Jan 27, 2022
Humans of the Open Web Sandbox: Anastasiia
A series on humans currently and previously involved with OWS.
Anastasiia has been around the Open Web Sandbox since its first months. She is an integral part of the OWS team, single-handedly managing all of their project relations. However Anastasiia’s background is not what you expect.
Setting up for the unknown.
Ana is from Moscow, Russia. Her interests are in cinematography and literature. But she doesn’t mind a bit of yoga and sewing. Her favourite era is 90s cinema: La Haine, Trainspotting, and all those other neo-noir, black comedy crime films that came out that decade.
Apart from her cultural interests, Ana completed a Bachelor of Philosophy in Moscow to absorb all those philosophical cognitive attributes that they tell you ‘teach you how to think’.
From Corporate to Web3.
She used those skills at a digital advertising company for a few years, making banners, videos, and digital content for medical, business, and fashion brands. But the clients and corporate structure did not really excite her.
She needed a new divergence, one that would help her apply those philosophical attributes to something less cognitive, pragmatic, but equally stimulating. Her move was to move to Italy to study political science, read Italian literature and watch every Fellini film. This was more of a ‘do now ask questions later’ move, but thats what somehow gets the ball rolling, right?
From one thing to another, Anastasiia got to know Valentina — OWS’s IT Wizard — during her time in Italy. Valentina urged Ana to look into blockchain, past the financial and computer scientific part, and into a career path toward Web3 technologies. This certainly got the ball rolling.
She became passionate about the social and political applications of Web3, finally making sense of her broad background: philosophical concerns against big corporations, applied to a geo-political reality of oligopolies and political misconduct, require pragmatic structural solutions, and Web3 seemed to her like the most promising candidate.
While these are big picture concerns for Ana, she still decided to turn her full professional attention to Web3, leading her into landing a job with OWS during its early incubation period.
The OWS story begins.
OWS began as a team of people looking for others to join the Web3 space by offering blockchain related opportunities within the NEAR ecosystem. A large part of that is to try and match the perfect person with the perfect opportunity. Her position is just that — project manager for OWS. Her experience in digital media and management is a valuable asset for OWS.
This is how she helps with project management; implementing timelines, structure and processes, and be effective at project relations. She highlights how the team is wonderful to work with, and the tens of people she meets through the projects excite her about the future of the ecosystem. Within the broader sphere you can reach out to anybody and anybody can reach out to you.
The future is NEAR, or OWS.
Her plan for the year is to help develop and build a new OWS Career Path so that contributors are clear on how to participate for all parts of the process: education, training, and opportunity. OWS is an important bumper zone for new comers and must be developed as such as the audience increases. She imagines the unknowingness of stepping into the NEAR ecosystem and hopes to make this easier for new comers.
After university (but not only) people struggle to find work and to gain work experience, the classic experience-without-experience loop. Companies like NEAR and OWS can aid this transition, by creating and assisting with educational content in conjunction to vocational opportunities.
On one hand, Ana passively hopes others in the Web3 space will move away from its narcissistic financial side and toward a more altruistic one.
On the other hand, Ana actively hopes to find a Web3 topic worth of intellectual analysis for her politics thesis, as she nevertheless remains adamant and bullish about its revolutionary potential.
She highlights her close relationship to her mother and the continual struggle of explaining to her what it is that she does.
Stay updated for future events by following us on Twitter and don’t hesitate to ask questions on our Discord. If you miss any of our events, watch them anytime on our YouTube channel.
Written by Jacopo Nuti, a proponent of a Philosophy of Blockchain.
