Who else is still in the process of recovering from Devcon? And I‘m not only talking about that cold we all caught…
I am!
And I’ll share more on my DevCon adventures with all the incredible people I met, but first, and so that I don’t forget, I’d like to share some of the learnings I had during this intense week.
Are you looking for an interesting project to collaborate in, someone from across the globe to talk about the challenges you’re facing in your DAO, some of the needs your community has and possible solutions that could be built, or the latest ZK proof voting mechanism? Devcon has you covered.
During this week I had abundant opportunities in the space to connect with people that offered and to whom I offered collaboration opportunities, ideas to be developed, shared, people from whom to learn and people with whom to grow.
There are 3 particular opportunities that stood out for me:
Participating at the Next Billion side event and Happy Hour and identifying collabs.
If you haven’t heard of the Next Billion program, you should listen to some of the panels recorded at Devcon. These are fellows with specific projects within their communities to drive adoption of blockchain technologies by providing solutions to real existing problems or through innovative methods. Read more here.
As someone working in finding paths to onboard more women into the ecosystem (and well, we‘re more than one billion for sure) I was very intrigued to learn. More on their projects and what they are working on, but most importantly, what have they solved for that could be useful for our community and how could we collaborate? I was very happy to chat with Gabriela who is already working on the ground in Mexico, particularly with women, and am excited to see how we can partner up.
It was also mind blowing for me to learn how two of the fellows are currently working in solving for the needs of farmers, given that most of small farmers in developing countries are women and in Latin America these are particularly vulnerable populations that need to emigrate, and am excited to see how those projects develop and what we can all learn from Benson.
2. Learning and “Balkanize Lear2Earn” led by Denis Vuckovac
Several of us are working hard in making sure people from emerging countries are not left behind in the process of building web3, we want to make sure that not only we contribute to it, but that we solve for problems our countries have. It is very exciting to hear and chat with others that are involved in diversifying the ecosystem and learn from their successes and failures. I have always been of the mindset that we need to share our learnings (both good and bad) with others to ensure we are allocating resources in the most efficient way as we continue to build on.
At HER DAO LATAM we have started to explore paths through which we can empower more women to learn how to code, or gain additional coding skills that will serve them to get new roles and opportunities in the space, and learning about other solutions has been enlightening. What became evident too is that having better avenues to connect with others working through similar problems is needed, while the internet enables us to connect there is so much noise that finding the right people for the right topics can be challenging…
This is Denis’s talk, in which he explains the scholarship project he has developed (BIG kudos!) And if you’re in the Balkans, consider applying here!
3. Connecting: On hosting 80+ incredible LATAM women leaders for breakfast.
HER DAO LATAM launched an initiative during DevCon called WAGMI LATAM. With this initiative we seek to onboard 5 million latinas into web3 by 2030, and this can only be done by working jointly with other communities in the region. During DevCon we hosted a breakfast in which the over 25 communities already in the initiative joined us.
This spaces are important for the community members to connect, to know they are not alone in the work that they are doing and that they have others they can reach out for a listening ear or for advice as they build their communities and look for ways in which to provide value to their members. Conversations ranged beyond financial needs but also what was working and what hand’s worked for them so far. My goal is to continue empowering them and working with them so they can continue to build.
I believe we need to highlight front and center other contributions to the ecosystem beyond the technical ones. While the onboarding of new devs is front and center, I believe, as many others, that the way in which we onboard the next billion will not only be by onboarding builders, but the masses. The end user, the person that needs to understand that they could receive their monthly remittances through crypto or how this technology can change decision making in favelas or remote communities that require reallocation of funds for public projects.
A week earlier, I visited Brasil to learn more about the existing web3 projects and communities there and was very surprised to see that most of the women led projects were focused in providing web3 education to disadvantaged and marginalized communities. And yet, little of this efforts was mentioned during the event. I believe it is a combination of language barriers (we’ll dive more into it later) and the selected tracks.
Maybe we should consider a track for next Devcon on onboarding non-technicals? Devcon has done a very good job widening the scope of the talks and panels being highlighted to now include Design, Public Goods and DAOs. Let’s push a little bit further and get even closer to the grassroots.
I am excited to see that over the last year UX and UI has become a thing in web3, and we’re starting to see less terrible and hyper technical products. However, one of the points that was striking to me during the talk “Original Sin” held by Taylor Monahan.
Her question “Why did we build technically something so dangerous and scary as current wallets?” Where one miss placed paper, or string could mean the loss of all your funds? Did we really create keys to our infinite garden that are poison pills or Russian roulettes? How are we building on with the expectation for others to join when we build intrinsic barriers for adoption that go beyond UX/UI? And how a aware are we, as we build on, that what we are pioneering could if developed and executed poorly cost us years of potential adoption?
All these questions do not point for us to be too scared to build, but to be more considerate when building and aware. This is not only about a poor UX…
And it should. Before attending DevCon I had heard of ZK roll ups, and that’s it. But boy, this week taught me this technology can be used for so much more.
As someone coming from a FinTech and Remittances background thinking through the compliance possibilities for remittance senders and receivers was mind blowing! What if you can show that the money is clean while protecting the identity of who is sending it?
And my favorite use case of all times is ZK for community voting and communications that can strengthen community participation. We have all been there, there’s a reason why national elections have private voting so you don’t get shamed or worst, shunned, from or by the community you belong to. What if we could offer this same freedom to DAO and community members? ZK can make it happen.
ZK is not a very easy technology to grasp and so far most use cases for it have been highly technical or refer only to scalability, I am excited to see how adoption in communities takes off to provide more security in interactions.
I had three interactions that made me see, once more, how important it is to have spaces in which we can see others like us.
After the WAGMIN LATAM brunch I had a person walk to me to share that at some point during their developer education they felt pushed to quit after being singled out as the only girl in the group, she considered dropping out of coding and web3 all together. She couldn’t believe it when she found herself in a room filled with other young women who not only looked like her but spoke her language and had struggled and overcome challenges similar to hers. This moment incited her to look for ways in which she could replicate such an environment for other women in her city.
As usual, I hacked in an all-female team during Eth Bogota and second though sharing this detail with a larger group of scholars, but still did. I was surprised when during a dinner a young girl walked to me to share she had been scared to hack and after reading that our all-female team won several bounties she was hyped to participate an upcoming hackathon. It is interesting to me that statements that can see so small or common place for some of us can resonate in such unexpected ways.
There are still some learnings that are slightly more personal from Devcon, and I’m overwhelmed by the support and care of the community I was able to meet there. Without a doubt, my experience in Devcon has helped me find my place in the web3 community and reassure that the web3 community, so far, is my kind of people.
