New Chapter Request - Canada

[neogeweb3]

Hi ProtoSchool,

I would like to start a ProtoSchool chapter for Canada.

Introduce Yourself I am the Co-Founder of IPFSMain and the sole director of IPFSMain Canada. We are one of the largest hardware and cloud mining service providers for IPFS/Filecoin. Our mission is to provide storage mining rigs production, global mining farms co-location, mining software development, dAPP development and cloud mining services to the IPFS community. In 2018, we hold a large number of meetups, summits and live streaming globally about IPFS/Filecoin. You can view our latest updates from Twitter, or visit our website here.

Co-Organizers One of my regrets in 2018 is that there was not much meetups about IPFS/Filecoin in Canada which has a population density of just 4 people per square kilometers. In 2019, we will visit more quickly and more efficient to major cities of Canada (like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal etc.) to organize Chapter events. @calvincao-ipfsmain will be my partner to help organize Chapter events especially on east coast. If you live in Canada and want to help, please let us know. We know how hard is to held an event in Canada, but together we will make it happen. All events will be not-for-profit and governance of events will have an open membership model.

What geographic area will your ProtoSchool chapter serve? Canada

What should we call your repo? Canada

Have you read and do you agree to abide by the ProtoSchool Code of Conduct? Yes, I agree to abide by.

How should Code of Conduct violations within your chapter be reported? Please email to: nge@ipfsmain.ca

[terichadbourne]

@NeoGe-IPFSMain & @CalvinCao-IPFSMain, thank you so much for your interest in ProtoSchool, and my apologies for the delay in my response.

Each ProtoSchool chapter is meant to focus on one local community, usually a specific city where the chapter organizers live, and where those leaders are already familiar with the local tech scene. Rather than ask one chapter to serve an entire country, we'd much prefer to encourage a scenario where an organizer can offer continued educational programming over time in a single location, thereby building a local community of members who can work through our tutorials together as they learn about the decentralized web.

Do either of you live in a specific Canadian city where that approach would make sense?

cc @michellebrous

[michellebrous]

Thanks @terichadbourne! I believe @NeoGe-IPFSMain is based in Vancouver :)

[neogeweb3]

@terichadbourne Thank you for the response. Don't worry about the delay, I know you guys are busy working on amazing projects.

We posted this chapter request for entire Canada, because of the low Canadian population and the amount of travelling we've done every year. But if that's not something you expect, I totally understand. I live in Edmonton, and Calvin lives in Winnipeg. Both cities are industrial cities that heavily relies on manufacturing, oil sand, refinery, mining and agriculture. I used to try host blockchain, BTC, ETH fun clubs and meetups locally, usually 3-5 guys show up. However, Canadian major cities are usually different stories. Vancouver and Toronto are really great examples, we visit both cities frequently and know their local blockchain communities, investors and incubators really well. Unfortunately, we don't live there.

I was planning to work on Vancouver Chapter, and Calvin works on Toronto Chapter. But if ProtoSchool needs someone locally that can offer continued educational programming over time in single location, I am afraid we are probably not qualified for this job.

Thanks @michellebrous! Close enough! It's only one hour flying :)

[terichadbourne]

@NeoGe-IPFSMain Thanks for the clarification here.

I think the ability to offer continued educational programming in single city is key, and I'd suggest once per month as a rough guide to a reasonable frequency. If you travel to Vancouver and Toronto frequently enough that a schedule like that would be feasible in each city, I'm happy to have you put in issues for the two cities separately to start local chapters.

One additional concern I have is that a focus primarily on Filecoin and mining/cryptocurrency can't be supported by our content at this time. Ideally, ProtoSchool events will be an opportunity to work through our tutorials together with support from mentors, and as we work on building our content we've started with IPFS and will be building up from there into more advanced material and exploring other projects. Some of other other chapters have benefitted from having a diverse leadership team with interests in different areas of the decentralized web. For example, the organizing team might be a combination of someone who runs an IPFS meetup and someone who's excited about cryptocurrencies. Having multiple organizers can also help to keep events community-focused and avoid any perception that a company is using meetups as an opportunity to pitch their services or products.

My gut instinct is that it would be great for you to join forces with another organizer in Vancouver and for @CalvinCao-IPFSMain to join forces with another organizer in Toronto to broaden your focus and community reach in both locations. Would that make sense?

[neogeweb3]

@terichadbourne Thank you for your response. I agree with your instinct.

There is only one thing I would like to clarify, we posted this chapter request for Canada, and the only reason behind it is our passion about this technology. It has no intention of pitching our services or products whatsoever. We care about the quality of chapters events and the learning connections in local community, that's why I said we are probably not qualified for this job in the previous comment. Some chapters might had this problem in the past few weeks, but we are not one of them.

We had over 7 IPFS meetups at China in 2018, hopefully we can consistently contribute to the ecosystem. If you have any other organizers in Vancouver or Toronto, please let us know. We will try our best to help.

[terichadbourne]

@NeoGe-IPFSMain My sincere apologies if it sounded like I was questioning your intentions. We're excited to have folks from a variety of organizations support ProtoSchool's educational goals! The issue I meant to highlight is simply one of audience perception, based on my past experience working at corporations that were helping with open source educational projects.

It sounds like it's best to table this request for now, and we'll hope that other local chapter organizers pop up in Vancouver or Toronto that you can team up with. I'll close this issue now, but please feel free to open issues for specific cities in the future!