Meetup 1: Talking to Children about Blockchains

This is to organize our first meetup! The process is likely to be rough, so let's soldier through.

Details:

You can find all the details in an easily calender-able form here

• When: 8PM UTC, April 4th
• Where: This Jitsi video chat
• What: Talking to children about blockchains!

Topic

The topic is fairly open ended but here are some interesting questions to explore.

• How do ideas of trust, security, and consensus relate to a young humans experience? How does this change as they grow/learn?
• Will children interact with the systems we're building, in their current forms? Things like key-management and smart-contracts. If not, how will they change?
• What are the abstract ideas of this space and field that are most broadly useful in learning? How have they changed how you view the world?
• Are we as a community open and engaging for young humans?

Material

There's nothing in particular this week as we're really just starting up. That being said Mindstorms (as I've mentioned before) provides an incredible perspective on children, computers and learning, that I think extends pretty well into our discussion topic.

For (very) rough initial exploration of that, you can check out the talk I gave at EthCC.

Outcomes

This is a short retrospective and summary of the conversation. I meant for it to be recorded, but blanked in the excitement of conversation.

We had a small but awesome collective of around 7 people.

Lot's of questions, few answers

The conversation was a little bit messy, acknowldged a couple times as so. One of the key goals moving forward will be to have smaller scopes for these meetings.

Explaining the tech vs explaining the impact

This question is one that's come up a bunch in multiple conversations I have. Roughly speaking the benefit of explaining the impact is that an individual can understand how it might relate to their life, and the benefit of explaining the technology is that an individual may be able to apply it to their life, in potentially novel ways.

Balance most likely.

What do we call this field?

Personally I've been referring to it as distributed or social computing, but it was pointed out (rightfully) that that isn't the most evocative of phrases. One suggestion was using the language of social organization and cooperatives. Or just sticking to "blockchains"

What are the pre-requsites?

A focus of our conversation was around the pre-requisites. We had people of varying backgrounds present, who came to learn about blockhains in different ways, and so started from a variety of different perspectives.

More than anything I think this meeting reaffirmed the need for a broader conversation around the topic of learning in this space. There was so much that we could spent hours individually diving into, and creating a space for this dicussion will be very valuable.

Moving forward:

• Set up a repository for information, materials, and tools. Create a reading-list.
• Set up a mailing list of some kind for the next meeting.
• Decide the topic, find a speaker, set the date