Onboarding Turkish students through Workshops

[GENERAL] Name and Surname of Main Applicant

Oussama Amir

[GENERAL] Email address of Main Applicant

oussama.amir@sabanciuni.edu

Additional Applicants

N/A

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

6

[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 outputs 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.

We aim to organize 6 Workshops in 3 major cities in 6 of the best universities in Turkey. The workshops aim to achieve the following:

• Introduce the Cardano Blockchain.
• Make the case for why Caradno is worth using or developing on.
• Introduce the Cardano user ecosystem (wallets, dapps, NFTs,...)
• Introduce the Cardano Dev ecosystem (Plutus, Marlowe, Aiken, Mesh, Demeter,... )
• Onboard some students to well-known educational communities (Swarm, Gimbalabs,...)
• Provide a path for students from learning Cardano development and ecosystem to Catalyst funding and beyond.

To maximize attendance, we aim to provide free meals and NFTs at the end of each event.

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

The proposed solution addresses the challenge because:

• The solution is a set of workshops for students at universities.
• The workshops will be held by a team of students.
• The workshops aim to encourage students to start building on Cardano.
• The workshops introduce students to outlines and resources to go from zero to a funded proposer on Catalyst, based on previous success stories in the Cardano ecosystem (i.e. Ales Berry, Patrick Tobler)

Our solution will make Cardano more popular amongst students in Turkey which has one of the largest pools of engineers in the world. Our workshops will start with a general overview showing how to set up a wallet, buy an NFT, exchange tokens,...

Later in the workshop, we will introduce more technical and educational resources for students interested in development.

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

We aim to track the success of our workshops by the following metrics:

• Number of attendees per university.
• Total number of attendees.
• The total number of universities visited.
• The number of students that follow the communities we will recommend (Swarm, Gimbalabs, ...)
• The average score from the final knowledge quiz we will hold at the end of every workshop.

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

Our plan is to hold one workshop per month. At most a week after each workshop, we plan to share the following:

• The number of attendees.
• Full or partial recordings of the event. (depending on the length of the event)

After the workshops are completed. We will share a report where we outline the following details:

• Number of attendees per university.
• Total number of attendees.
• The total number of universities visited.
• The average score from the final knowledge quiz we will hold at the end of every workshop.
• Overview of the videos posted in our socials from the events

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

Oussama Amir PhD student at Sabanci University, EE department / Catalyst PA since F4 / Catalyst Swarm community member / SingularityNet Ambassador / Member of the Sabanci Blockchain club.

Gledis Zeneli / Bilkent University Alumni / Distributed systems engineer @ Microsoft

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

The main goal of this project can be summarized in two points:

• Maximize the number of attendees in each university.
• Maximize the retention of information by attendees in each workshop.

We aim to achieve our goals by doing the following:

• Work with Blockchain clubs in every university to market the event properly.
• Provide meals and prizes at the end of each event.
• Make an event quiz at the end which will encourage attendees to pay attention.
• Give ADA prizes to winners of the quiz contest.

[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.

We define each milestone to be one university visited where the workshop will be held. The current list of the universities we plan to visit is:

• Milestone 1: Sabanci University (Istanbul) - Expected attendees 40 - Expected to take place at the end of October
• Milestone 2: Koç University (Istanbul) - Expected attendees 40 - Expected to take place at the end of November
• Milestone 3: Istanbul University (Istanbul) - Expected attendees 120 - Expected to take place at the end of December
• Milestone 4: Bilkent University (Ankara) - Expected attendees 70 - Expected to take place at the end of January
• Milestone 5: Hacetepe University (Ankara) - Expected attendees 85 - Expected to take place at the end of Febuary
• Milestone 6: Dokuz Eylül University (Izmir) - Expected attendees 100 - Expected to take place at the end of March

(The number of expected attendees is calculated based on the size of the Blockchain club in each university.)

The specified timeline for each milestone is a month as a maximum, starting from the first month after we get a positive result from Catalyst. This means that if our proposal is successful we will get the results on the 21 September, we start planning for our first workshop starting in October and we have our first workshop by the end of October. The process is repeated at the beginning of each month.

For each university workshop, we will do the following: (Each milestone starts at the beginning of the month)

• Preparation of the event and collaboration with the host university and preparation of the event site. (Beginning of the month)
• Marketing of the event, social media campaign, and school announcements. (Middle of the month after confirming with authorities)
• Hosting and cohosting of the event and travel preparations. (End of the month)
• Preparing prizes for the winners of the quiz event.
• Preparing pizza and drinks for attendees.

At the end of each month, the community can expect a full report including details about the held event, recording from the event, and other KPIs mentioned before.

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

Since each milestone is a visit to a university, the outcomes that we aim for from every milestone are the same:

• Maximizing attendance, and learning from each event to improve the next one.
• Measuring the knowledge level of each audience and basing the workshop on that data.
• Onboarding as many people as possible.

The community will be able to measure that through our reports which include:

• Anonymized lists of the participants.
• Videos from the event.
• Follow-up poll results.
• Social media interactions summary.

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

Each milestone is a Workshop done at a university, and the steps to make each event are quite similar. Hence we present a model for the budget of one event. We start by breaking down the budget for each event:

• Marketing of the event, social media campaign, and school announcements (10hrs) - 100 ada/hr
• Preparation of the event and collaboration with the host university and preparation of the event site, recording equipment rental (20 hrs) - 100 ada/hr
• Hosting and cohosting of the event and travel expenses (2* 5 hrs) - 100 ada\hr
• Prizes for 10 scorers of the quiz - 50 each
• Pizza and drinks for the attendees - 500 ada

Total budget per event = 5000

Budget for documenting all events and reporting to Catalyst and to the community and editing the videos taken: 5000 ada

Total budget = 5000*6 + 5000 = 35000 ada

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

It is quite a tedious job to attempt to market to builders to adopt your technology, and Cardano is facing this difficulty currently. A simple marketing campaign on social media or through influencers is often not enough. Making a workshop specifically for students in leading Turkish universities assures that Cardano's name is at least familiar to a large population of future engineers and influential individuals in the country. Furthermore, getting even a couple of developers to get involved in Catalyst after these workshops is a huge win. The community can easily grow from there when onboarded individuals start onboarding others. This is exactly how Cardano started, there were no Instagram, Youtube, or Twitter ads.

[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