Dear Steem friends,
I wish to share my vision with you; a vision of a Blockchain University. Don’t think that I am talking of creating a brick-and-mortar university or any Ivy League one. I am talking of a university that suits the requirements of post-bitcoin world. For the first time in my life, I can see a world where I can live without borders, can speak without censorship, can connect with anybody and can earn my livelihood without fear. I come from a land where a brutal mix of feudalism and monopoly capitalism thrives. It is the worst kind of rent extraction system that few westerners can comprehend. One can spend entire life without gaining any seriously sustainable reward here. This is not the India you know. I live in it. It does not kill but it does not let you live. Individual grace and honour are appropriated by big labels of religion, culture, nationalism and masochism. For the last twenty five years, I had a dream of super abundance for my society but alas, the fact today is that I still keep on living in a systematically impoverished ecology. Merit is forked into mediocrity, institutions are reduced into machines and environment is sabotaged whenever there is a fresh idea. I experimented with various ideas; with non-formal learning systems within schools and colleges, organic farming, with unschooling; with polyamory; with startup ecosystems; with classless family structures; with multiple intelligences’ nurturing projects; with redesigning resistance of teachers’ unions; with oral cultures; with poetry groups; with decriminalizing-social-domain experiments and so on. Most of them flopped badly or only a few succeeded partially. One thing that always nearly killed me was enclosure structure of my political and societal regimes. I could not go beyond my national currency; I could not go beyond my religion; I could not go beyond the hubris of legacy structures; I could not go beyond my national borders.
But now, I am in a world where blockchain technology offers me a paradigm where millions of failed experiments like mine can succeed because money has now a window of freedom, collaboration is unfettered by nationalities and censorship is not possible for regulating agencies without paying a cost that can actually counter-kill them. In this world, I wish to create a Blockchain University that would launch multiple disciplinary projects that would be using following formats:
- Mobile Format: Deliver, conduct and conclude at the collaborating institutions using their hardware but with our own software.
- Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO) format: This will nourish self-defined projects developed by both students and teachers of the university.
- Distributed Centres of Excellence: These will be the centres that are geographically distinct with their own unique geo-spatial and geo-cultural capabilities.
About the structural design, I would say that it will encompass all the domains of blockchain society. Since this range is very large, I think that it needs to be precise and specified. To make faculty recruitment easy and allocation of work focused, I propose to build four different schools that will comprise the Blockchain University.
a) School of crypto-money: This will house the Departments of monetary studies with exclusive focus on crypto-currencies. Since there are already more than 700 such currencies, there would be needed specialized programs of Bitcoin, ether, Dash, Agora Tokens, Synereo, Steem etc.
b) School of P2P Commons: This will have a complete framework of commons’ studies. It will have Michel Bauwens’ P2P Foundation’s work as a standard but adaptable to multi-cultural reality of South Asian sub-continent.
c) School of Fintech Business & Startups: It will have an incubation centre for Fintech Businesses related with Blockchain technology. Whether it is related with R3 or Hyperledger or whether it is focused upon Consensys or Sidechains, it would be covering all kinds of macro and micro business case studies with a clear aim of producing viable business projects.
d) School of Distributed Computing: A real standard has already been set up by Cornell University teachers through IC3 project, Initiative for Crypto currencies and smart contracts. Our focus would to extend this work to projects like Tauchain, Tezos, Tendermint, Fermat, Rootstock, Graphene, Multichain, Nxt and others.
Who will fund Moneyframes: A Blockchain University?
The seed money has already been provided by a close friend. So, the beginning is already there. As far as the social capital around this is concerned, a dedicated Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1157257760951763/?ref=bookmarks) is active since 5th January, 2016 and under its evolution, India's first university course on Bitcoin and Blockchain Applications has already been conducted. It was a 16-hour long single credit course spread over seven days from 29th Jan-4th Feb, 2016 for the student of NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. This course was titled as “Politics of Money in Bitcoin era”. As far as the funding figures are concerned, I am not worried much. As the work unfolds, it will be automatically attracting money and support. Many routes like DAO tokens and other funding mechanisms are being planned. Broadly, I don’t want it to be a either a NGO or a non-profit entity. I would like it to be a something between a public limited company and a cooperative as organizational models of new world are yet not fully settled. At the end of the day, somebody has to be accountable. So, why not to put my head first? I am actively building on enhancing more possibilities in this. A couple of papers are already complete, a research project is about to be finalized and many more things are in the planning phases too. As far as the organizational structure is concerned, a Board of Faculty as well as a Board of Advisors is being charted out. Soon, their names will be brought out into public domain gradually. I need a lot of ideas, criticism, upvotes, downvotes and hell lot of more support. I hope that you will guide me.
P.S.: This is not related in any way with Palo Alto based Blockchain University in USA initiated by Srinivasan Sriram of Skuchain. That project is basically a skill-development centre for professionals supposed to work with blockchain technology. Its courses are on-site and are not more than a week long. It is a good project though its canvas is well-confined within boundaries.