Community Fund Discussion - NEM Academic Innovation Grants/Partnerships

General Discussion
#1

This idea has been sparked after reading this story about Ripple :

Speaking from experience, universities and in particular IT in my country(Ireland), are underfunded to the point where students no longer have elective modules and have to pay maintenance fees every year to support software licenses and cover printing costs.

What would be a really cool thing to see, is NEM announcing a number of grants to third-level institutions to support the academic research of NEM technology. Speaking from experience, computer science students in my uni do at minimum 1 IEEE format research paper and 1 final year project of their choosing either of which could be aimed at NEM. Each year hackathons are also organised in these institutions. A further benefit of a sponsorship could be that these hackathons also may become NEM orientated.

Iā€™d like to open up a discussion on what the community thinks of this.

3 Likes
#2

reserved

#3

I got the impression the thrust was more to do with creating NEM blockchain centres.

There are millions of academic institutions. Itā€™s far easier to concentrate efforts on the creation of one place students can drop in on thatā€™s fully geared up for them rather than spread thinly elsewhere.

Agree though that investing in education now will pay off in spades in the future. Definitely one of the most productive places to funnel money.

1 Like
#4

The fund thus far has been used to create a blockchain centres centre successfully so this is also a model Iā€™d like to see continued.
One counter argument I have against it though is with a concentrated effort on one centre it requires every one not in that area to travel. Taking again the example of Ireland, a NEM centre in Dublin would benefit those in that city greatly but developers not from the area will have to travel 2-5 hours depending on their location which could dis-incentivise them. I have known students at my institution who wouldnā€™t go to talks by popular companies or recruitment days due to the big travel time there and back.

Instead what I would propose is an arrangement with 10-11 of the 14 institutes of technologies in Ireland or some other country. Each one could be provisioned a delegated account for the purposes of setting up a node. This has 2 benefits:

  • NEM is so lightweight, you donā€™t need to be ā€˜geared upā€™ to use it. Most of the functionality can be done over API calls and doesnā€™t require any fancy hardware. Hosting nodes will benefit individuals with low latency access to a node.

  • Colleges use the Eduroam network, through this any node set up on a institutions network is now accessible to any European college also using Eduroam.

All of the above could of course be done in addition to setting up a singular blockchain centre.

#5

I love this idea. Im also based in ireland (west) and can attest to what your saying. Fully support this idea.

Taking again the example of Ireland, a NEM centre in Dublin would benefit those in that city greatly but developers not from the area will have to travel 2-5 hours depending on their location which could dis-incentivise them.

Ireland does already have enough issues with everything being in dublin and the rest of the country being neglected, especially the west and north west, where there are an ample supply of high quality colleges and UNIā€™s. Would be great to not add to this issue and go for the smaller hubs scattered in colleges instead of one main hub in dublin. Also deloite already has a hub in dublin which would likely swallow most of the tallent.

Instead what I would propose is an arrangement with 10-11 of the 14 institutes of technologies in Ireland or some other country. [...]

I like this. +1. we could set up a college access only network like you have suggested separate from the regular test net, an extra plus of this is that we can assign each college a genesis account so that students have ample access to test xem easily directly from within the college.

I would be more than happy to visit colleges and uniā€™s in ireland to help get this rolling and maybe even do dev training days at said colleges

#6

Iā€™ve worked in higher education my entire career. In Australia, as in many parts of the world, there are a number of challenges that make an idea like this seem timely:

  1. Dwindling resources. In Australia, government funding has been frozen until 2020, further putting the squeeze on universities when they are already in most cases cut to the bone.
  2. Lack of vision. This is not entirely a government problem, but partly. There is a real gap opening up between the way higher education has traditionally been offered, and what students need to be successful (in their careers and lives).
  3. Momentum. Universities often find it difficult to move quickly and stay ahead. This is more intensely felt within an industry that is heavily regulated (for good reasons) and not funded well for innovation.

In my view funding like this could encourage smart people to do a lot more ā€“ finding new applications that we have not even dreamt up yet ā€“ and would definitely have a whole range of benefits for NEM. To cite a well-known example, it was pure research at the CSIRO in Australia that led to the development of Wifi. If the scientists involved had not received funding, who knows how long it would be before weā€™d have had that technology?