Unleashing Your Potential On The Blockchain with Heather Corallo

all right so we're gonna do a little bit this is like uh I don't know what day it is in the conference but uh congratulations that you're still standing um uh so I thought we'd get a little bit of energy going on in the the group this morning before we get started with the talk so uh I I want everybody to to look around at each other make eye contact another human who you do not know and raise your right hand really high in the air all right and then raise your left hand all right cool all right so now we all know that like those things work all right cool okay so so if you own at least one nft raise your hand if you do not own an nft raise your hand great if you now be paying attention so don't just look at me like look at each other while I'm asking you these questions right this is a game called commonality that's figuring out our knowledge perspective and experiences of each other so if you're if this is your first East Denver raise your hand amazing congratulations if it's not your first youth Denver raise your hand hi congratulations you're you're alumni um uh if you're a developer raise your hand if you uh went to school in a traditional sense you have a four-year stem degree undergrad Masters if you have a non-traditional technical degree raise your hand phenomenal if you live in the U.S raise your hand if you live somewhere outside of the United States raise your hand amazing welcome thanks for flying um okay if you live uh in Asia or Africa raise your hand cool okay so today's talk is all about radical accessibility in technical education in the web 3 space and getting to know your communities knowledge perspective experiences and who they are as human beings really matters as you begin to build curriculum and communities around education in the space and so that's just a little bit to get to know each other and to help each other try to connect with at least one person who raised their hand who was different from you before you leave the session today so uh with that we're going to get started thanks everybody for raising your hands um and uh we see lots of fun friends coming in thanks so much I'm Heather Corolla I'm the CEO and co-founder at quickbeam which is a immersive technical education platform devoted to Smart contract and blockchain Technologies I've been in the technical education space for the last 15 years devoted to diversity and Technical education at companies like Groupon 8th light and now I am launching my own show so thanks very much for having me here in the conversation and I'm joined by my beautiful friends Coogan lisandra and Dave I'll let you introduce yourselves hi everyone my name is Coogan I work at matter Labs we do ZK sync ZK sync era that the Biddle box is running on for our food trucks today it's my third week at matter labs and uh before that I know can you believe it I worked at consensus for five years where I ran consensus Academy and helped lead uh in-person Technical Training and Enterprise training as well as building the consensus Academy boot camp which ran for five years while I was there so really passionate about education and we've done a lot of really fun like really impactful scholarship work with a lot of groups as well as a lot of Enterprise so I've seen the whole gamut of educational opportunities and audiences and that sort of thing so excited to talk about that today love it thank you lisandra thank you hi everyone good morning my name is lisandra Martinez I am the founder of bloxy and the co-founder of our Guild for the last 10 years I've been a fierce advocate for empowering bipod communities through entrepreneurship last year I went down the web 3 Rabbit Hole by co-founding our Guild and our Guild is a woman founded community on web3 initiative dedicated to empowering bipoc communities through technology entrepreneurship and intergenerate intergenerational wealth creation and most recently I founded bloxy and bloxy is a blockchain based Market that allows anyone to commission art while empowering professional artists to generate sustainable Revenue doing what they love it's a pleasure to be here with you today thanks lissandra Dave I'm Dave Hoover I'm the CEO of a consulting firm called Red Squirrel I'm also co-ceo of quick Beam with Heather I'm I'm here on this stage because I've had a long history of pushing apprenticeship and kind of non-traditional paths into technology I was the co-founder of deaf bootcamp and I wrote a couple books that are available on the here for if you anybody wants one apprenticeship patterns and Hands-On smart contract development both published by O'Reilly um yeah and I'm just yeah the thing that I for me that lights me up is unleashing latent human potential and uh so anytime I can find ways of helping new people into this space that I really enjoy especially in web3 uh I go after it and I'm going to be periodically waking my computer back up to bring the slides back not that there's any slides but just so you have us thanks dude so there's truly some incredible cryptocurrency and nft layer web three communities that are out there doing amazing things in bringing diversity into the web3 ecosystem and you know lissandra your efforts around our Guild and the community that you've built is one example of this and but as we drop down the technical layers of the ecosystem from Identity and to application and software and infrastructure and finally to the base layers of the blockchain the communities and educational opportunities to participate in those layers become and look more and more exclusive and just to give you all some stats to sort of set us up here despite the fact that web3 has had that promise of improving democratic values and equity and in the ecosystem in terms of gender only 20 percent of developers in the United States identify as women and from an lgbtq plus Community we are only representing at eight percent um in terms of racial backgrounds Hispanic and Latinos represent 8.2 percent of developers black and African Americans only at 4.5 percent um and Asians uh represent 29 so over half of the developers identify as white and you can do the math on the the difference and the Gap that we're seeing across the rest of the intersectionally diverse developers both in web 2 and for for our conversation that that leads us into web3 as well and so while these overall numbers of developers working in web 2 continues to rise and into web 3 continues to rise over time the numbers of underrepresented groups are actually declining and so we need to be thinking about what do we need to do from A radically Accessible education standpoint to influence the web 3 community and the ecosystem and the solutions that we have the opportunity to build and so with that Coogan and lissandra and Dave I'd love to hear from your perspectives what do you think are the biggest consistent challenges that you've seen in both creating communities and delivering technical education in this space over the time that you've been uh in in your roles yeah absolutely thank you so much so it's a really important discussion to be having because I think as we spoke about when we were preparing for this talk that the web3 community I think a lot of us are here because we are idealists or utopian um and it's a specific kind of flavor a sort of a techno-utopian and the context for that is typically efficiency it's typically uh you know banking is extremely inefficient or we can make it more efficient in this sort of regard which when you're talking about it as sort of a high tech or a conceptual level is interesting and very compelling however in terms of addressing societal issues societal issues are typically enmeshed in much deeper societal social economic structures which somehow we do not uh tend to start to address when we're talking about web 3 in this idealistic or utopian way and again it's not a problem when we're talking about Dows or you know what the metaverse is going to look like in 20 to 30 years necessarily however when when I've seen projects at myself I've been involved with myself or or have been very close to become involved with developing economies in the global south or trying to address economic inequality in the United States not only do we um miss a lot of subtlety and end up alienating a lot of these communities we are almost guaranteed to make the problems worse in those communities when we come in and do it because while we have this very you know forward-thinking very idealistic language we don't have language for what does systemic oppression look like in everyday life what does economic inequality what are the historical precedence there and typically in the uh computer science or the tech world that scene is distracting identity politics or you know this is you know just you know just code just show me the code and then all will be well however that's an extremely privileged view there's no such thing as an objective sort of framework everything has a contextual framework and when we don't acknowledge that it compounds it it makes it worse in those communities so you know I'm in the web 3 space because I think uh you know these problems are intellectually very challenging but I'm also very compelled by the notion of uh you know dismantling systems of Oppression uh enabling uh freedom of communities to be able to come together and Empower themselves but if we don't have this context and if we don't have that um understanding we inevitably make those problems worse rather than making them better I love that yeah thanks lisandra yeah um so it's it's really interesting in the last year the work we've been doing with our guilds has been very focused on community building and we've been very boots on the ground about it we we took a lot we've been taking a lot of our programming to underestimated communities we were doing monthly pop-ups on web3 education in Humboldt Park that's a town in Chicago where an area in Chicago that's traditionally Puerto Rican and you know we weren't expecting for those communities to come to us right so that was the first challenge it's it's addressing the accessibility from like a practical Transportation time level and then once we were in the communities what we realized was one of the biggest challenges is awareness right a lot of our communities a lot of bipod communities don't even they've heard about web3 they've heard about nfts they've heard about blockchain but they don't have the privilege of time to dyor right so that's the reason we were going out there and imparting our knowledge because I understand that time is a privilege and underestimated under resource communities don't have that we have to make a lot of choices about what we're going to do with our time and so in addition to accessibility awareness trust is a huge component of you know involving and including bipac and underestimated people they're in a trustless system you think that that would be sort of something fun you know something attractive but it's really the opposite right it raises a lot of flags so you have to be very intentional right about communicating repeating going into those places more than once um and and really connecting with them through empathy through a lens of empathy outside of just the solutions you're trying to bring and then lastly is practical Solutions right like if you're not bringing a practical solution for a real world problem for people who are dealing with day-to-day challenges it's not going to pull them in right and so that's even what caused the pivot for us it's like okay how are we going to really solve a problem for this particular community and remove as many obstacles as we can and that's what we've been working on on building all right um thank you I want to piggyback on that one thing I've learned over as I've been in software engineering for about 23 years and uh just kind of Riff on both both you all said is like if you just kind of go status quo you're going to end up with this we're going to end up with the same group of people building stuff one thing I've learned is that intentionality when it comes to recruiting Talent as well as as we were doing research for quick beam like figuring out places right now in web 3 uh where people where like you get you come to a learning community and it asks you to stall install a wallet right off the bat um that's fine that that's good for that Community but we want to but we know that there's people that hit that wall and bounce right just because of intimidation or trust or there's just different things they're going to get in the way and so we're trying to like find ways of lowering that that barrier and like pushing the web 3 you know deeper into the um into the experience uh and having a more gradual on-ramp um but yeah the intentionality is the thing I just keep coming back to as someone who comes from privilege uh you can kind of assume that you can just kind of show up in code and let the code do the talking and meritocracy wins um but you have to keep coming back this is the thing I have to do to like reaching out and finding ways of connecting with people from different backgrounds to pull them in to what you're doing I love that and you know we talk about meritocracy which is a myth for underrepresented people uh and and how do we how do we address that I think and something to to your point there's a social contract that's connected to the smart contract and how do we make sure that a diverse set of voices and a diverse set of eyes are looking at that contract and participating in the conversation uh is you know required required reading and executing as we start to build at the against these different use cases and we start bringing people into a broader web three so Dave I have a question for you dropping down into like curriculum for a little bit so for those individuals here in the audience who might be participating in writing curriculum or delivering content and education can you talk about the Learner Journey and the educational programs and the approach to curriculum today and what you feel is maybe missing from the like technical web3 education and and what you're seeing in the market right now yeah like like I was alluding to we we did a lot of research last year into what's out there um there's a lot of great stuff out there I I've always appreciated crypto zombies as an example of an interactive way of getting up to speed on solidity for example uh but we did want to with my background uh similar to Coogan's in like immersive learning boot camps um we wanted to provide something that was more challenging and that finishing uh meant something and it could potentially signal something in the market uh in the talent Market um so we we like what the the Gap that we found was Finding finding a combination of radically accessible curriculum meaning relatively easy to start but actually making it difficult to finish and that comes through giving them a realistic development experience in the browser similar to crypto zombies but something that doesn't kind of just hold your hand through the process uh the way it the way crypto zombies does but instead lets them struggle debugging their way out of a smart contract issue a compiler problem uh interacting with it through JavaScript and ethers um and so that's that's the that's the space that we really felt like uh there was a solution that was needed um in in the web 3 education Coogan do you have anything to add there yeah when we were doing the consensus Academy boot camp we paired with a lot of organizations uh all over the world some of the most sort of notable ones that I remember were um uh code to inspire which was based in Afghanistan um as well as uh working with a company called agril Ledger in Haiti and when we were initially writing the curriculum for this boot camp which was going to be blockchain development sort of start to finish we initially thought it was just going to be okay here's solidity maybe you don't know JavaScript and then you know here's uh how to build a a full stack application however we got questions very early on from non-profits and we started to sort of realize as cohorts were moving through that there were more kind of fundamental uh almost uh just more uh foundational sort of knowledge pieces that that we're missing so initially this was you know not understanding what git is you know not understanding troubleshooting being intimidated uh feeling as though they need to know everything and so we wrote a course that was called uh basic training unfortunately like military terminology is very uh sort of embedded in the boot camp world so anyways basic training which was uh the first module was how to ask a question and that was really pretty fundamental because a lot of people feel as though software engineering is you know I don't know the syntax I don't know this sorts of thing but any sort of senior engineer is going to be Googling all the time you have some of my favorite stack Overflow questions are how to Google well or you know how to debug a question and so we end up sort of building out this whole curriculum and as part of that process realized that education is a social service it's not just about delivering that intellectual uh material and then that's sort of downloaded you know like Neo in The Matrix and then suddenly like you know know Kung Fu and you can totally just just do amazing in the job market it's much more sophisticated much more subtle and much more complex so you know we were starting our boot camp from 2021 uh in September and we got an email from our colleagues in Afghanistan saying hi the Taliban has just taken over and can we have a six-week extension on starting our boot camp and it was like yeah yeah you can definitely have a six-week extension from starting the boot camp in fact whatever you all need to be able to get this do you need laptops you know how can we sort of uh schedule your office hours so they're at times where you know the energy grid is is power cycling and so you know all these sorts of really things that you don't think about and become again just sort of references to the social context in which the education is being delivered is so critical and uh just to add one last thing one of the ways in which in terms of like a solution for that that we've seen the most and to to pick up of what at least it was saying in terms of community was communities like her now that are coming up metagamma Delta which is in all uh female identifying Dao um who are able to meet their community members where they're at have in-person events be able to Mentor before and after we found that students were intimidated to ask someone who who looks like me a question in a zoom chat with you know 200 to 300 people and so we set up telegram groups or Whatsapp groups or whatever the sort of you know modus operandi was for that culture and making sure that they were just checking in regularly and that increased the completion Times by orders of magnitude it was really profound it was really just someone who is in your community able to check in with you once a week and it just made an enormous world of a different for completion I love that and you know we we talk a lot about um when we're building companies and we're thinking about education we're like oh does it scale does it scale well that doesn't scale but that works and you can build something that doesn't work and scales or you can build something that works and figure out how to how to make things that are are growing become smaller maybe that's breaking up into Dows maybe that's pulling into separate organizations or by location but um not I think I think it's the not diminishing and taking away from the community and and the cultural attribute that is required and the full support of the learner's Journey besides the technical curriculum itself that's completely required in order to succeed we could probably talk about this for like three hours but I know we only probably only have 55 minutes 10 minutes left it's 11 25 okay so we're gonna jump over to communities and like building Community Solutions I want us to quickly talk about that and what's gone really well um for I'm going to start with lisandra you've done an incredible job in Chicago bringing web3 to the Latina and Latino community and and the bipod Community there what's worked really well for you if you had to offer these people you know any like immediate like lightweight Solutions like what's what worked for you I think that the most impactful approach for us was initiating Community Partnerships right um the the space where we were doing our web 3 education in Humboldt Park is a bipod co-working space for creatives you know on the main strip of the Puerto Rican neighborhood um so you know we reached out to the venue owner there who has the relationships with the community who has spent years nurturing all of her her clients her community coming to her space um and and initiated communication with her and helped her understand the importance of the the and the value of what we were trying to bring right and having her buy in and having her communicate and bring in her community members um I we didn't pretend that we had those relationships those pre-existing relationships but we definitely understood the value of those and the owner of the co-working space wasn't even web3 and she's a web 2 native it's a healing space it's a create you know it's Art Space it was educating her also right and so initiating meaningful relationships with the people who have those relationships already have empowering them to be the voice right I have the knowledge but I'm not the person who they see every day and giving her that information to disseminate was very very effective showing up in unexpected places is also been very successful for for our strategy and and and really just being Fierce and just passionate about really creating that access and bringing resources to our underestimated populations and so being that Advocate creating awareness outside of the communities for the players that are trying to build to come to our communities right and so it's working within working outside to bring in advocating elevating right the the key holders the The Gatekeepers for our communities creating trust being there in person showing up like you were saying providing the the pre and post resources the basic life skills that complement these elevated Concepts and tools we're trying to impart for us if our artists didn't understand how to read an artist agreement don't see themselves as entrepreneurs then we couldn't teach them how to leverage web 3 to generate revenue and to you know really capture the power of royalties that this technology has to offer so it was not just the tech side but the basic life skills side as well and and remembering that it's not in a bubble we're not working in a bubble and the challenge isn't finding people who want to learn or finding people who want to succeed it's removing all of the barriers that prevent them from doing that and understanding firsthand what those barriers are or working with people who do so that you can create those genuine connections and that genuine motivation to succeed right it goes beyond just today for a lot of our bipod communities intergenerational wealth creation is a big thing it's not just about my job it's how are my future how are my children and how is this going to help them right it's thinking into the future um and and then just empowering right it's okay I could get a job if I want to but can I build my own thing with this and that's what's most exciting to me about web3 I'm not from a tech background but what I'm most excited about is the solutions it brings and if we can get our bipoc and underestimate it under resource communities excited about the solutions that this technology can bring to them then we will be able to have them adopt and be part of this revolution so those that's those are my main points is how to be successful well I don't know I don't know how I follow that I think she's Louise that's beautiful thank you um cooking any final thing to add for you no no not at all actually that was amazing that was amazing yes um any I think we have time yeah can I add one little thing oh yeah come on Dave well just I the thing I get the thing that got me into education I was like I said I was in software engineering for uh the first 12 years of my career and I was reading a book and it talked about decentralizing education and I just wanted to mention it because at the time I was like okay that sounds amazing because like school like traditional schooling is obviously to some extent broken in in various ways and um and that's kind of what drew me into like the boot camp space a few years later and uh and it's just it's amazing to watch now the number of small Sharp Tools in the learner's tool belt and the internet provided that itself but um but just to now that we're like a little bit more Upstream for boot from boot camps with quick beam it's really awesome to watch how like these different solutions these different learning Solutions can fit together a little bit of what you just were talking about Lisa in terms of like we're not living in a bubble and when you're in education it's not like you're it's not a winner take all right it's a huge space and uh it's just a real it's a cool opportunity to be a community of of like education providers um I just wanted I wanted to emphasize that I love that um any questions from the audience I think we have time for like two or three questions if you ask a question you get a book analog your first smart contract book yeah in the back I think your question is something around what do we do to bring uh International uh participation to the web 3 conversation when we think about people who don't have English as a first language I love that conversation I love that question thank you for that I appreciate that guess what y'all there are a lot of people in the world who don't speak English and are Developers and we need to start writing curriculum that's not only written in English because when you are writing I I think when when we are teaching people something as complex as smart contract development solidity ethers you name it any number of the technologies that we love to touch in this ecosystem the complexity is there already right you probably have to be in web 2 developer you've got to understand it a basic understanding of JavaScript to understand how to interact with the contracts and to ask people who are web 2 developers who don't speak English as a first language and there are literally billions of them to then ask them to learn this incredibly complex technology and speak English at the same time is a barrier to entry that is unnecessary and so I think that the the solution to that is to internationalize curriculum as much as possible and to have a variety of different mediums in which to source that curriculum there are incredible videos from free codecamp.org I love that guy he's like so like feisty and and big and very English and American and and and so if I if English is not my first language that's going to be a challenging video to get my information from and I think just more of that content but that's in French that's in Spanish that's in Portuguese that is in a Swahili thank you yes absolutely because these are the communities that are going to be most impacted and have the most potential for web3 and these use case we need to be hating and teaching in those languages anybody else got something to say there nailed it any other questions one more question and you get a book come on up and get your book last question yes sir I love that thanks for asking I love that question uh quickpm.

xyz um my marketing director would say don't tell anybody because we haven't publicly launched yet it's a public beta but please go to the website and you can start coding right now and you can learn all about us and reach out to Dave and I on Twitter or LinkedIn we are very excited to talk to anybody who's interested in the education space and supporting bringing diverse and underrepresented groups to every layer of the ecosystem so and I'll just say use the eth Denver promo code to get it much cheaper Heath Denver promo code do we have content in other languages already yeah talk about do you do you at matter Labs or consensus and how to continue yeah we do actually we have a great uh devrel person uh Antonio who is Spanish and uh is doing great translation work there as well um we're working on that now at ethereum.org has a wonderful translation program that they've run um and uh we're piggybacking off of that as well it's always quick what's up quick meme is as well with the ethereum foundation quick beam is as well with the ethereum foundation you heard it here first don't tell anybody uh thank you for that question and would you what that's Antonio oh hello Antonio well thanks for all your translation work and doing good job in the world thank you hey everybody this has been delightful we're our time is up um thank you very much for coming um help each other look at each other in the eye make eye contact like LinkedIn telegram everybody who's sitting here we're all new to this and we should all be helping each other move forward so thanks very much for coming to the show thanks everybody thanks everyone thank you t-shirts and books over here foreign [Music]