ETHAnglia - 0 to web3

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  • Project Name: ETHAnglia - 0 to web3
  • Team Name: ETHAnglia
  • Payment Address: ETHAnglia.eth
  • [Level]: :seedling:-Seed

Project Overview :page_facing_up:

If this application is in response to an RFP, please indicate this on the first line of this section.

If this is an application for retroactive funding (i.e. work that is completed and committed into a codebase), please drop any related PRs in this section.

Overview

0 to web3 will support those from disadvantage, or poorer backgrounds gain an opportunity to learn to code and contribute to web3.

Starting with our full stack web development course, students will progress to our web3 bootcamp, and with our support into a role within web3.

We feel, with support from Radicle, we can introduce Radicle to new entrants into development to the collaborative coding functionality that Radicle delivers.

Education is incredibly important to our founding team, we have been fortunate enough through community support to receive education that has driven us to seek out opportunities to support others. This project allows us to continually drive opportunity.

Team :busts_in_silhouette:

Team members

  • James Adams (Project Lead)
  • Timothy Smith
  • Dom Davis

Contact

Legal Structure

  • Registered Address: Tech Educators Ltd., Kiln House, Pottergate, NR2 1DX, United Kingdom
  • Registered Legal Entity: Tech Educators Ltd.

Team’s experience

James Adams

James has been supporting Tech Educators as part of the Akcela incubator since its inception. James takes an operational lead, working alongside partners to deliver the course syllabus, as well as commercial aspects of partnerships and the talent pool. James is a co-founder of ETHAnglia, who have a mission of developing the adoption, education and use of web3 in the East of England.

Dom Davis

Dom brings decades of industry experience from a variety of areas. He has given training courses to companies and governments around the world, as well as putting together training syllabuses for multi-billion dollar organisations. Dom has been involved in startups and scale up tech companies and is an alumni of TechStars.

Tim Smith

Tim brings years of development experience, and an understanding of the bootcamp process from both sides of the table. As lead instructor he forms the main point of contact for the students, and liaison with our partners to provide the best courses possible.

The team have previously applied for and received community funding from Ethereum Foundation, Polygon and Unlock Protocol

Team Code Repos

https://bitbucket.org/idomdavis/

Team LinkedIn Profiles (if available)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescharlesadams/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/domdavis/

Project Description :page_facing_up:

The cost of education is incredibly high when trying to take a structured course to gain traction in coding and web3. As we continue to build in web3, we require individuals from diverse backgrounds and those that may not have taken to traditional education routes. Working collboratively with employers in the web3 space, we feel once we create a talent pipeline into web3, we can leverage an additive community where employers don’t play recruiters a fee, but pay it forward to code academies to continue a perpetual education model.

Deliverables :nut_and_bolt:

Please list the deliverables of the project in as much detail as possible. Please also estimate the amount of work required and try to divide the project into meaningful milestones.

  • Total Estimated Duration: 30 weeks
  • Full-time equivalent (FTE): 80
  • Total Costs: 50,000

:exclamation:The more you can organize your milestones into manageable chunks that are conducive to iteration, the better!

Milestone 1

  • Estimated Duration: 14 Weeks
  • FTE: 5
  • Costs: 5000
Number Deliverable Specification
1. Cohort Creation During this time the team will work to reach out to thise who require support to get into web3 coding. This will include a number of outreach programmes through local jobseekers, running 101 courses to define if candidates are capable and willing to delve deeper into coding (this stops people signing up, taking a potential space and not completing) and learning more about coding.

Milestone 2

  • Estimated Duration: 11 Weeks
  • FTE: 55
  • Costs: 30000
Number Deliverable Specification
1. Full Stack Bootcamp During this milestone, students will learn 102: Intro to Software Development, 201: Foundations of Software Development and 301: Intermediate Software Development. By the end of this course, the students will be capable to move onto our web3 bootcamp.

Milestone 3

  • Estimated Duration: 3 Weeks
  • FTE: 15
  • Costs: 10000
Number Deliverable Specification
1. web3 Bootcamp During this milestone, students will a range of implementations on blockchain technologies, from introduction to blockchain technologies, through to dApp creation and projects.

Milestone 3

  • Estimated Duration: 8 Weeks
  • FTE: 5
  • Costs: 5000
Number Deliverable Specification
1. Partner EcoSystem Providers During this milestone, which will run concurrently with milestone two and three, our team will reach out and begin placements with web3 companies hiring, on the basis that their hiring “fee” is actually creating a new bootcamp space for another member of the community joining. Paying it forward for other companies in the space, and creating a sustainable solution for talent creation moving forward where the educators create the talent and companies pay it forward to future talent creation.

Future Plans

Please include the following:

  • Our team are fully committed to this project, we have agreed the syllabus required to deliver this from two global leaders in bootcamp delivery and sought out and integrated a tutor to deliver the project. We are supported and supporters of our local developer communities, with support from other projects like Ethereum in delivering the web2 to web3 bootcamp.
  • The team’s long-term plan has always been to create a sustainable talent pipeline that allows more individuals to understand and create a future career in web3. Whilst the web2 to web3 concept gets us talent today. Working on a sustainable pipeline that puts talent and employers together, builds long term relationships and opportunities. We feel that this is an excellent way to develop, hire and promote web3 and web3 developers.

Additional Information :heavy_plus_sign:

How did you hear about the Grants Program? Twitter

The team have a long history of experience in education and community building in web3.

We have received and are working closely with the Ethereum Foundation, Polygon and Unlock on community building for the wider ecosystem, now we are looking to implement the sustainable talent development model.

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Feb 4 Call Notes

Sharing notes that we had on Discord together

Radicle Grants Questions

  1. Can you go over the “pay it forward” model a bit more?

Current model:

  • Pinching approach: if you want a dev today, you want to recruit someone who already has a job and just “poach” them from elsewhere. We’re just pinching talent from the “middle” of the funnel. Does not address the start of the funnel.
  • Fees: 10-15% of recruit’s salary goes to recruiter, thus getting out of the entire educational ecosystem

Proposed model:

  • Fees: 10-15% of recruits salary goes to educating new talent, thus keeping funds within the educational ecosystem
  1. How do you organize your bootcamp?

2 bootcamps:

  1. Full stack bootcamp
  • 101 - can I code: high drop-off rate (80%+)
  • 102 - html, css, javascript, variables, conditionals, GitHub, etc.
  • 201 - 4 week program; html, css, javascript, variables, conditionals, GitHub, etc.
  • 301 - intermediate software development (css, javascript, react)
  • web3 bootcamp - transition from 301 to web3
  1. Do you have any other funding?
  • Ethereum Foundation: They help with the 2.0 - 3.0 part of the funnel including a 4-week bootcamp (middle of the funnel recruitment; lots of experience).
  1. How have you designed your curriculum?

Licensed from:

So all content is licensed and they handle all the logistics and teaching

  1. How do you screen people?
  • Aptitude: must pass the 101
  • Attitude: must show interest in 101
  1. How many people are you trying to get into your first cohort for
  • 9 students
  • This would be post drop-off that we’d see from the 101 (usually 20-30% drop-off). So they’d likely start with 50-60 people, but end up with 9 getting through.
  1. How are you thinking about sustaining this?
  • Fees (10-15% recruitment fees that feed back to education; see above)
  1. Are any milestones concurrent?
  • Milestone 1: standalone milestone
  • Milestone 2: standalone milestone
  • Milestone 3: standalone milestone
  • Milestone 4: concurrent with all of the above (they want to get hiring companies involved as soon as possible in the process)

Questions from ETHAnglia

  1. How is CI/CD working?

Big issue is not having CI/CD, hooks, etc.

  1. What is scheduling looking like?
  • Milestone 1/4: most immediate payment would be 2000 USDC (20% of the combined 10,000 USDC of Milestone 1+4)
  • Milestone 2: can be voted on once Milestone 1 is complete
  • Milestone 3: can be voted on once Milestone 2 is complete

Other Info

EthLondon

1 Like
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(4) - Education

We handle the teaching - we licence the material. Our teacher (Tim) and senior (Dom) are currently working with both providers to gain a thorough understanding of the course for delivery.

(6) retention rate is 20-30% - at 101 - minimal thereafter. For clarity, drop off is 70%.

(7) Sustainability

Recruiter fees usually 10 -20%. Start back end loaded. Move to up front course Payne t, interview, bootcamp and nurture model

4

One risk I’d like to mitigate with this sort of work - education in general - is:

What happens if this project/work initially flops? How can we make sure that it can be salvaged or picked up by someone else and continued later?

One great solution for this is documentation. That can be documentation around curriculum, how classes are run, etc.

Would it be possible to find a way to add this into one of the current milestones? Or create another milestone?

I’d basically like some forcing function (i.e. something in writing) that you will hold yourselves accountable for making this work documented.

Documentation also helps with scaling. The better the work is documented, the easier it is for you to pass it on to people in other cities, countries, etc.

So I think adding this as a line item here would kill several birds with one stone.

1 Like
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Please see updated Milestone 1 - this was probably overlooked on our part. Great catch and thank you for raising.

Milestone 1

  • Estimated Duration: 14 Weeks
  • FTE: 5
  • Costs: 5000
Number Deliverable Specification
1. Cohort Creation During this time the team will work to reach out to thise who require support to get into web3 coding. This will include a number of outreach programmes through local jobseekers, running 101 courses to define if candidates are capable and willing to delve deeper into coding (this stops people signing up, taking a potential space and not completing) and learning more about coding.
2. Document Creation Documentation throughout this phase will form a public good approach to the following strategies and main headlines within the project. This will include, but not limited to, Mission Statement, Market, Go To Market Strategy, Cohort Creation Strategies, Stakeholder Engagement, Course Syllabus, Syllabus Partnerships, Partnership Curation, Outcome Evaluation, Student Feedback, Bridging Support into employment
6

Thanks for the quick turnaround on this!

1 Like
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Yes sorry, was already part of the overall strategy - primarily for our own roadmap and requirement, but we would like this approach to become a widespread . Hence the public nature of the documentation.

8

Also note update for feedback loop on documentation on milestone 4.

Milestone 4

  • Estimated Duration: 8 Weeks
  • FTE: 5
  • Costs: 5000
Number Deliverable Specification
1. Partner EcoSystem Providers During this milestone, which will run concurrently with milestone two and three, our team will reach out and begin placements with web3 companies hiring, on the basis that their hiring “fee” is actually creating a new bootcamp space for another member of the community joining. Paying it forward for other companies in the space, and creating a sustainable solution for talent creation moving forward where the educators create the talent and companies pay it forward to future talent creation.
2. Documentation feedback loop Update documentation to include learnings, strategy updates, best practice findings, next steps
9

We’re not open to funding this grant at this time.

High level feedback is the following:

  1. A general purpose web3 curriculum is out of scope for the Radicle Grants program.
  2. Given the broad/vague curriculum, the 50-week timeline is very long. We’d likely only want to really focus funding on a single module within the curriculum and we don’t see a specific part of the curriculum that specifically interests us right now (see note below on future ideas).
  3. The scope of the program itself is hyperlocalized (one region of the world + ~10 students at a time). This means the project has very low accessibility. It’s not as “open source” as we’d like to see.

In the interim:

  • We would recommend to continue reaching out to grants programs that are more broadly funding tech education.

In terms of working together, we may be open to funding this once:

  • It gains more traction. By traction, we specifically mean: addressing accessibility in terms of scaling it beyond a single region and building some self-serve element that allows more than ~10 students at a time.
  • A module of your curriculum is more focused + related to Radicle. For example, having a specific module in the curriculum that focuses on code collaboration within open source work generally. Or specifically using Radicle. Keep in mind, this likely means any funding we would do here would be more focused, and therefor likely much smaller than the 50,000 USDC mentioned here.

For now, it is a “no” from us. But please reach out if you think there is a more focused point we can help out with. This definitely seems like a valuable project and you guys are very clearly super keen and thoughtful about building opportunities for others.

10

Thank you so much for the opportunity to promote and discuss this with you. It was a good to review internally and we found it a good process. Hopefully others looking to do something similar will gain something at least from our outline :slight_smile:

To the points raised, just for wider clarification on future readers to distil the project.

  1. It isn’t a project aimed at building a cirriculum, the costs are for time to build a developer ecosystem which becomes self funding in the future. The costs outlined are for time to train developers. The ciriculum is already built by CodeFellows and ChainShot.
  2. The view is that these developers, moving into jobs in web3 as part of the ecosystem creation, would be taught from the very start using and pushing to Radicle.
  3. Agreed, the open-source element would come from the documentation build. Not the program and its cohort.

Thank you once again for the opprortunity to promote and put forward our project. The time to speak on the Discord and being a part of the process. We look forward to continuing to be a part of the community.