Jun 21, 2020
Why Did the elimu.ai Community Decide to Use Aragon? 🦅
Open Source Community
The Purpose of the elimu.ai Community
The purpose of elimu.ai is to provide disadvantaged children with access to quality basic education.
According to a report from UNESCO, more than 387 million children of primary school age (about 6 to 11 years old) are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. The elimu.ai Community aims to solve this problem by developing Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for teaching children the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic.
This global learning crisis is exactly that, a global problem. And our community consists of contributors from all around the planet. As long as a person agrees with us that a quality basic education is the right of every child and wants to contribute towards building the software, we don’t look at things like that person’s age, location, nationality, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, academic degrees, etc.
Global Citizenship as a Mindset 🌍 🌎 🌏
“Borders. I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.” ― Thor Heyerdahl
As a global and open-minded community, we invite people of any background to join us in our work. A contributor’s set of skills and knowledge is the valuable thing that we actually care about, not their location or nationality. When a contributor generously offers her time and knowledge to help build our software, it benefits humanity and the world.
Rather than following the old way of thinking where people used to divide the planet into political borders and randomly grant basic human rights to individuals based on their place of birth, let’s emulate an astronaut’s overview effect, and consider ourselves members of one humanity.
A New Way of Creating Organizations
“There ain’t no rules around here. We’re trying to accomplish something.” ― Thomas Edison
Enter Aragon. Empowered by Aragon, a group of contributors can now freely organize and collaborate without borders or intermediaries. What used to require an enormous waste of time spent on government bureaucracy and banking, can now be handled within minutes by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
The elimu.ai Community DAO
Because the purpose of the elimu.ai Community (providing every child with access to quality basic education) transcends geography or political borders, it makes perfect sense for us to use Aragon to organize ourselves.
Being an open source community, transparency is also an important factor. In fact, anyone can check the elimu.ai Community DAO’s members, financials and decisions taken: http://eng.elimu.ai/contributions/aragon-dao
As in many other open source communities, meritocracy also plays a crucial part in how we collaborate. Rather than opting for a central decision-making function, we can use Aragon Voice for community-oriented collaborative planning. More specifically, we follow an approach where community members build their reputations based on their efforts.
Every month, the elimu.ai Community DAO mints a fixed amount of new tokens, and these are distributed proportionally to contributors based on how much value they have provided to the community that month.
As a holder of elimu.ai Community DAO tokens ($ELIMU) you are considered a community member and you are automatically granted access to participate in the community’s decision making through the Aragon Voice dapp:
The meritocratic structure of the community implies that hard work is rewarded by letting long-term contributors have a larger impact on the governing rules. The more $ELIMU tokens they amass from their sustained contributions, the more impact they will have in the votes.
Based on the outcome of the votes, we update the community’s strategies, milestones and action planning in our GitHub Wiki. Token holders also govern funds in the DAO treasury and funds received from donors.
What Exactly Is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)?
For someone new to blockchain technology, it can be hard to grasp the concept at first; Anything that is added to the blockchain is publicly available and cannot be modified, and therefore it can be trusted by two transacting parties without having to rely on an intermediary (e.g. a bank). And the history of all these records is distributed openly to a large amount of machines, making it decentralized.
This world-spanning and ever-growing blockchain can be used for a variety of purposes. One is transferring value (cryptocurrency). Another usage is adding entire organizations to it (using what is called smart contracts).
A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) is one example of these types of organizations.
One good way to explain it is that a DAO is internet-native and without any central management:
This makes DAOs well suited for coordinating a global set of participants around a common mission.
The Future of elimu.ai & Aragon
We are excited to use Aragon’s technology to organize our work around providing disadvantaged children with access to quality basic education.
Now that we have Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) at our disposal, we can more easily organize ourselves in a way that is fully global, open and transparent. Thank you, Aragon! 🙌
About the elimu.ai Community
For more information about our work, see https://github.com/elimu-ai/wiki/blob/main/README.md.
