with other DAOs that share similar goals. As these relationships involve even more DAOs, whole ecosystems of organizations sharing resources, knowledge and even talent (DAOs tend to share contributors) emerge.
The vision I have for a truly decentralized university is of a DAO of DAOs: a distributed organization that shares governance across many other learning DAOs that come together with a shared purpose.
So, what can we do about this?
A few months ago, almost at the end of 2021, a new community for people exploring web3 was created as a simple WhatsApp group. In just a couple of months, the group was already close to max capacity: 200+ members, all of them arriving organically through word of mouth and from different countries of LatAm.
Cryptoamigos was born. And since I became a core contributor as co founder, I've always described it as a General Studies Faculty.
The goal of Cryptoamigos is to help people navigate web3 so they can find how they can create value with this tech. But what happens when someone wants to go deeper into a specific rabbit hole?
We could always just expand and try to cover a little bit of everything. But why would we do this? If there already exists specialized communities for other subjects, wouldn't it be better to create with them an even bigger community?
To build that, we have been talking with leading members in other communities. Futurx, a community for music professionals exploring web3. RedWeb3, a community for DAO founders and operators. Impact NFT Academy, a community for creators of Impact driven NFT Collections. And some others that we are just beginning to explore, such as a community for Artists that want to create impact with their crypto art, or a web2 community for scientists and engineers doing research and creating projects together that want to tokenize their organization.
The idea is to come up with a model for an organization that allow us to share resources, knowledge and opportunities across all of the talent in our communities. This new organization would work as an underlying support for all of our different communities, while each of us keep our own models of gobernance untouched.
Our common goal? Develop the Latino talent so we can make the most of web3. Creators and builders would eventually find any learning path they choose, being able to move freely between all of our different educational offerings.
That's what we are creating now.
A Discord server has been created for this purpose. Leaders across all of these communities have been invited, and together we will decide how we shape our Decentralized Latino University!
If you are creating a Learning Community that shares our purpose, please get in touch with me on Twitter or Telegram.
If you want to keep up to date with our progress as we go, you can fill this form so I can send you any progress!
Latinoamérica ha vivido durante siglos ante la sombra del resto del mundo. Tercermundistas llaman a nuestros países. Y tienen razón.
Es hora de cambiar esto.
Unida, nuestra región puede prosperar con esta nueva revolución tecnológica. ¡Depende de nosotros construir un futuro mejor para toda nuestra gente!