ethereum is growing and the diversity of human participation creates resilience throughout the ecosystem. The Devconnect Scholarship Program is a small effort that aims to build resilience through community diversity. Better representation in human geography and demographics leads to diverse experiences and new perspectives that help the ethereum protocol meet the coordination needs of all humans, not just a lucky few. Better representation (leading to better geographic distribution of ethereum nodes, for example) not only helps network security, but we believe it is crucial to enriching our community and making ethereum stories tangible for more people.
The Fellows Program brought 22 community builders who are currently underrepresented on ethereum to Devconnect Istanbul. This post highlights just a few of the scholars and their stories.
Meet the academics
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Meet Ovia, a blockchain researcher who studied proof-of-work blockchains as part of her PhD research. She is an active contributor to India's Web3 community, particularly delivering technical workshops and helping to empower women and non-binary people at Phoenix Guild. Ovia said she left Devconnect with ideas and potential collaborations that can contribute to her ongoing work, as well as having some fan-girl moments from meeting some of her real-life tech heroes. You can read her conclusions here: “Introduction to ZKVMs and ZKVM types” and here: “Simplified lunar math behind ZKSNARK”.
Meet Elnaz, a Java backend developer from Iran turned smart contract developer. After her centralized exchange banned her and people from certain countries, Elnaz read the bitcoin and ethereum whitepapers and found the decentralization innovation “mind-blowing.” Speaking about her community, where access to banking is limited and inflation is high, she said there is still a need to work on educating people about the disadvantages of centralized networks and incorporating them into decentralized networks. You can find her reflection here: “Enabling low-cost, decentralized micropayments on ethereum via Layer 2 rollups.”
Meet Alphonce, a software engineer from Kenya. He was initially drawn to cryptocurrencies because of speculation, but his perspective changed when he began participating in open source projects on ethereum and realized that it can be a “powerful platform to foster financial inclusion and innovation.” “. He said that he wants to contribute to the blockchain ecosystem in Africa by bringing back Devconnect's spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing. Continue reading his findings here: ethereum-6ec6f02574be”>”Reflections from DevConnect: Revealing opportunities for financial inclusion with ethereum.”
You can find stories, ideas and learnings from more scholars. here.
Whats Next?
Along with the efforts already being made in our community for better representation, we hope that the Devcon and Devconnect Fellows Help expand and enrich the ethereum Infinite Garden. For future academic programs and more stories, follow @EFNextBillion.
