Melbourne crypto community to host project for RMIT University post grad students

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Greetings from Melbourne, Australia.

DisFintech, in association with the MBTC, (Melbourne Bitcoin Technology Centre), has established a 12 week project for RMIT University Masters of Business Information Technology students. The project, in a nutshell, is to create a globally connected, local community to contribute to and support Safe Network application development here in Melbourne. Excitement here is building with student induction Wednesday, 22 July. We anticipate that our students will be making contact with this forum, hence this advance notice.

Following is an excerpt from the project outline.

Project name: Community Development: Emerging Cryptographic Technologies

Project description:

The advent of cryptographic digital currencies has given rise to a large number of projects in the space referred to as ‘crypto 2.0’. These projects extend upon the concepts of Bitcoin’s value transaction network to include ‘smart contracts’, incorruptible voting systems and unalterable public record databases just to name a few. One of the principal characteristics of these new technologies is decentralisation. The new standard for networked applications is that there be no central control and no single point of failure.

DisFintech is the principal hub for the Melbourne crypto community. This community represents wide ranging interests and aspires to nurturing the emergence of new digital currency and crypto technology businesses in Victoria, Australia. In service to this objective, this project aims to focus on the development of a special interest sub-community dedicated to a specific open source project known as MaidSafe.

MaidSafe incorporates a decentralised, incorruptible network, with an in-built digital currency and a platform for service and application provision that is designed to replace the existing World Wide Web. In so doing it will provide a safe, secure and private environment for individuals to conduct their online relationships with other individuals, groups, or the world at large, thus solving some of the most critical issues plaguing the current Internet.

After nine years, the Safe Network is in late development and MaidSafe are conducting extensive testing of the network’s component parts. While MaidSafe has a small, dedicated, well-informed community globally, a major, unexploited opportunity currently exists. Key to the Safe Network’s rapid adoption will be the availability of services and applications to replace those currently available on the World Wide Web. This project is dedicated to developing a broader community focusing on Web developers and early adopters as stage one of mass adoption.

Project objectives:

Research and develop a plan to build an application development community for MaidSafe through:

  • Identification of existing community groups, other collectives with memberships and individuals likely to have interest in emerging cryptographic technologies
  • Collaboration with selected DisFintech members to develop a plan to approach and engage the groups and individuals identified
  • Participation in the execution of the engagement plan
  • Development of an on-boarding process for interested parties to be welcomed into and engage with Melbourne MaidSafe sub-community
  • Engagement with and facilitation for a group of individuals to ensure the ongoing growth of the new MaidSafe sub-community beyond the twelve week project period

We’re currently reaching out to the wider MaidSafe community for assistance, mentorship and general advice to aid the project’s success.

If you would like to help, please contact us at admin@disfintech.com.

Many thanks

Peter

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Hi Peter!

This is both a remarkably unique and well thought out project proposal. I’ll be very interested to follow the progress and see the resulting plan (unfold). Of course, Im also available to assist where appropriate !

Best of luck
Ben

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Hi Ben

Thank you for your kind words and interest, we’ll certainly be in contact with you. We look forward to any help we can get in developing our little community here in Melbourne so that we can contribute to this world-changing project. While the focus with our RMIT friends is on establishing a SafeNet application development capability here, we’re of course open to any activities that can contribute to and take advantage of the Safe Network.

Cheers

Peter

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Hi everyone,

My name is Steven Gouw, you can call me Steve or Steven, one of the RMIT students. I am very thankful for the opportunity to be involved in this project and I am looking forward to give my very best with everyone in this project.

Best Regards,
Steven Gouw

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Welcome Steve, we will do all we can I am sure.

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Thanks David, it is going to be a great one :smile:

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Hi Everyone,

My name is Tejeshwar (Can call me TJ), doing my Masters of Business IT. Firstly I would like to thank RMIT and Maidsafe for giving me an excellent opportunity to work along with highly dedicated professionals in Safe network community. Why this excites me is because I come from a networking background and this interests me a lot. Looking forward to achieving things for this community. Hope this is going to be an amazing roller coaster ride :smile:

Best Regards,
TJ

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Welcome TJ! With your networking experience it’ll be interesting to hear your take on the SAFE Network at the end of the project.

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I’m a passer-by to the SAFE community, but if the university needs any practical assistance from somebody local who is experienced in Rust, I might be able to be of assistance.

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Hi bjz, thanks for dropping in.

It would be extremely valuable to have a Rust developer aboard, may I ask where you’re located?

Peter

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Melbourne! My credentials. :wink:

I work full time at a startup in town, but I might be able to fit it in around that.

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Thank you to everyone who responded to our post regarding the Post Grad initiative. It’s been a busy few weeks and our students have been hard at work, here at Level 1, 89-91 City Rd, Southbank, our home generously provided by Bitcoin Group, http://www.bitcoingroup.com.au/.

Here is our progress report, as related by TJ and Steven, our RMIT Masters of Business Information Technology students themselves.

Steven and I started the project by analyzing how the community works. We went through few documents about Maidsafe and Safe network. We wanted to make sure we had a clear understanding about the project and how we would tackle the developers.
First we started by creating social media accounts. Following are Social media accounts.
Maidsafe Melbourne (Facebook Page)
Maidsafe Melbourne - @MaidsafeM (Twitter)
We are working on LinkedIn page as of now. We need to build some professional contacts. Hence it is delayed but not for long.

We have been working on the website, maidsafemelbourne.com
[Note here from Peter: We’re aware that it isn’t appropriate to use the name Maidsafe in the domain, and will be changing this to something incorporating safenet, safenetwork or similar.]
The website has been developed with the help of Peter. He gave us the content to it and we have few plans to make it interesting. We are currently integrating GIF animation into our website. When people browse the website they will find out what are project is about, what is Maidsafe, why we need a community.
Furthermore, the website will be used to host all the traffics from social media pages. We are currently developing the ‘sign up’ feature to get the interested people involved as soon as possible.
We have been getting in touch with developers through personal contacts, other communities, University friends etc.
We know the project needs Rust developers but it is not limited to just rust programming and hence we expanded this thoughts and went searching for developers outside Australia. The response was decent. There are few developers outside Australia who want to know more about this community and how they would be of any help. It’s just a matter of time we get them all to understand this project. However, 3 of our University students already have showed some interest and maybe by next week we get to arrange a meeting with Peter in MBTC.
[Note here from Peter: a contribution to core development from Melbourne would be great, but the priority is on application development and my focus here is on HTML5/CSS/javascript. Of course, Rust coders very welcome for app development too :slight_smile: ]

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Hi again, dang, I missed this reply! You’re in town, we’re in town (our meetups are at Level 1, 89-91 City Rd, Southbank VIC 3006) , and we gather each Wed to chew the fat and have a formal presentation once a month. I’d really like to meet you and see how we could work together.

Cheers

Peter