How a Graphic Novel Is Sharing Blockchain with the World - Annie Connelly

so next i'd like to welcome my friend ann conley from singularity university she's going to talk about how what do we got a novel going on blockchain like we're making a graphic novel that teaches kids about blockchain um and i'm actually joined by my co-author and the artist of the graphic novel chief nimoy he's here as well oh hi great to be here thank you all right well look i'm i'm fascinated by what this is going to be so um take it away okay so should i start or you start at yeah go for it chief okay um about two years ago um was it probably two three years ago it it blends in my mind now ann approached me with this concept uh she was on the blockchain faculty of su where we had met and you know she wanted to do a graphic novel about blockchain because she believes that uh education is super important for adoption and you know my first question is that what what problem does this solve for us because uh in my part of the world in in kenya we are not new to to digital currencies in virtually every village that you can go to we have empeza and you know um you know mobile money is even more widely used than in the us and so um her response to me was that what it solves is trust and that's when i i sat up and started listening and um you know i was like already the associations that came to my mind with this word uh began to explode because this is a huge problem that i see in in how we work you know the lack of trust makes everything much more expensive much more inefficient and basically just make it takes the joy out of work and business and life as a whole so i i i took some time away and i thought about it and as i was ruminating um maybe we can move to the next slide um the brief that she had given me was that uh you know um can you tell a story that would inspire a million people and um you know she was already familiar with my work she'd already uh supported the my previous graphic novels and you know it was an interesting and unlikely pairing that we had um so as i continue to to ponder this problem and and see how we can reach the widest audience possible and continue to unpack the idea of trust um she was supposed to visit kenya a little bit shortly after that and as i was looking for presents to to get for her she came we came upon this and we can go to the next slide uh this what you're looking at is the wahanga necklace it's a very common item if you're familiar with kenya if you've lived in kenya or familiar with pastoralist culture in kenya not just the maasai but the samburu and and turkana you can see one behind me uh when a woman is getting married uh they wear this and it's it's not just a decoration it's also a way of communicating it's also a way of keeping history who has married whom which which clan um you know what happened where and you know it if you like you can think of this as a as an early uh what's the word i'm looking for as an early forebearer of of what we think of now as like an immutable ledger of course it's not as immutable as as what we have with the with the blockchain but i thought it would be a a really good analogy that is already rooted in in in african culture and and it could be a way to to ex to further explore the whole idea of trust and uh you know once ann saw this she she loved the concept and everybody else who who's seen it since has been inspired like wow you know where is this going and i think we'll see a lot more about this when when she shares the video that we did on on the first episode of the book next slide please so um after after i had a rough concept after i i had a rough idea about how i wanted to start unpacking and and and um and merging this also with the with the basic blockchain curriculum you know explaining what decentralized ledgers are etc uh i had to you know find a character that could carry this story and uh maura was the character that we came up with and you know she's evolved a lot since this early stage when you know um when i was you know determining her dress we lost the cape but of course we kept the wahanga necklace next slide please uh these are early slideshows when maura meets with her grandmother and her grandmother explains why the wahanga necklace what it meant for the culture how how we kept our history in this way and it's it's this is basically just going deeper and deeper and you you'll be you'll be able to see as we go into the story how how it defends the curriculum next slide please so from the storyboards you have uh you know better develop drawings these were the drawings i was making that we were going to that they were going to become the graphic novel and uh this is her interaction with a policeman you can see we we took the opportunity to throw in an ethereum logo on her earrings i thought it would be a nice touch next slide please um this is now the digitization version of of the slides as we were building the story of trust um basically i drew everything in layers so that it would work both as a graphic novel and as a motion comic when when we give it to animators we do very basic animation without lip syncs and walk cycles just to make it efficient and you know just really get people excited because uh my idea was that if you really want people to to fall in love with a subject you don't just hit them bang on the head with it you do what um i don't know if you've seen the film there will be blood uh where daniel day lewis is playing an oil prospector it's a film that's almost entirely about oil and and the oil trade but it's also a genre film and you can follow it as a genre film but in the process of hauling the the story you learn all these things or like wolf of wall street it's as much about uh you know the stock market as it is about um you know a person's ambition and their drug problems etc it's a it's a human it's a human story at the end of the day next slide please uh this is a closer look at maura you can see how she's evolved since the the early character sheets and she's the one who she's basically a stand-in for for me and my own education journey as as as i started to use wallets and i started to to to accept payments for my books in in crypto and also learn how to trade also lose money and you know just go into the whole world it would it would better inform all the choices that mora went so i'm kind of living a parallel journey that that maura is also living and yeah it's fun next slide please so thanks chief um it's been super interesting to kind of learn about the process of creating a graphic novel but as chief mentioned at the beginning our fundamental goal was to educate over a million african teens about blockchain and get them inspired about the technology um and started on their journey to becoming crypto owners developers and entrepreneurs and so in order to reach this goal we want to make the book as accessible as possible and so we're creating a mobile first digital version and we're giving it away for free and trying to share it as much as possible um and one of the other things we're trying to do is we're actually going to expand the project for raising funds right now to be able to turn them the book into a full motion comic um and so i wanted to share with you today just a one minute clip of what that motion comic would look [Music] like bless you more your necklace is so beautiful thank you it is a map of ohenga history over many lifetimes a colored bead for every newborn and a white bead for each of our dearly departed with every new cycle around the sun our community grows this way no matter how far we live from one another we will always be family and always trust one another so you can catch the full five-minute clip um at our website trustgraphicnovel.com um and we're hoping to turn that into an actually full-length motion comic over the next year which is pretty exciting um so as i mentioned this is just a you know taking new new crypto owners from zero to one getting them inspired and so the next step for them is really to connect to education partners all across the continent who can help take them further and onward into the community so we've been able to partner with some incredible organizations from across the continent from south africa rwanda kenya and we're always looking for more that can help us just build that community so much better and lastly we want to thank all of the partners who've helped us make it this far and helped us made it possible for the book to be free and accessible to everyone we've had great support from all across the blockchain community from interchain algorand consensus um and most importantly from bitcoin grants from community members just like you who've helped to actually bring this book to life um so if you'd like to make a donation to help us make our motion comic we would absolutely love your support on git coin grants and you can find us on a trustgraphicnovel.com thanks so much for listening today and we hope you'll all support the book thank you very much