Using the SafeNetwork for the Education company I work for

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I am relatively new to MaidSafe, the SafeNetwork and SafeCoin. I’m no developer, and I have no background in ICT whatsoever. I have been following this project now for 6 months and just recently joined this forum and bought myself a humble amount of SafeCoin.

The company I work for is a publisher of online courses and educational platforms for schools. At the moment, around 100.000 students (from the ages of 10 to 22) work daily with our platforms.

I personally believe this network could really change the internet as we know it, and in the process could change our company as well. So I thought: why not tell my CEO about the network and the potential of it, right? IMO, our company might as well be an early adopter and jump on the bandwagon as soon as the network launches. Especially considering the fact that we have so many users of whom we have to protect their login credentials. (Not to mention the fact that we get DDoS’d at least once, every few weeks)

I see a lot of upsides for our company if we were to use the SafeNetwork. I tried to think of a few downsides, but besides having to port and adjust our platforms to the network (which would take some time and effort of course), I can’t really see any downsides.

In fact, if users were to pay with SafeCoin when they use our platforms and online courses, using them could be ‘free’ so to speak. (Provided that the earnings of SafeCoin, which users farm by contributing to the network, exceed the cost of using our platforms)

Though, come to think of it, there might be one big downside. On our platforms, teachers can follow the progress of their students and for instance adjust the difficulty of the course at any given time. With the students being completely anonymous and all, will this still be possible?

A few minutes ago, I sent my CEO a few links to the Maidsafe-website and some online interviews with David.

I’m really curious about his reaction, but my guess is (I hope) that he might suggest to copy one of our existing platforms to the SafeNetwork as a testcase when the network launches.

Hmmm, don’t really know why I started this topic. Just to share the excitement I guess. Do you guys think my thoughts about using the SafeNetwork for my company are correct? Am I maybe missing something? Any upsides or downsides I haven’t thought about?

Annnnd maybe this topic could trigger/inspire other ‘non-ICT-background’ forum-members to think about how the company they work for could use the network? I would love to read other ideas/use cases.

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It sounds completely do-able and as you mentioned, the main downside is developing the system so that you can do what you do now on SAFEnetwork. I don’t see why you would have a problem with teachers following an student and adjusting their course either. Anonymity is optional, and even if you don’t know the identity of the person you could still work with the anonymous account.

There will certainly be advantages, including security of user related information, avoiding DDoS you mentioned, plus zero hosting costs - just the upload/modification fess to pay for when you create or alter content. A small downside might be supporting students who are not already on the SAFEnetwork to obtain the SAFE Browser and create their account, and if they have to pay in Safecoin for your service, helping them to earn or purchase this would be something you’d need to help with.

I’m glad you shared this, and I think you are right that it might encourage others who are not involved with ICT to think about and discuss how they or their organisations might benefit from it. So please keep us informed and continue to discuss your ideas. :slight_smile:

PS I’m going to add the word “Education” to your title - hope you don’t mind, but feel free to change it.

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Sure, but I have read or heard somewhere that the idea of the browser, and the whole network for that matter, is to make it an ‘easy-to-use’ experience. Install and run, right? It’s either creating an account on our platforms, or downloading the browser, and make one on the SAFEnetwork (which is the better option, considering all the advantages of the SAFEnetwork compared to the internet). Indeed we maybe need to help students understand how to earn or purchase SafeCoin, and I guess in the very beginning this is what we’ll be doing most of the time to ensure they’ll be able to actually do our courses. Therefore it’s not recommendable to start a testcase with one of our kids-platforms I think. English is not their native language for instance (though most kids speak and read it by the age of 16-18 here), I can image the kids-platforms being a problem, hmmm.

But hey, kids-platforms aside, instead of just letting students (or their parents) pay, we’re actually giving them the opportunity to earn something as well. And we’ll be introducing them to the new and improved internet, for free. :smile:

I’d say win-win.

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You guys could get started now with the testnets and soon alpha 2. There is also ‘mock’ and local networks that can be used for development

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Well, first…I don’t know what ‘mock’ means, is there a thread somewhere so I can get up to speed?
Second…sure, personally, I’d love to start using the test networks to start development. But I’m quite sure that my CEO doesn’t want to start developing something for the SAFEnetwork until there’s a working, stable network that’s proven to function the way it’s supposed to. (including SafeCoin).

Besides this, I think our devs would need proper guidence when the time is right. Just pointing them to the forum or github for that matter might not be the best/effective way.

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As @happybeing says there isn’t a problem following an account. Each Safe account can be uniquely identified.

What will be good is that each student can have their SAFE account with multiple IDs. So the student can interact with others using other IDs and interact with your platform using their “student” ID. Thus you maybe able to keep track of the students progress but noone else who deals/interacts with that student could know their progress even if they had your access to the student records. And conversely you cannot match up a student to their other activities since they are different IDs.

I’d expect in fact you could hand out student IDs (SAFE IDs) to each student upon enrollment. This way you could ask for any required information needed for government/business requirements. The student uses the ID you give them . The advantage is that the student losses no anonymity using the SAFE network elsewhere because that (student) ID is only used to interact with your platform and the student uses other IDs on say social media or shopping or even contacting you anonymously.

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It just means like local simulation instead of interacting with a real network.

edit: link - How to build the SAFE Browser and upload a website with Mock-Vault - General - Safe Dev Forum

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