Education + Research is at the center of everything PA does. While we have routinely prioritized dedicating resources to this aspect in most of our product work to date, we are still lacking capacity to adequately address this aspect across all of our initiatives
Consider for example that out of all of the projects going on, only FDI + Dao Utils Beta Testing have had resources (financial + contributor capacity) earmarked specifically for educational purposes
Part of this issue is a matter of not having had the requisite number of contributors to serve across all these projects. However, that is recently appearing to be less of an issue, so it feels like it may be time to take concerted effort to address this.
Pulling from experience during my early days at Developer DAO helping start an Education Team, I propose (offchain for now) that we establish some sort of an education working group/focus group that can work on accomplishing things like the following:
more clearly defining PA’s stance on what research + education means for us and the different ways it manifests across different initiatives. ex: education could mean starting a university or just having really nice protocol documentation
allocating PA resources to core product development to make sure they are provding sufficient educational material
figuring out how to make education a core part of the new member onboarding experience to PA
If we can get this up and running, I think it has the potential to:
create new + low-barrier-to-entry surface area for new/prospective members to engage/contribute
more strongly connect PA’s focus on research + education into our general ops/initiative strategy
increase quantity + quality of educational efforts across all PA initiatives
address potential lack of educational capacity in ongoing efforts like FDI + the beta dao utils testing
if there are ppl interested in championing this, I think it could be smart to allocate some treasury (0.5 - 1.0 eth total?) to one or a few ppl to spend some time scheming
Thanks for this post, I raised this concern privately regarding my last proposal. This is a bit of my view on education.
As an independent contributor, research is more of the things I seek to do as well as: focus groups, case studies, and actually documenting live experiences so it can translate into creating a distinct personality for Public Assembly education, separate from ZORA education even though there are crossroads
I started with content creation in PA.
I believe content creation misses the mark without verbose documentation.
I think all docs for PA suck in correlation to the actual hot points in PA i feel as the most interesting. Example people may know Neosound for music but it will take a specific amount of attention to detail to know that was also PAs first experimentation with onchain SVGs (pre-nouns era).
I made the docs with the least amount of context possible in most cases. It required setting up meetngs, discord diving, forum diving, hours of actually reading and listening to people’s conversations with care async, twitter thread diving constantly. Basically digesting ever single piece of media ZORA or PA creates as well as recontextualizing, video production, “coding”, and preparation for putting it back out into the world. Which is great.
The feedback loop is flawed if it is going off of my opinion alone.
However I’m not sure how people think you can create what’s missing without full context of what exists.
I feel like the solution is full time attention.
An adjacent dilemma is I have some boards that date back to September with hours and hours of valuable information and as the boards grow, the forest grows.
But so many boards just become graveyards and never reach the point where I can sit down and audit all of the content to where an actual brand presence can come from the curated resources. It’s just entropic hell and I do not have mentorship for anything in PA and definitely not enough to steward education entirely on my own. Everything I learn is async and I’ve been on a journey to seek web3 native project managers specific to this niche and religiously ghosted to be able to turn this into “something tangible” or “intentional”. Or have the capacity be able to give high level opinions.
I can share wips all day and build in public in this forum as they have circulated internally enough. But a close working group makes more sense to me.
++++ to this. we need more context auditors, async researchers, education creative directors, grant writers
research/education in the global, distributed, async, always online era requires creative direction to figure out how to make it effective for everyone involved (ppl contributing research, ppl managing/organizing research, ppl providing education on said research, ppl receiving education, etc)
to put it another way – the boards @valcoholics is describing are entire week/month long courses in their own right. but we need to figure out how to extract + deliver that education or else it all gets stuck in the graveyard
and this bit ^ is just as important as well. we need to be able to identity what prerequsite information is necessary for ppl to even be able to engage with education in the first place. u cant teach linear algebra to someone with no concept of geometry (lmao exposing that i have no math capabilities)
And that’s not a dig at anything I’m literally saying don’t know whats going on unless I read through every post, essay, or fully watch 4 hour long tutorials, You should not need to know everything to interact. I just don’t understand how else it’s getting done and that’s my flaw.
There are other roles in PA that can afford less connection though and for the road map that should be noted
@valcoholics@0xTranqui Great compilation of material on both docs. Question: Do we have a target audience for the educational process? Seems important to know who we would be targeting
The types of people we want to encourage participating in PA
a less annoying way of putting this would be that our educational processes should be able to be accessible to very beginner level ppl with no context – to power users who know how everything works and just want the fastest way to get going
figuring out how to overlap efforts towards both spectrums of participants is ideal (for capacitiy + efficinecy reasons), but might mean some content is geared towards one side while other is geared to another
Sorry I was extra lowkey, I was joining on back-to-back-back meetings and a little camera’d out. But was great to listen mostly and get started thinking more directly on this. Thanks for facilitating @valcoholics and everyone for their considered input.
