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Polkadot Blockchain Academy - retroactive funding for wave 3 of the Academy held at UC Berkeley this Summer.
On behalf of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA) I am posting this treasury proposal for retroactive funding for the third wave of the Academy.
The Polkadot Blockchain Academy at UC Berkeley ran from July 10th to August 10th 2023, in partnership with the Berkeley RDI centre. The program educated 75 students, 55 developer track students and 20 students went through the pilot of the founders track syllabus. The goal of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy is to help speed the adoption of Polkadot by seeding the ecosystem with educated developers and aspiring Polkadot ecosystem team founders. Currently we offer in person education such as the course held at UC Berkeley, we are also creating online content and have recently made the developer track syllabus materials available for all online.
Current Progress and Comments:
The third proposal after Cambridge and Buenos Aires. The Polkadot Blockchain Academy sought retroactive funds to cover all the expenses of the only in-person in-depth and allegedly, best education program until now. Covering all of the content required to become a full Polkadot-sdk developer, the Polkadot Blockchain Academy has educated some of the future high impact developers of the ecosystem. The main concern was the high amount asked for the proposal, over one million dollars for this event, made it the most expensive outreach event funded by the treasury so far. Questions about the actual impact were present already at the discussion stage and the referendum stage. Moreover, some questions about expenditures and invoices were presented, something that this and future events and organizers will struggle to present, according to them, due to “competitive advantages” or “them being necessary expenses”. The most important outcomes of this event as the time of writing was the publication of the course material as an open source repository. (https://polkadot-blockchain-academy.github.io/pba-book/) as well as the inclusion of of some of the alumni into the fellowship (emphasis ours).
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