# Balkanize Learn2Earn - Educating & Financing the Next Batch of Web3 Developers in the Balkans

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 10:16
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-1K9m_wUhdBw
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K9m_wUhdBw

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/balkanize-learn2earn-educating-and-financing-the-next-batch-of-web3-developers-in-the-balkans/

The next iteration of “the web” is not going to build itself - and people in developing countries are not going to participate in this (r)evolution without some guidance and financial support. 
See what can be achieved by handing out scholarships to students in developing countries and guiding them in their learning process towards becoming proficient in the web3 ecosystem.

Speaker(s): Denis Vuckovac
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: education,scholarship

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Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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## Transcript

foreign [Music] thanks for coming uh welcome to my talk balkanize Learn to Earn so let's start with some Universal truths that we can hopefully all agree on um number one some countries are poorer than others and frankly some countries are probably just poor often we call them developing countries number two although markets have been doing not that great lately I think some of you might still have made some money number three some people or if we're being honest actually most people especially in these developing countries they're lacking awareness of this whole web free space but at the same time we need more web free literacy and we actually need more web free Developers so now let me actually introduce myself hello GM buenos dias um this is me hello uh my name is uh Dennis or Dennis which God I was born in 1998 in former Yugoslavia today's Bosnia I moved to Germany in 92. at the beginning of the war lived there most of my life and then uh 2014 I actually moved to Switzerland for a PhD I studied industrial engineering had like a focus on energy economics worked a bit and then did this PhD at eth Zurich we have a focus on machine learning eth Zurich is like the Technical University in Switzerland it's not affiliated with ethereum or the ethereum foundation I then worked as a data scientist last stop was at eBay left uh that position at the end of last year and um yeah I'm now with this little project that goes under the name enot.io and I'm also a partner at very early Ventures like an early stage Venture fund um I've been involved in this crypto space for a few years now this is my second def con first one was in Prague I did this weird thing in 2018 where we built like a Bitcoin client in Python from scratch and I'm a quite regular user of Dune analytics for all sorts of like on chain data analytics these things together with my background will become somewhat relevant to the actual design or architecture of the program okay now let's dive into some local truths um Bosnia the place that I'm from it's probably safe to say that it was hardest hit during the wars in the 90s it's still ethnically quite divided youth unemployment rates are quite High think until recently the numbers were around like 60 65 percent they claim they're lower now if the numbers are true then I think it's mostly because people are emigrating to the West and at the same time the GDP per capita is around 5K US Dollars like 400 USD per month would that would translate into 400 USD per month average salary uh which is not that much interestingly if you look at it on like purchasing power parity basis it's a factor 3x higher that basically just means that life there is quite cheap uh students there usually have a strong theoretical basis they often lack opportunities for practical experience and when they get practical experience they often end up choosing like a weird text deck or some outdated Technologies that's kind of a little bit of my opinion though okay now let's look into some hopefully generalizable Solutions I am of the opinion that with guidance incentives and arbitraging this purchasing power parity uh you can achieve quite a big impact both for these people but also for our whole industry what does that mean guiding basically um telling people what they need to learn and how they acquire these skills then incentivizing by mapping this learning this is the Learn to Earn component mapping the learning to some monthly income and then the purchasing power parity Arbitrage which basically means funneling money from a place where a beer costs seven euros to a place where a beer is one Euro doesn't mean the people have to spend it on beer but it's just my personal Big Mac index um and I think through that you can achieve quite quite High leverage good type of Leverage so that's the theory what does it look like in practice I currently have eight students in this first batch in Bosnia and Serbia they're aged 20 to 25 years they have a background in computer science or physics either final year students or graduates they receive 150 Euros per US dollar per month per student they're supposed to learn like a machine learning track blockchain training as well the learning is outsourced I'm not doing that myself I think I'm lacking the patience for that but the projects are in-house I'm making sure that they learned what they were supposed to learn the expected duration is like 9 to 12 months currently they're about to enter the third month for more information you can see inert.io scholarship with a few funny pictures and only quickly let's look into the curriculum or the timeline what are the students actually learning I mentioned they usually have a computer science background they did some Java maybe some JavaScript some front-end development that then transition into python mastering the libraries that are essential for data science and machine learning numpy pandas then first level we're actually doing machine learning and because every data scientist or machine learning engineer ends up spending quite a lot of time with SQL I make them use Dune analytics to actually work with real world data which is quite useful for me as well because I don't have to yeah host any fake data and then eventually in the next uh modules or levels the students will be interacting with the web free python Library I'll make them do what I had to do like re-implement uh Bitcoin from scratch uh in Python and then eventually we'll be going into smart contract development um okay um what's next covertis well uh a minor point it would be nice if we got like some more crypto native remittance currently it's still revolute transferwise but there's just no local economy for the students to to do anything with usdc A4 or whatever big question is what is this becoming will this be an education Ponce or will there be like income sharing agreements at some point to to fund next Generations all open questions but the most important thing and that's kind of why I'm here is to spread the word and make people that are interested are in a similar position uh copy pasta uh not just code but uh maybe even this type of setup where you can guide and incentivize and support people in other places and hopefully push them into uh yeah this web free space big Vision it's written here it's years decades centuries maybe a way who knows maybe not um yeah that's it thank you a really good talk I I would like to ask you how or yeah how do you think you can incentivize investors into getting into the Dao to have more scholarships um yeah that's a good question I think my deliberate Choice was initially to just do it myself don't do any outside funding next steps might be to talk with some of the organizations that are here you know Giver for talent protocol I've already spoken with a few of them maybe that's like the leanest or easiest way uh I guess any investor funded approach yeah might be related to just investing in in talent that eventually would work for you uh Germany Switzerland they both have like this apprenticeship culture which essentially is like uh you you got young people and you're um paying them to to become actually productive uh workers so I could imagine something like this working now this would be very tight to a company if we get this income sharing thing I mean I like to think about these ideas but I think that's still a philosophical conversations but