45B - Marlowe workshops for non-tech builders of diverse backgrounds. Simple hands-on learning of Cardano Smart Contracts.

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Pedro Lucas

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

lucas@45b.io

Additional applicants

45B team - https://45b.io

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

12

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

No dependencies

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

Project will be fully open source.

[METADATA] Category of proposal

Education

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Marlowe is a ground-breaking tool in the user experience it brings to Cardano. Especially for something as Smart Contract development, that can be seen as a huge difficulty for projects to overcome in developing. Marlowe shines in enabling non-tech builders to access a robust Smart Contract technology [for prototyping or cost-effective].

However, a very small number of developers from learning/developing communities (e.g. Gimbalabs) are truly familiar with Marlowe, and seriously consider it when planning a project.

This is due to lack of familiarity with the technology and lack of proximity with communities that are Marlowe-centric and available to support.

We propose to run cohorts of online workshop-based courses that will provide a space to experiment with Marlowe and get to know it using terminology relatable from our daily lives. Demystifying acronyms and initial concepts to common sense language, while extending options to learn more.

We will reach out to teaching communities and web2 or web3 development entities from other blockchains, to promote that they come build in a simpler way. Also there are many financial and business areas where although a specialist of that area won’t be single-handedly taking a solution to production, they can greatly benefit of Marlowe for prototyping use cases on the Marlowe Playground

We will go over real use cases, discuss possibilities and even debate with guest lecturers from the IOG Marlowe team, who are available to support and discuss with our learners.

The results of our workshops will be fully shared for other to learn on their own time, plus learner project debriefs depublished as blog posts for easy reference and to build upon.

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

This proposal will very directly respond to the question:

“How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst? 

With the documented an collaborative workshops approach we propose, plus the relationship between communities that it will generate, we specifically align with the challenge’s Potential Directions of “Knowledge base & Documentation” and “Collaborative structures”

This proposal will make it easier for people specialized in finance, business, logistics, and other non-technical backgrounds to create smart contracts. By creating content tailored to them, we increase adoption and lower the barrier of entry to work with Cardano.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

Success for this training project will be measured in diverse ways:

• Quantity of sign-ups
• Tech level of applicants - should be introductory
• Attendance of the sessions
• Survey the learners to quantify their experience
• Assess between trainers and document what worked and what didn’t
• To provide feedback to next cohort or courses
• Learner projects completed and debriefed 
• Social media interaction, blog posts and content produced sharing outcomes and learnings

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

45B and the partners of this project agree to share the initiative and it’s outputs (detailed at the end of the [CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] proposal section) via:

• 45B’s social media (e.g. learners projects close-out blog posts)
• IOG / Marlowe social media
• Catalyst community
• Gimbalabs community
• Any relevant partnerships formed during this project

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

45B’s Pedro Lucas is an experienced trainer with 20y in IT and 10y as a Technical Business Analyst (bridging technical and non-technical teams). He ran Cardano for non-techs workshops weekly for three months, onboarding end-users to Cardano and experimented with bridging that format to Portuguese. The initiative also resulted in a Cardano Sin Tecnisismos spin-off to Spanish, by Roberto Mayen. 

The goal of this project is not to dive into the technicalities of end-to-end taking a Marlowe solution to Production, but on the contrary to take builders through a use case approach of understanding the flow of events that happen in simple Smart Contract use cases. We have the ideal team to keep things at this level with accessible language.

This proposal will include limited advisory and mentorship from the IOG Marlowe team. Furthermore we will articulate with Gimbalabs for any technical support, plus Cardano Beam developers, who have hands-on experience with Marlowe.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

of this project are:

• Highlight how simple yet robust Marlowe can be
• Interact with the broader community
• Use Marlowe as a flagship to bring devs and non-techs from web2 and other blockchains to build on Cardano
• Help learners create their own projects
• Interact with existing Cardano learning communities coming from diverse languages
• Facilitate that Marlowe as a solution becomes a commonly known alternative for projects and is always considered as the best cost-effective solution for developers, especially for a prototyping stage.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

Stage 1: Promotion and gathering sign-ups - 1 month

• Identify communities in Cardano and elsewhere to captivate for this training
• Development organizations developing Web2 financial/business solutions
• Communities teaching the development of smart contracts through other languages
• Organize a workgroup and coordinate session timings

Stage 2: Workshops for background knowledge leveling - 3 sessions

• Review or introduce Cardano Concepts 
• E.g. Wallets, transactions, UTxOs
• Practical Blockchain concepts
• E.g. Blocks, Staking, Confirmations
• Using dApps and other tools and aspects
• E.g. Hands on experimentation, knowing NFTs
• Time for questions, experimentation, and catching up with each other

Stage 3: Introduction to Marlowe - 2 sessions

• Function on Smart Contracts in dApps
• Understanding Payment vs Contract addresses by using them
• Marlowe vs the typical solutions
• Playground vs IDE
• Easy UI to simulate running contracts
• Marlowe Playground tutorials by IOG Marlowe team
• Contents from IOG documentation "Marlowe Playground tutorials” https://docs.marlowe.iohk.io/tutorials/videos#marlowe-playground-tutorials
• Playground, Blockly, Main tools, First contact and your first contract
• Time for questions, experimentation, and catching up with each other

Stage 4: Deconstructing Marlowe use cases - 5 sessions

• Marlowe: Financial contracts on blockchain
• Contents from https://docs.marlowe.iohk.io/tutorials/videos#marlowe-financial-contracts-on-blockchain
• [some practical examples to select]
• Learning by doing and exploring
• Running the examples hands-on
• Deconstructing the observed examples and documenting them with flow diagrams
• Time for questions, experimentation, and catching up with each other
• Learners will be incentivized to experiment tweaking and building asynchronously
• Guest lecturer to discuss building Financial use cases 

Stage 5: Building a use case together - 2 session

• An example will be provided and built with cycles of discussion and hands-on

Stage 6: Prototyping your own idea - 6 sessions

• Discuss learners ideas for projects to build; Distribute a diverse set of projects, possibly team up some learners
• Wireframe ideas, drafting flow diagrams, presenting and discussing with the group
• Sessions where learners are invited to build asynchronous and we focus on one project per session
• Final project presentations by each learner/team; Using each other’s prototypes
• Guest lecturer from the IOG Marlowe team to openly discuss learnings and possibilities

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

The deliverables, for this proposal are:

• To run 18 1,5 hour-long online workshops per 6-8 people cohort
• Teach 40 different non-tech and users how to use Marlowe
• Provide free public access to all the workshops
• Publish recordings videos of the workshops
• Open-source repositories with all the resources related to each workshop
• New example of Marlowe use cases based on attendees personal projects

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Promotion, content and administrative time

$45/hr x 30hrs x 5 cohorts = $6 750

Workshop sessions time

$60/hr x 18 sessions x 1,5hr/session x 5 cohorts = $8 100

Total $14 850 at $0.30/ADA = 49 500 ADA

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

There is a huge potential in proving that Marlowe is something unique for the development of web3 solutions. Facilitating the greater adoption of Marlowe with this kind of trainings will represent planting seeds in whole industries and for example the finance sector, where usually the professionals that understand processes would not dare pick up coding their automation themselves.

The training budget is according to or bellow standard rates for specialized trainers in Europe or the USA.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept