Decentralized Futures: Introducing Diogo Mendonça.

Polkadot at Universities

Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA) is an intensive program to teach students about Blockchain and Polkadot. However, this program happens in person one or two times a year in specific universities around the world, making it difficult for students from other universities to attend.

Polkadot at Universities seeks to provide similar content to PBA in undergraduate computer science courses, in a one semester discipline(s), tailored for the specific curriculum of the university.

The lead on this initiative is Diogo Mendonça, Ph.D., a Computer Science (CS) Professor, and former Web 3 Foundation grants evaluator, who has evaluated more than 90 milestone deliveries of Polkadot Ecosystem projects.

Diogo will start by analyzing the curriculum of undergraduate courses in computer science of the university and identify which parts of the PBA curriculum are already covered by disciplines, and which are not. This mapping will provide a foundation for a course syllabus, with the content that will be covered, teaching approach, and planning for the discipline. The content will then be scheduled, prepared and delivered to the students. At the end of the course, they will produce a report with the students and grades achieved in the discipline and the lessons learned from the experience of teaching it.

The long term goal for this project is that it can be used as a model by other universities to deliver Polkadot content at the university level, and even become a Bounty program open to any university professor to apply to.

Project Milestone Deliveries On-Demand Evaluation

In addition to Polkadot for Universities, Diogo will begin building out an​​ on-demand outsourced evaluation team

The Polkadot ecosystem has many opportunities for funding, such as grants, treasury, bounties, etc. These funding opportunities organize projects into milestones and the progress of the projects is measured by evaluating the scope and quality of milestone deliveries.

Each funding program has its team of evaluators with a fixed capacity for the task. However, the moment of delivery is upon each project, which could lead sometimes to peak demand for evaluations making it difficult to achieve the Service-Level Agreement (SLA) for that. Furthermore, some evaluations take more time than others, making it difficult to precisely predict the capacity needed for evaluating the milestone deliveries of the projects of a funding program.

Diogo has proposed a flexible way to increase the capacity of evaluating milestone deliveries by having an on-demand outsourced evaluation team. This concept exists today in the grants program and is called external evaluations. However, in the grants program, external evaluators are paid a fixed amount per evaluation, which could lead to a predilection for easy milestone delivery evaluations and low-quality evaluations.

The plan is to establish a continuous and long-term partnership with the Polkadot ecosystem to provide quality control services to the projects supported by its funding programs. The team will evaluate milestones and projects provenient from grants, treasury, bounties, microgrants, and other funding programs that eventually will be created. The team will also manage parts of funding programs or selected funding initiatives such as microgrants and bounties. Funding initiatives from the Polkadot ecosystem are growing and becoming more decentralized, and this program would be an opportunity to decentralize its management as well.

You can follow Diogo’s progress on Github and learn more about these initiatives at our next X space on Wednesday Feb 7th at 4pm CET.