Grant Proposal: College DAO

Community Grant Applications
#1

Grant ID: 8677qtyqv

Summary:

College DAO is the first and largest blockchain education network on college campuses worldwide. We empower students to get involved in the blockchain industry through education, internships, startup funding, and events like hackathons.

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If available, please enter a link to your project below:

Are you applying as a team or individual?:
Team

What type of grant are you pursuing?:
Long-term (continuous)

Please select the category your project best fits into:
Education

Please select who you think will benefit from your project?:
Subgraph Developers, Delegators, Indexers, Other

How much funding are you looking for? (USD):
20000

Provide a breakdown of your requested funding:
We are currently in the process of developing an Academy called 0xKnowledge that will act as the knowledge base for the blockchain space. We are looking to contract a development team and a design team to build the platform and we were quoted $23,000 for the development and $5,000 for design and copywriting.

To work with student organizations to build courses that are approachable to newcomers and technical builders alike, we would need to sponsor projects with them, and this often amounts to $2,000-$5,000 depending on the schools that we partner up with.

Have you applied for (or already received) funding from somewhere else?:
Yes

If yes, please describe where you’ve received funding from and how much you have, or will, receive:
We are currently in the process of applying for grants from different chains and blockchain companies like Ethereum Foundation, BNB Chain, Chainlink, Polkadot etc. We have not confirmed the grant amounts yet, and will update as we move along with the process.

What’s your vision for how your project will impact The Graph and/or web3?:
College DAO is bringing blockchain education to college campuses. This means that the student developer ecosystem will get exposed to The Graph and Web3 technologies as they begin their professional journeys. As time in college is when young people are more open to explore building on the blockchain, we believe that this would be the key to mass adoption for Web3.

What can you share about any past work that is relevant to this grant?:
We have previously held over 20 educational events, and currently work with 42 universities all around the world. We are also partnered up with Polkadot for their Blockchain Academy, Buildspace for their Nights & Weekends S3, and Whale Coin Talk for educational Twitter Spaces. We will also be organizing a deep dive with the Cosmos ecosystem, and a workshop with CertiK further into the year.

Can you share any information about current/past web3 experience?:
I previously worked at Treehouse Finance as a Product Manager. As an early employee, I helped to build the Harvest product that did historical portfolio analytics for DeFi investors. This was where I also scoped out the Graph for indexing and pulling on-chain historical data.

At College DAO, we have also been accelerating education on college campuses over the past 8 months. This includes educational workshops, internship opportunities, organizing conferences, and writing tutorials/documentation/curriculums.

Why are you interested in contributing to The Graph and/or web3?:
I am interested in contributing to The Graph as it was one of my first interactions with smart contracts on the technical side. I believe that for students and newcomers to blockchain to get started or be incentivised to explore Web3, tooling and infrastructure has to be easy to interact with, and The Graph is definitely one of the platforms that would help to make this happen.

As for why we’re interested in contributing to web3, we believe that blockchain technologies have the power to shape large portions of the technology space, and society in general. And as students have the chance to be one of the first adopters and builders in this early space, we have to surface these opportunities so that builders who are keen have everything they need to give it a try.




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#2

Hi. Thank you so much for your grant application!

In general, everything looks pretty clear and interesting, but still after analyzing your social networks, discord, twitter and also the website and in general the information you provided, I have a few questions about your application.

The very first is the breakdown of funding, you requested a rather large amount, so I would like to know how you plan to implement it. Perhaps in the format, x for this, x for that.

Next, is the fact of how many people will be involved. As you indicated here, you are familiar and involved with over 42 universities, so I would like to know what universities they are and how many students are there.

You want to create an Academy. Is this going to be some offline place where you already plan to host and create everything, or will it be some online platform with open access for anyone interested in The Graph and the web3?

How do you plan to summarize the quality and quantity of people and knowledge you want to provide that will come to The Graph in the future. Maybe it’s a format for some kind of certificates, I’d like to know more details as well.

Thank you!

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#3

Hello,

Thank you for submitting your community grant application! In addition to @doxe01.eth 's, questions I would like to know:

  • What would the specific deliverables be for this grant? Examples might include how many students participate in your workshops, or number of workshops provided, etc.
  • Also, can you describe which specific topics relevant to The Graph that you’d be teaching about? Some example of what the curriculum would include would be very helpful.

Thanks again for applying! Looking forward to your responses.

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#4

Hiya,

Thank you for applying. In addition to the previous questions asked, I would also like to know:

  • How would College DAO add value to The Graph?

  • In what ways does College DAO align with The Graph’s specific roadmap?

Anticipating your response, thanks!

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#5

Hi. Really appreciate the interest and thank you so much for diving deeper and asking us about these aspects of our initiative.

Here is a clear outline of the allocation of the $20,000 funding across different aspects of your project. Provide a detailed breakdown of how the funds will be used, for example:

  • Development and maintenance of the online platform (30%): $6,000
    This would head into a portion of our development budget to kick off the MVP development. The rest of the funding for the full product release would be obtained after the launch of the MVP. This MVP would contain simple learning management system (LMS) capabilities with limited blockchain functionality.
  • Content creation and curriculum development (25%): $5,000
  • Marketing and outreach efforts (15%): $3,000
  • Partnerships with universities and industry experts (15%): $3,000
  • Scholarships or financial assistance for students (10%): $2,000
  • Operational and administrative expenses (5%): $1,000

The academy would be an open online platform where anyone interested in blockchain will be able to access the content for free. We would be working with various student organizations and industry players to complete the curriculum and launch them.

It will be an online education platform with open and free access for anyone interested in Graph and Web3. The idea is to aggregate all the documentation and educational material from protocols, simplify them by breaking them down into approachable and actionable steps, and allow students to choose which protocols they are interested to dive into. Students can search through all the different blockchain protocols, and get familiar with the technology at their own pace.

After course completion, we would like to offer an NFT certification that would unlock job opportunities in The Graph ecosystem. We would once again be working with the education team at The Graph to lay out the requirements for this certification.

To start with, this will be a basic repurposing of existing educational content. The end goal is to create an educational platform that will integrate with the different technologies being built, and allow students to directly learn by interacting with and building using those technologies. In the case of The Graph, this would possibly look like the ability to scope out and deploy a subgraph directly from the curriculum on 0xKnowledge.

Such an educational platform would train students directly on technologies, greatly reducing the time taken to onboard new talent. And given that we are so early into Web3, starting to build this platform early will ensure that we have a knowledge base that can actually scale and grow alongside developments in technology.

One of the things that we realize we should have specified in our grant is that this will not be a program where we would go and develop without any oversight from The Graph. Building out such an education platform will require support and consistent communication with the The Graph community and teams. This would ensure that the quality of content that is on the platform matches the expectations at The Graph.

We did a review of the college groups we are working with and here is a list of the clubs we have worked (46 universities). This includes in-person events, online events, as well as collaborations on educational content. For example, we helped the Neo blockchain organize their campus tour last year, where we connected the team with 10 colleges, and we ran the logistics for 6 visits.

In terms of the student community, we are still tallying up the exact number of students that would be involved in this but it would depend on the organizations we work with and the students themselves for us to know who will be actively participating or benefiting from the project, either through direct involvement or by accessing the resources.

U Michigan Michigan Venture Club Venture Capital Midwest United States
U Michigan Wolverine Blockchain Blockchain Midwest United States
U Michigan Blockchain @ Michigan Blockchain Midwest United States
U Michigan Michigan Cryptocurrency Investment Club (MCIC) Investing Midwest United States
U Michigan Digital Asset Law Association Law Midwest United States
U Michigan V1 Michigan Entrepreneurship Midwest United States
UC Berkeley Blockchain @ Berkeley Blockchain West Coast United States
NUS NUS Fintech Society Fintech Singapore Singapore
NTU Blockchain @ NTU Blockchain Singapore Singapore
SMU SMU Blockchain Blockchain Singapore Singapore
SUTD SUTD Blockchain Singapore Singapore
FIU BlockchainFIU Blockchain South United States
Indiana U Blockchain @ IU Blockchain Midwest United States
MSU Spartan Blockchain Blockchain Midwest United States
U Chicago Blockchain Chicago Blockchain Midwest United States
U Chicago Chicago DAO DAO Midwest United States
U Chicago Chicago Blockchain Club Blockchain Midwest United States
Northwestern Kellogg Blockchain Club Blockchain Midwest United States
Northwestern NU Blockchain Group Blockchain Midwest United States
CMU Tepper Blockchain Initiative Blockchain Midwest United States
CMU CMU blockchain group Blockchain Midwest United States
UI-UC Illini Blockchain Blockchain Midwest United States
UW-Madison Badger Blockchain Blockchain Midwest United States
UPenn Penn Blockchain Blockchain Midwest United States
Cornell Cornell Blockchain Blockchain East Coast United States
Columbia Columbia Blockchain Club Blockchain East Coast United States
NYU NYU VVC Venture Capital East Coast United States
NYU NYU Blockchain Club Blockchain East Coast United States
NYU Blockchain Lab @ NYU Blockchain East Coast United States
Stanford Stanford Blockchain Club Blockchain East Coast United States
USC Blockchain@USC Blockchain West Coast United States
Harvard Harvard Blockchain Club Blockchain East Coast United States
Yale Yale Blockchain Club Blockchain East Coast United States
CU Boulder University of Colorado blockchain allegiance Blockchain West Coast United States
USC Blockchain @ USC Blockchain West Coast United States
UCLA Blockchain @ UCLA Blockchain West Coast United States
UCI Blockchain @UCI Blockchain West Coast United States
UCSD Blockchain @ UCSD Blockchain West Coast United States
UC Berkeley Blockchain @ Berkeley Blockchain West Coast United States
Duke Duke Blockchain Lab Blockchain South United States
Emory Blockchain Union Blockchain South United States
Georgia Tech Georgia Tech Blockchain South United States
UT Austin Texas Blockchain Blockchain South United States
UW University of Washington blockchain society Blockchain South United States
Rice University Rice Blockchain Blockchain South United States
Princeton Princeton entrepreneurship club Entrepreneurship Midwest United States
Princeton Princeton blockchain society Blockchain Midwest United States
Boston U BU cryptoclub Investing Midwest United States
Cambridge Cambridge Blockchain Society Blockchain Cambridge United Kingdom
Oxford Oxford Blockchain Society Blockchain Oxford United Kingdom
Northeastern Northeastern Blockchain East Coast United States
Arizona State U ASU Blockchain Blockchain South United States
404DAO (ATL DAO) DAO South United States
Tufts University Tufts Blockchain Blockchain East Coast United States
Vanderbilt Blockchain at Vanderbilt Blockchain South United States
Susquehena University Susquehena University Blockchain CollegeDAO East Coast United States
Fordham University Blockchain at Fordham University Blockchain East Coast United States
Kansas University KU Blockchain Institute DAO Midwest United States
Waterloo UW Waterloo Blockchain Canada United States

We also work with University Blockchain Alliance (UBA), which expands our network to 160+ additional colleges (mostly community colleges), which translates to thousands of students who will benefit from this Education Platform.

#6

Thanks for following up with @doxe01.eth’s questions!

  1. Online platform: Launch and maintain a user-friendly online platform that offers easy access to course materials, workshop schedules, and other resources.

  2. Curriculum: Develop a complete Graph curriculum consisting of 8 to 12 modules, covering essential topics and skills within a six-month time frame. This would include creating lesson plans, learning materials, and assessments to provide a structured learning experience for students. The curriculum will be made available for free for members, offering accessible educational resources to our global community. Some examples of topics we will include are:

  • Roles in the Graph ecosystem and contribution opportunities
  • Using Studio to create Subgraphs
  • How do delegations work
  • Pulling on-chain data using common languages E.g. Python, Javascript, Go
  • How does indexing work and how to operate a node
  • Using The Graph Explorer

  1. Number of workshops: Organize and host 4 workshops on various topics related to The Graph and Web3 technologies within a one-year time frame.

  2. Student participation: Engage and educate at least 500 students in the workshops or education programs, providing them with valuable skills and knowledge in the Web3 ecosystem.

  3. University partnerships: Establish partnerships with 4 new universities, expanding The Graph’s network and increasing access to The Graph’s educational resources for a larger audience.

  4. Community engagement: Host 1 community event such as webinars, hackathons, or meetups, fostering collaboration and learning among students, professionals, and enthusiasts interested in The Graph and Web3 technologies.

  • Regarding the specific number of educational events, workshops, or courses related to The Graph and Web3.

As for specific numbers, we will need some time to scope this out. Here is our roadmap for the rest of the year, and the strategy behind some of our initiatives:

Using our upcoming Twitter tour involving about 30 college groups, we will be gathering an understanding of the range of topics that students are interested in. Such an initiative will also serve to strengthen our relationship with our partner clubs and get them more actively involved as the year progresses.

During the summer, we would work with our partner clubs to lock in workshops and educational events that they would like to host for the upcoming Fall 2023 semester.

  • A targeted number of students participate in these events or workshops.

In the past, most workshops have garnered interest from around 20-30 students on each campus. In larger universities like the University of Michigan, we are capable of bringing more than 50-70 students.

Here is a link to a recent event we had at the University of Michigan: College DAO on LinkedIn: #goblue #blockchain #blockchainsummit #detroit #networking #web3… | 14 comments

  • The successful development and launch of The Graph course on the 0xKnowledge platform.

We would be tracking student engagement with the courses, and also gathering feedback on how useful the course was in their learning.

As for the specific topics relevant to The Graph, the curriculum and other workshops could potentially cover the following broad topics to start with before narrowing down into implementation details. We would be working with the educational teams at The Graph to curate and develop this curriculum as well. If you are also interested in providing guidance for what this course may look like, we are definitely open to hear more!

  1. Introduction to The Graph, its purpose, and its role in the Web3 ecosystem.
  2. Understanding subgraphs, indexing, querying, and how they work within The Graph.
  3. Hands-on tutorials for creating and deploying subgraphs.
  4. Exploring use cases for The Graph’s technologies in decentralized applications (dApps).
#7

Hi @poptones! Thanks for adding in those questions.

College DAO can add value to The Graph in several ways:

Education and Awareness: By organizing workshops, courses, and events related to The Graph and Web3, College DAO helps increase awareness of The Graph’s technology and its benefits. This leads to a better understanding of the platform among students and newcomers to the blockchain industry.

  1. We would be leveraging our networks with University Blockchain Alliance (UBA) to help organize educational workshops across different college campuses in the US.
  2. Additionally, we are connected with all the top universities in Singapore such as SMUB and NTU. College DAO Singapore also has a developer faction with whom we are working to put together a Chainlink developer workshop. Similar events can be hosted for The Graph.
  3. We are also kicking off initiatives like the College DAO Twitter Tour in partnership with WhaleCoinTalk. We are working with the UBA to bring together student speakers from blockchain clubs and help them connect with companies - we would love to have someone from the Graph ecosystem be on board to speak on a Twitter space as well. We are happy to share any documents regarding this if you are interested.

Talent Pipeline: College DAO’s educational initiatives and internship opportunities expose students to The Graph early in their careers. This can create a talent pipeline of skilled developers and professionals who are familiar with The Graph and can contribute to the ecosystem as they enter the workforce.

  1. We would love to showcase any internship positions for students across a wide variety of positions such as marketing, business development, and software engineering.

0xKnowledge would be a place for students to keep up with any technological developments in any interesting protocols.Students would also be able to learn the structure of The Graph and the key features of your roadmap: Data & APIs, SNARK Force, Protocol Economics, Protocol & Network Operations, and lastly, Indexer Experience. 0xKnowledge aims to have similar interdependencies to allow developers to build in public and receive feedback on their work. 0xKnowledge hopes to help developers learn how to create subgraphs, indexing, and tooling and be the first to learn about any developments on The Graph platform. Here are some of the ways that we think College DAO aligns with The Graph.

a) SNARK Force: We aim to teach students what SNARK Force is through our educational platform. As they build on The Graph platform they will also be able to learn about new developments that come out and concepts like zero-knowledge proofs and fraud proofs for indexing.
c) Protocol Economics: We aim to continue to incentivize students to contribute so that we can support the addition of subgraphs and the implementation of protocol economics to meet the growing needs of The Graph ecosystem.
d) Protocol & Network Operations: We aim to have the College DAO team consistently be dedicated to releasing team developments within our community and bring a greater number of people to be working on Protocol operations.

#8

Unfortunately, this grant proposal did not generate the level of support in the community to move it to the next phase of the grant application process.

Thank you for submitting this proposal and you are encouraged to stay engaged in the Graph community. You are also welcome to submit new grant applications in the future with proposals that may generate stronger community support.

Best Regards,
Graph AdvocatesDAO

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