Use Case For a Particular Mutual Aid Society
A Mutual Aid Society Based on Scholarships to Allow for Continuing Education
Mutual Aid Societies (MAS) have long been around in the existence of government sanctioned and registered co-operatives and non-profit organizations.
STEEM is a blockchain technology which will realize the same type of goals without the unnecessary government overhead.
This post is the description to the first of several services that I will manage and pay developers to build using the rewards from signing the blocks as a witness, assuming I have continued support by the community.
STEEM Scholarships
Education always benefits society and, at the same time, the individual. I am not saying that this type of learning necessarily needs to be in the form of "Higher Education," but continual growth of knowledge, either general or domain specific, tends to remove unjust bias through deeper understanding of 'the other'. In addition, sharing and passing along the knowledge gained to the wider community creates societies that place value in learning.
For this service, I would like to begin offering scholarships for attaining long-term education of a person's choosing. General guidelines for scholarship proposals are as follows:
- Subject to Learn
- How will you learn it ? (self-taught via books / internet, university, hire private tutors, etc.)
- How long will this continue?
- How do you plan on sharing what you've learned with the STEEM community and your local community?
For now, this is open-ended as to the subject matter. Some suggestions are: learning C++ and the Graphene library, teaching yourself how to build your own solar panels, understanding the basics of cryptography, or even taking a class on a subject of your choice at your local or community college. The possibilities are endless, and I urge you to use your imagination.
We have a wealth of knowledge, both individually and collectively. Disseminating and sharing the information we have acquired over the course of our life is reward itself; but why shouldn't we gain some additional STEEM along the way?
Education is an important part of a Mutual Aid Society and it is a useful way for Steemit to reach out to the public. Fuzzy, a long-time Bitshares community member had built an online "easy" learning platform known as the codeacademy.com and he has some successes with it. IMHO, there could be much synergy to reap if both of you could work together, and build on what is already established.
You can check out more information here - https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,20477.msg264450.html#msg264450. Fuzzy is a member in Steemit too.
I agree that building on top of existing systems can be useful for certain aspects of this proposal. In particular, if a user submits an entry that asks for a scholarship to learn the skills that codeacademy.com offers courses for, then this would be very useful. However, learning to code is not the only choice for continued life-long learning. Other possibilities are learning a new language or taking an acting class.
The scope of this proposal is much larger than what fuzzy has initiated by setting up weekly sessions for Bitshares community members to simultaneously take self-paced learning courses.
With that said, where overlap exists, I am happy to work together.