What is a hackerspace? A hackerspace is a community-operated, often "not for profit" workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, science, digital art, or electronic art, can meet, socialize, and collaborate.
In this blogpost are my ideas on how a social blockchain like #HIVE could potentially revolutionize education, creating a technical, hands on learning system by incorporating attention economy, gamification of education, lecture NFTs, and more.
Hackerspace Coin
I am friends with a black-belt martial artist who is also a programmer. Trust me, this is relevant to this blog about hackerspaces. I have been friends with him for a few years now, and I talk with him to learn little insights into programming and coding. He has gone through the steps of becoming both a trained martial artist and a programmer, both skills I find highly admirable. While talking with him, we both started to formulate a thought, and idea. We are both deep into science and all about technology, and sharing what we know. Both of us are passionate about teaching others.
So what if a space could be formulated where students were encouraged to attend? What if the process of learning was a process of growth turned gamified, with students leveling/ranking up as their knowledge increases? What if students were left with cryptographically verifiable proof of attending a lecture, the contents of said lecture packaged up and given to them, at class completion, in the form of an NFT? What if the students were maybe....maybe even paid to attend?
I like taking generally unrelated concepts, smash them together in my head, and running with it. For the purposes of this blog, the ideas coming together would be the procedural growth system of modern martial arts (akin to belt rank), corroborative community driven education in tech, science and engineering generally found in Hacker/Hammerspaces, packaged together neatly with a bow on a social network blockchain, backed by a new coin with lectures packaged into a series of NFTs. The new coin? Hackerspace Coin. (oooh bold)
Before I continue, please note: I'm a moron with a lot of this stuff. I honestly have no idea what an NFT is outside of a tokenized representation of a digital asset. What I propose ahead might not even be functional or doable. But I think it is. So I'm gonna roll with it.
Free entertainment vs paid-to-learn. The economy of attention.
500 hours. That's how many hours of content were uploaded to youtube, per minute, in 2019. Is it any wonder anyone can pay any sort of attention? We are all out of attention to pay.
Fickle yet true, I know many smart, hilarious, intelligent, creative people, locked behind an unmoving doldrum of content overload. The creative spark is there, the desire to innovate, to learn, to figure new things out, locked behind a paywall of endless, cheap and free content ever consuming their time. There are so many people who have the desire to lose weight, to learn a new language, to write beautiful music, or to code an amazing game that has been lodged in their heads. It seems the economics of attention have played a trick on our psychology. Just because it can be free or cheap doesn't mean its worth your time.
How can we better ourselves? For people with a creative desire or itch, a mind that wanders and dreams up robotics, technology, software and videogames, but who are locked in an endless cycle of meaningless content preventing them from the knowledge to create...what could one possibly do to overcome the avalanche of daily FREE content to contend with?
Pay them.
For real. Pay them. Their time is valuable. Your time has value. I am paying my time writing these ideas down in this blog. You are paying me your valuable time right now reading this blogpost, for which I am grateful. But how would such a payment system work for a hackerspace? What would the payment system be utilized for? Who would even care about such a system in the first place? Honestly, I don't have all of those answers, I just happen to think dApps and Web3.0 could do it. Not one to leave anyone emptyhanded, here's something I dreamt up.
Classes are free, open to the public, community supported and community driven. Not a single race, gender, orientation, wealth status etc barred. Open knowledge, open platform, open to all. The ultimate idea is to lift up anyone who cares about learning science and tech, from young to old. The physical space itsself is structured to hold hackerspace labs and makerspaces, but fundamentally the focus would be on lectures. Community corroborative learning takes place within HAM radio communities all the time, this is an extension of this idea.
Pay them....how exactly?
The physical hackerspace is envisioned to be public and open within reason. Anyone spending 1hr at a hackerspace will receive an allotted amount of HackerspaceCoin for being there, being a member of the community, helping people with their projects or to learn or even just to socialize in a technical, knowledgeable way. A screen with QR code could be used with a dApp/smartphone for validation/proof. Lectures done at the hackerspace to be recorded, documented, graphics, code packaged up into an NFT, which is then given to anyone who attended the lecture. This in turn could be used as cryptographically verifiable proof of course knowledge. Extra lecture NFTs could be minted, sold on open markets as well as donated for charitable educational foundations.
HIVE Blockchain, dApps, Web3.0, the future
What is the use-case for the coin, and why discuss it on HIVE? Many uses cases could be implemented, such as staking for computational time inside the space, purchasing NFTs of missed lectures, trading within the HIVE ecosystem, etc. HIVE is a social blockchain, and what Hackerspace Coin proposes is a social club of sorts, made up of like minded techies striving to cooperate to learn and create.
If you can understand the value of HIVE I hope I've somewhat illustrated how that value could also hodl true for a hackerspace/makerspace coin. Part of technical understanding in this new age of digital information will be how blockchain technology works. It only makes sense to introduce it to hacker/makerspaces in the most logical way possible, by using a dApp on a blockchain to pay users for their attention.
My skills as a dev are sorely lacking. Partly because I don't have any good hackerspaces around me to goto (lol) but if I did, I would take the whole family. Developing a dApp like this would be a monumental undertaking for someone who can barely get "Hello World" to print. That being said, I feel like this could be potentially a really great idea for someone to take and run with.
Understandably ideas are like grains of sand, the implementation is what counts. If this blog entertains a few and gets me some upboats, great, but maybe, just maybe jotting down this crazy idea I woke up with might stir something in someone competent in dev. If it does, please, for the sake of the next generation of techies and nerds, run with it.
