 Hey folks, if you're just joining, we're going to give you a few more minutes while people drop in. We see attendees still dropping in here, but just give us a couple of minutes and we'll get started. For those who just joined or are joining, we will be getting started in about two or three minutes after the hour. Hey there Bart, great to see you there in the audience. We'll get started very, very shortly. Hey Daryl, do you want to make sure that the chat is enabled for everybody? I'm just not exactly sure if it is. I think, okay, let me, although I would prefer, if you have just folks, I'll turn on the chat. Let me just go and we do that with. Yeah, if you have any questions, definitely put them in the Q&A section for us so that we can capture them. Yeah, it might be too late to turn the chat on, but the Q&A is, if it's not already on, I'm just looking at the options I'm seeing right now. Folks, if you're just joining, we'll get started in about one minute. Okay, I'm going to turn the chat on so that people can chat to the host and panelist, that being Christine, Laura, and myself. Oh, Nikki Hickman says chat is already working. Thank you very much. All right, let's get started here. Just going to share my screen again. So welcome, folks. I'm real excited to talk about a project we've been working on in the background for some time. I've been watching a project here, and it's getting to the point of more of a reality, which is always an exciting, exciting stage. So quick rundown on who's here. Well, I'm Darryl O'Donnell, the CEO of Continuum Loop. Christine is joining us. She's going to help run the show in the background. We're also joined here by our special guest, Laura. Laura is the founder of Student Reader, and you're going to be hearing a bit more about that. Laura, do you want to just give a quick intro? I remember you and I were chatting about how frustrating you found it when, especially, you saw the shift from physical books, which were really expensive. Laura has worked in university publishing and bookstores, seeing students buy these hardcover books, hard books that are expensive, and then sending in e-books, which were expensive, and they got even less from it. Can you just sort of tell a little story of what frustrated you there and the kind of the beginnings here? Sure, sure. So first of all, my name is Laura Burgione, and I've worked in a community college campus for 18 plus years, managing auxiliary services with a big focus on our bookstore. And before the pandemic, we were able to help create these programs that were tackling some of our students' insecurities, and the biggest insecurity is the cost of our textbooks and course material. But since the pandemic, a lot of our funding has gone away, so it kind of left this void, and that's why I started Student Reader, because of the high cost of textbooks. And we've got these different modalities now of the e-books and inclusive access, but students still don't own their digital content. Your device does. So that's why Student Reader was born. We're hoping to change that. Yeah, I remember you and I were chatting. I probably capped, I don't know, five, 10% of the books I bought when I went through engineering, if that many. Well I remember selling the books and still getting some cash, it was beer money for me at the time, but it was really expensive. And I was surprised when you mentioned that maybe the audience doesn't get this, that e-books, you don't own them. Your device doesn't. You can't give them. That must be frustrating to see that. It is. It is very frustrating. So that's why Minting NFT books is, I think it could change education the way course materials are delivered. You do, when you have an NFT, you can resell it and you can set your price. And if you don't get that price, then you don't have to sell it. You can gift it to another student. You can gift it to a friend. You can just let a friend borrow it if it's something that you want to keep, that you need throughout your career. I just think NFT books is really going to change the way we view course materials. I think it's also interesting as well, as I looked at how the student reader and the ecosystem spun up, and we'll talk about, that's what we're here to talk about, how the NFT started to play a different role as well, in that you can use an NFT as a gateway to say, hey, if you have this course material, welcome to the course. If you don't have the course material, maybe you see a different part of the course. You're missing some pieces, and or they just say, hey, listen, you're auditing the course. Hey, perfect, great. But at the end of it, you maybe don't get the same credential or something, but at least they know you have the material and can, in some ways, follow along as you read through and stuff. But let's jump in and start going through. So what we're going to cover off is really two things at the same time. This is kind of the theme of the Oscars, I guess, everything everywhere all at once, which, by the way, Laura, I think it was you and your boyfriend who convinced me to watch that show, and I'm still not sure I should have the finger things a little weird, but we're talking about two different things. One is a decentralized education project, which education is a mass of space. We'll talk about that. But also the tooling of how did we do this? Because one of the questions we get asked at Continuum Loop a lot is, how are you doing this and how can I apply it to my own projects? Certainly we're there to provide the services for projects that want to bring us in. But we also want to make sure that other folks are able to do this. We're going to be showing a little bit of those two things. Laura's project with Student Reader, but also how did we apply these tools? So Continuum Loop, what we work on is decentralized ecosystems. We work in places where there's no point to control, and we're talking about this one today, which is education. Education is absolutely mammoth. This diagram you're seeing on the right, we're going to talk about this a fair bit, where we talk about ecosystems and arenas and interactions. I'll explain that a little more later. Education is an absolutely enormous and very convoluted ecosystem. Every country, in each country, typically there are in the US, there are states, Canada, we have provinces. That's where the mandates of education come and even get lower down into school boards that are below there, and they're different. There's so many players, there's literally billions and billions of dollars, if not trillions, going through these education systems. And frankly, we're not seeing a lot of great results. It's being disrupted. We've seen, for example, the value of a degree decreasing. A degree used to meant you get a job. You spend literally now hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US, similar numbers in Canada. To get a degree, you walk out of university, college, and suddenly you realize it really meant almost nothing. Most of the degrees aren't doing what they used to do. But perhaps more important is we're all recognizing that we never stop learning and how do you share that learning when you realize these micro-credentials, these nanocredentials that you can get these small courses that can make a really big difference are really helpful. They also make a huge difference in areas where there's less formal education, less opportunity. I've worked on a project with some of the Ministry of Education folks in Ethiopia, for example. They're working to, one, recover an education system that was destroyed by civil war, but also making sure the long term goal is that those students in that country have opportunities around the globe that are equivalent to folks that are growing up in North America. So I want to back up to kind of where did this start? Because I was involved in a different part of the project. The part that Laura's going to talk about this, you'll hear the term course reader, we'll get to that in just a moment. It's not what I was working on. It was part of the head of product at a client was basically saying, hey, we need to create this course because we need to educate our community. It's involved in the Cardano community, which is a very rich community of developers, architects, people who are really excited about, you know, changing some of the foundations of the internet and how things work. And they wanted to teach about decentralized identity, which is our space. We've been deep in decentralized identity before it was called that, before it was called SSI, self sovereign identity. So all these pieces we've been involved in. But they wanted to create a learning program so that people would say, what is the essential identity? And then you build the technical blocks as well as the user experience blocks on top of that. And how hard can this be? I've done education courses sort of. Every course really needs training material. I really never understood so that basically, hey, here's the manual. Here's the training document and stuff like that. Turns out, much like everything in life, a lot of things we work on are extremely complex is a lot to them. But they come across as very, very simple. It turns out this course reader thing, this was a beautiful document, it was great. I thought it was, yeah, how hard can it be? Laura, can you give me an idea of what a course reader can be? Because I had no idea how complicated they could be, but you jumped in and helped because you'd seen this. And honestly, this is one of the parts of the problems that we find. Christine and I have the same issue with Continuum Loop is that when we know our topic really, really well, it comes across as, well, everyone must know this. But the depth of knowledge that you brought to things of the sort of complexities of how this could be, again, I thought it was simple. It's not. So you helped prepare this reader. One was physically beautiful. But can you explain some of the steps that are involved, especially that copyright and licensing side of things? Yeah, so within our college campus, we also have instructors that create course readers. We call them course readers. What they do is they, because they're subject matter experts in their field, they can come up with their content. But they also sometimes they'll use content from traditional textbooks. So when you're using content from textbooks, you have to have copyright clearances. If you're using a certain percentage of that textbook, you have to make sure that the author is going to allow you to use that content. So the biggest and most important thing is to get that copyright clearance. And then just making sure that you go through the material, you edit it, we had, for this particular reader, we had people go through it and edit it. We made sure that we were clearing all the copyright. And then to create this nice looking book, we had to figure out how to bind it, how to print it, what would make it look and feel like a course material, like a textbook, like something that could be used for a course. So I mean, I'm kind of just simplifying that a little, but it was a couple of months of going through it and working through it to get what we do now. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine the, this is how naive I am. I know there's a thing called a fair use clause, but I know that it's ambiguous, what is fair use? But when you said you have to get the author's clearance, you get a clearance from the author to say, hey, you're allowed to use this. Do they also get paid? Oh, absolutely. So that's part of the copyright clearance. We need to make sure that the person who created the content that you're using is getting their royalties. And that's what the copyright clearance is. You know, you tell them how much of the book you're using and then they charge you per page to use that and you have to make sure you're paying it. Cool, it's interesting on that. One of the things Christine sends out a monthly newsletter from us last month was, I think it was last month, Christine, where we did Choke Point Capitalism, which is a really interesting book for folks. And this kind of fits in. I didn't think about this until just now. Corporal Laura is hearing me just stand perennially make stuff up. But Choke Point Capitalism is about the machine behind, whether it's music or whether it's movie, screenwriting for TV, books, about the machine behind it is about how do I get my copyright license and who gets there once you pay that publisher or the holder of the copyright, who then gets the distributions. Very interesting, because it turns out the authors get almost really nothing but separate. I've jumped to jump topics here. So it was really interesting for me to see this, this reader drop to know that one, it was compliant. It was actually meeting the needs. Cause it's, you need to be fair to the people who are producing this content. Decentralized identities of particular space where there's a lot of different players and stuff like that. So having Laura help and student reader help on that was really neat to watch. Again, we weren't really involved in that, but also to see that physical product that was delivered, the amount of pride that the team had. This is the product is called the Tala Prism. It actually just last week went to version 2.00 on beta with the actual environments. That's why I was involved was to help get that launched. But to see the team's excitement about the physical product that they could hand out to students, they could hand out as almost, it was really marketing material because it taught the people, but it was beautiful. But also the PDF, and now we're sliding into this world of, okay, cool, you got a PDF, but what if you had this NFT version of that? What does it enable? We'll talk a little bit about that as I go ahead. Cause part of the problem behind this, the driver for this reader and the courses that we're driving was really to drive adoption. The Tala Prism product itself is a next generation Decentralized Identity SSI, if you want. We just don't use the term self-sovereign that much anymore. It's more Decentralized Identity and trusted data. In order to drive the adoption, people have to understand what's different about it because digital identity is kind of nerdy and it really doesn't work well on the internet right now. So people are like, well, why would I want to use that? So a bigger problem is also that the team was really, really busy and focused. The laser focus that the client had on this project of getting the product launched was absolutely the number one. Really, there were no number two priorities. So they didn't really have the time. So that's where the community now is taking a look at how do I blow up? How do I take this reader? How do I take this course that's there and actually distribute it? How do I incentivize people? So what was really cool to see is, Laura, you were mentioning this, you're probably a better storyteller on this because you were there. There were two conferences almost back to back. I remember hearing about them because I was, again, involved on other things getting the product launched. But there were two conferences that kind of jumped in. One was CNFTCon and the other one was Rare Bloom. Both of these are Cardano things. Maybe you could tell a little bit about how you managed to rally a whole bunch of pretty different folks. So I have to give credit to Book.io. When I saw what Book.io was doing, giving us, giving people back their ownership of their digital material, I thought, again, this could change education. So I thought, why don't we mint course readers as NFTs and give people ownership again? So going to CNFTCon, my goal was just to kind of meet with Book.io people, see if this was a viable thing, if we could do that, if we could work together and mint course readers. But once I got to CNFTCon and being around the Cardano community, which they are amazing, I started to connect with other people. And we started talking about, minting the NFT and creating a scholarship fund. And I kind of went from just minting course readers to minting course readers and funding the scholarship and using oracles and SSI and smart contracts. And it started to become really interesting and fun. And I started learning a lot more. Like I have no technical background whatsoever. But just meeting with them and talking to them, it became like this real viable thing. And then going to Brarebloom, I started to connect with educational institutes and people that had mentorship programs within the Cardano community. And really that's when the learner to earner program started. Like we were setting up a path for students to help fund their education. We connect them with this funding, they can use it to further their education to pay for additional courses and then get them to the point where they can become, they can be teamed up with a mentor and help them use that education in the real world. And then from that mentorship program, hopefully we can onboard them into some kind of a professional platform that can help them get jobs. So that's it just going to see an NFT con in Brarebloom and talking to the Cardano community. It just became this huge project that I'm just so proud to be a part of. Yeah. So sorry, I get really excited about it. Well, no, and that's the key here is that, and one, I think it's really important that you mentioned you don't have a tech background. Often that's the more important and more powerful perspective that comes in. Because I didn't have no desire I don't really like going to huge conferences, but the CNFT con really was a bunch of folks who at that point in time, the vast majority of NFTs are JPEGs, yes, it's a unique JPEG, and there's a lot of investment speculation. That's interesting in a very, but as someone who builds ecosystems, someone who builds systems, I'm like, whatever. But I think you kind of glommed onto it in the book.io was doing a classic, they're taking the Gutenberg press, the off copyright stuff and producing, various different, they have the monster series with Jekyll and Hyde and all these things are off copyright. So I started watching that going, okay, it's interesting. See the content is there and I get a special cover, custom cover, that's kind of cool. But then watching, as you mentioned, the part that the audience may not know is there's independent authors coming in now. So you have independent authors who are producing and publishing their material on chain. Their books are being released as NFTs. There's an NFT reader. So they actually have like a little app that they can read things on. But that also means that the revenues from those sales, you know, with a very large portion of it is going directly to the author. If you read that choke point capitalism, again, back to that book, you'll realize that most authors get almost nothing. Like literally nothing. Versus, you know, in the NFT world, they can get like very large percentage, you think it's, you know, well over half of the revenues, versus in the Amazon Kindle world, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage, single digits. But you also take the next level where you're seeing the ownership of this thing, that this NFT, you're seeing the fact that someone is buying it and then can use it. It's like, okay, great. But then you connected the dots of hang on a sec. This is also how we can incentivize or inspire, pay to inspire, whatever you want to call it, those learners so that they actually want can earn money while they're doing the scholarship. They can show that they've gone through the course and get more and more mentoring. If you show that someone's gone through the course and we'll talk about the credentials that will fly after this, because it's not about NFTs at that point, it's about credentialing, the fact that I have completed a course. My mentor or possible employers can see that I've gone through this stuff. So to me, it's really, really powerful that you've gone from kind of a nerdy, nerdy, weird speculative investment thing. You connected it to the world you're in, which is books and book.io helped there, but then you took it to the next level. That's really, to me, really powerful. So when you went in and kind of built this, this is a coalition. Well, we were looking at it and we started doing this over the past month or two. You've been working on this for almost a year, I think. Is that correct? Almost, yeah, almost a year. Yeah, and this is what always happens is you see these things that start to succeed and you think it's overnight and you're like, no, it's been a year of work. So here's what we started to do. You started to look at how do you take the course reader for educational material? How do we turn that into and start to feed into scholarship funding? So that any revenues from a course reader's sale, the minting, if you wanna get in the NFT term, but really the course readers are published and they're sold just like in the real. Just like when you're buying e-books, the difference being that the licensing is different and the ownership is now with someone. Nikki's asked the question, can you have a group ownership? Yeah, you can have a group wallet. There's nothing wrong with a group wallet in the crypto space. So a group could certainly own that. You also get into this space though and this is something that my client and I guess your client, they're getting into course and curriculum management. Not a huge topic here, but the approach that the teleprism is doing is you must do a teleprism 101, the basics, the decentralized identity basics before you slide into one of two tracks. You can do both tracks. One is the technical track. Here's the coding. How do you use an SSI decentralized identity agent? How do you issue and verify credentials? How do you hold them? The other is more of a user experience and design. How do you fit these things into your world? How do you make it consistent for users so that it's easy to use what they understand what they're doing? How do you fit it into your business and your business model canvas and stuff? That's kind of the two courses that you have to have this early entry. Part of it is you have to have had the NFT but then been issued a credential, a verifiable credential, which again comes into our decentralized identity realm that we have continued looping working on. But further, this whole coalition is leveraging what we call, a continuum loop we call systems of record. It's very rare for us to come into an area where it's brand spanking new. There is literally nothing. That's not a very exciting space to actually work in. It's really, really hard to make any progress. So one of the questions that was going around was, okay, well, cool. How do you manage a bunch of students? How do you manage the fact that I completed a course? Well, there's learning management systems out there that are already in place at many institutions. A teleprism actually uses a tool called Canvas. Canvas is one of the largest, it's open source and there's commercial licensing for learning management system. It's one of the largest on the planet. It's used at, well, from K to 12 but a lot of higher education institutions use this as their system of record. This is how they manage stuff. What's really cool about that is you can take it, you can jump in and say, listen, we're not asking you to do a lot of new stuff. So an open source adapter was created that says, hey, if you're using Canvas and you have a course, here's the little module you drop in that will let you easily issue a verifiable credential that says, Daryl O'Donnell finished AP one. I should probably actually take the course actually before I say that. In theory, I could teach the course but I probably could also fail the course simultaneously. So it's kind of a weird place I'm at. So one of the questions I had for you, Laura, is you did some early work on the ecosystem side and what I kudos to you for creating the early stages of governance frameworks because you were able to go and talk to these various players, the publishers, the learning management folks, the folks who had a course and had curriculum, the folks who were doing the minting and the NFTs, folks that are doing the part of the thing you're not seeing here is the smart contracts that are in the background. How do you manage a student scholarship treasury? You were able to create a governance framework that started to do that and then we kind of stepped in. Do you want to just maybe tell us a little bit of how that kind of happened? Yeah, yeah. So I get really excited about the minting of the NFT but I also, what student readers doing is with the partnerships with our learning institutes, we are issuing student credentials. So we identify for this particular program, we're identifying 100 students and issuing them a student credential. And in order for, I was told, in order for the community to really stand behind me, I had to create this governance framework, which I had no clue about, took me weeks to even like wrap my head around it to even get started. So we created this governance framework to show people to let our partners know that this is how we were going to issue the credential. This is the criteria. Sorry, I get... Yeah, sorry, I distracted you. This is not exactly yours. I was trying to grab a book, Laura, because what you just said about governance frameworks is, there's a book I have, it's called One For Many, D-Hawk was the founder of Visa. Christine, we'll make sure people get a link. Can you find a link perhaps and put it in the chat for many by D-Hawk? I was fortunate enough to work on a project with the US credit unions, which was the first operational deployment of SSI decentralized identity. And D-Hawk was one of the advisors. The reason I raised D-Hawk is, what people don't understand about governance frameworks is it's how the world works. When it's codified, if you look at something like Visa, MasterCard and AmEx, everyone talks about, in the crypto space at least, everyone talks about Visa and its transactions per second is the thing. It's not, that's technology. It's just technology. Getting to transaction per second is totally doable with technology. The real asset, and they have some magical tech at Visa, MasterCard, AmEx and all of the other networks, the magic behind it, the real IP, that if they got rid of it, they would fail as a company, is their governance framework. A vendor knows what happens when I pull out my AmEx, that they'll get paid on a certain timeframe. If there are issues, here's how chargebacks work. There's a ton, ton of rules and they know where they fit into the ecosystem. So when you were able to go out and talk to folks and said, here's a governance framework, hi, I'm a registrar. You're like, okay, great, you issue student ID credentials. You want to be in control of that, that's your job. Here's how you fit into the ecosystem and here's how your student ID credential is used, not abused, it can only be used in X, Y and Z or Z for the Americans and Canadians in these particular ways. This is what the governance framework, this is where we came in and basically started to help because you started it off and you did an awesome job. Somebody just asked a question here. Did you present the idea for one of the great publishing houses like Oxford and similar players? I think right now, we'll talk a little bit about that in the future, but without a robust governance framework, you can talk to your close friends. When I say friends, the colleagues you've met at CNFTCon and Rare Bloom and say, here's the idea I'm working on, does this make sense? Here's where you fit into the ecosystem, but the next level of going to an Oxford or some large organization as a publishing org, is a large institution that is managing many, many students. We're gonna need just the next level, which is where we kind of stepped in and said, hey, we can help with that because the project is we're learning, we're applying this framework that I'll speak a little bit more about shortly. And it's a great example of one that's relatively lightweight, but it needs that rigor and we can help to that. So that's what Christine and I kind of jumped in. So I'm gonna jump ahead a little bit here and talk about what it is that Christine and I are doing and show you how we did a couple of these things, how we're taking this huge ecosystem and breaking it down, but we're taking a look a little bit more deeply at the ecosystem. See, who are the players? Because when you're dealing with small institutions, small groups, you end up saying, okay, cool, this is what they do. It's actually there are actually three different things. So a small learning institution, if you take, for example, who's the education partner? I know Attala Prism runs its own EP-101, but there's education partners who we were looking to work with. Can you give one of the examples, Laura? It's the grouping. Oh, one of the, sorry, Power Learn Project. Sorry. Yeah, Power Learn Project is a small group that are looking to take a small cohort. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. Like a couple of hundred or so students and push them through. When you're dealing with an organization of that size, the roles in an ecosystem get blurry because they're managing all of their students, they're managing the actual course, they're testing the students, they're saying, yes, you graduated and they're issuing a diploma. Those roles maybe it may feel like it's one because it's really one person. There may be three or four or five roles actually there that if you don't separate them in the ecosystem, if you don't separate them in the governance framework, things get confusing really, really quickly. So this is what we're helping with Laura and the student reader crew and the broader ecosystem because education is enormous. So jumping back, we work on decentralized ecosystems where if you look at education, it's enormous. We break them down. I mentioned this earlier from an ecosystem level where we have literally hundreds and hundreds of players. We'll break it down into an arena. How do we do a learner to earner type of system where you're talking about tens of players still quite a bit, but really it's the interactions that we can actually start to chip in on and say, who is doing what to whom? What are the ramifications if I get it wrong? If I register a student and issue a credential to them, are there any liabilities I'm taking on? And if there are, am I okay with that? There's nothing wrong with liabilities as long as you know what it is that you can value it, that you can indemnify if necessary or you can move the risk to someone else. Liabilities are everywhere. So we take a look at these breaking it down from the big ecosystem. I'll show you the example in a moment. To an arena or arenas, many projects we work in and we end up with many different arenas where they could play. And then those breaking down those interactions so we really understand who are the players in the ecosystem that need to be governed. So those arenas interactions are absolutely critical. And this lets us get to those key players. Who are the key players or components? So in the case of student reader, we've got people. We've got students. We've got people at organizations and we have on Jane stuff. We have components that are running all automatic. And we need to understand who they are, what they're playing. Additionally, what are those signals we need to make sure that the ecosystem is growing? This is something for the longer term of student reader and it's learners or earner ecosystem. How do we maintain and monitor it? But let's make sure we understand those players. And this is where we get into education is absolutely enormous. This is just a quick diagram. I'll show you a better one in just a second here. And again, that industry as I mentioned is shifting. This learner to earner concept is everywhere. One of the groups that we advise I'm on the board of advisors for the Learning Economy Foundation. One of the things they're looking at is how do we really enable the skills gap that exists that employers want? They need people to fill these skills gap but the students don't know they exist. How do you start to make this happen? But also, can you do this in a way that small credentials, not a four year full degree program or something like that? I mentioned earlier that the value of degree versus the cost is really dropping. You're not getting the bang for the buck of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can run the numbers and it says one, depending on what career you're in you'll never pay it down. You'll never recoup your investment of education. Something is wrong. What people are recognizing that lifelong learning is critical. So the shift that student reader is working on is really, really important. So we looked at this ecosystem, which is again, enormous. On the right side, we've got a whole section here. Just quickly rip through this. You have employers who have this skills gap that I mentioned. They know that they have job openings that map to the skills gap. They have job applications. Learners need to find out about these opportunities to learn. We have identity, but on the one side we looked at, okay, what is student reader working on? And it's really the scholarship space. So we actually took a look at that individual ecosystem to say, what are the pieces? And there's lots of different things. This is what we call an ecosystem scan. So we're looking for things that are componentized utilities routine things. This is where a teleprism comes in. It is aimed to become a utility that folks use. But then you have where these points of concentration, learning management systems are absolutely critical when you're in any really heavy education. I say heavy, it could be a course or two type of a system. We also though separated out, and this is where one of the key things we've learned is that the learning management system is critical, but the registrars are slightly different. They're part of the educational institution. But if you treat them the same, they're different beasts. And that was really important for us. And then we get into the governance frameworks and the trust, but all the pieces that are moving. I get a course completion credential. I have a student ID credential that's issued. That is then used later when I apply for a scholarship in the case of student reader. I have to have that proof that I am a student of the PLP, the power learning program or project. I have completed the course. That now means I'm eligible to apply for a scholarship. The scholarship smart contract is really an oracle can actually say, do you have a student ID? Does it match your student, your course completion credential, your names match? Perfect, you are eligible. It now triggers off a contract and takes money from the treasury and awards to the student. This is the main flow of things. So when we looked at that main flow, it's still a lot of pieces. We looked at, okay, cool. The market has said there's a skill gap. I have this earner to learn. I have this NFT where I can own my reader, but how do we incentivize this scholarship concept? You've talked a little bit, Laura, a little bit about the scholarship idea, but when you started talking to other folks beyond the CNFT con and rare bloom where you got, honestly, you got a little bit nerdy on NFTs and where they can fit in the world, when you started talking to folks who were more about the education side, what did they start thinking about this scholarship and earn to learn idea? Well, it's such a new concept that I don't think that the people in education really understand how it can change, they don't understand that it's another modality to offer to deliver content. Right now, we have eBooks, we have inclusive access, which is, it's content that's integrated into LMS, in our case at our community college through Canvas. We also have open educational resources that are known as OER and ZTC, which is zero textbook costs, but with all these modalities and all these ways to help students save money, again, students don't own the content, their device owns it. So I think that NFTs in the educational space is gonna be a slow start, but I think once people understand it, we'll start to see it being used. Book.io is, I know somebody asked about working with publishers or I forget what the chat said, but Book.io is currently working with Ingram, which is a huge publisher for textbooks. So people are starting to see it and hopefully they'll start to understand it, but I'm hoping that student reader, once it's launched and we're actually out there doing this, that people see it as a modality and maybe even a way to do scholarships and just have it open and doing scholarships this way, there's more transparency. Stakeholders can actually see where the money is going and see who it's helping. So that's really my hope. Yeah, and when I've only heard because I've not been involved in the outreach, I've been involved in getting that teleprism launched again. Launched last week, it's finally out, but to hear the folks who do kind of get the idea, meaning there are groups out there right now and we know that, I'll probably get the name wrong again, Power Learning Project. There are people funding that project right now, knowing that there are skills gaps. They have a different goal. Their goal is to enable and grow skills in Africa. They're very active in Kenya right now, but this aligns really, really well because they're already funding students. Now you have portions of this thing coming in, hang on, there's a funding mechanism, there's a scholarship application mechanism with validation that you're really a student. So they start to get more rigor because you can just imagine a few years from now to someone saying, hey, listen, I started taking these courses not knowing what would happen. Now I've got a job and a career and here's what I'm really doing. And you can say, and prove that you actually did that. They can say, yep, I actually, I'll prove it, sign it and say, I came through the Power Learning Program. Here's what I did. And by the way, my mentor to help me here and my employer found me here. That's where we're going to, but like many visionaries, Laura, you're seeing that future. It's the chipping away at the small pieces. So that scholarship piece was really, really key. So can I say one more thing? Oh yeah. So I'm, people in the traditional educational world don't really understand it or see it. People in this space and this technology space are excited. I have different, I've been talking to different educational institutes that are on the Cardano community and they are excited. I already have different institutes that want to work with us, but I'm like, let's just make sure that this works. Like let's, I want to be very confident going into it. And I'm confident now, but I want to see it in action and then, you know, grow it. So, you know, we do have educational institutes that understand it and see the value. Awesome. And that's how real movements start in my view. I'm gonna start burning through some slides because we are running down and we do have a whole whack of questions and comments. And apparently you need to beat me up because Nicky has made comments, but I'll jump to that and I actually recognized that Nicky yesterday, I was like, crap. So we went through and started doing an arena scan. This is another level of detail where we start doing the interactions. Again, I'm not gonna dive in on deep on this right now. But again, our key role was to identify, our key job here is to identify those key roles and capabilities so that we can take the initial governance framework and recast it to focus in on those ones, the roles that are absolutely critical for adoption and try to simplify it, but also split the framework apart because the current governance framework is doing two things. It's being managed on how do I use my courses, this AP 101 course being required to enter the next level courses. That's nice, it's important, but that's an internal learning institute thing versus the outside world. Really doesn't care other than, oh, that's nice to know that AP 102, you had to do AP 101, but it's not a requirement for them to manage that, to gate that, that's the institution's thing. So we're separating a few things out. The goal here is we wanna get down to simple. So these ecosystem scans and arena scans really lead to what we call a minimum viable ecosystem. What's the bare bone start so that Laura, you can point at something. So that when you take institutions that are not thinking about this crazy new future, you can point about and say, see where you fit, oh, right, and it's easy to approach. If you make something convoluted, there are no examples of complex ecosystems. We got a little thing down the bottom that the complex ecosystems cannot be designed. They simply can't. They emerge from a bunch of simple things and then you get complexity. If you try to design complex, you are going to fail, just depends how much money you throw at it about how long it takes for you to fail. Again, we're going for that simple thing, that minimum viable ecosystem. I'm gonna rip through this real quick cause what are these tools cause I keep showing up these different tools and stuff is part of this thing we're calling the trust continuum. It really just, it's a tool that helps us do what we've been doing for years and they came out of a really weird, I didn't realize that we have kind of a weird, weird past a continuum loop where our careers started out in our history started out really building these life critical systems in search and rescue, both civilian and combat, emergency management, multi-agency where we had 700 agencies in Canada, US sharing the simplest of information for crises. Laura, your neighborhood is under this right now, roadblocks. Roadblocks during a crisis on the level of Katrina on a level of a local crisis is one of the number one problems because I need to be able to ask the following question. Great, the road is closed there. Okay, can I get an ambulance through? Will you let an ambulance through yes or no? That has life consequences. The lessons we learned going through this weird history over literally decades is that everyone thinks they have control and that's not true. We rarely have the control that we think we do. It turns out the ecosystem we are in, they rarely ever had any control. The search and rescue, they beg, borrow and steal resources to do the search and rescue stuff. Combat search and rescue is a little bit different. They have a little more operational control. Mercy managers have no resources, no money, no resources. And what's really interesting is it's all been decentralized and it's always been about ecosystems. How do I ask for something? How do you offer something? How do I task you? How do I share information? We didn't realize that we were consistently in this weird world. So realizing the last year or so, Christine has been helping me build up this framework and we've been applying declines all around the globe in various forms in finance, both traditional finance, as well as through the DeFi crypto education. This is one of the double projects, supply chain, government and even into the deeper crypto side of things as they come through the realization that regulation is actually a thing that they do have to be concerned about. What this has done though is allowed our approach to scale. Just folks who are out there, it's being released openly. And it's really just tools and methodology. It goes from early stage through growth. This is a bit of a diagram on the thing. We'll happily share this out later. I'm just gonna burn through because we only have 10 minutes left. And we did a small portion of it here. We really worked on two, three different things. The ecosystem scan and arena scan to make sure we understand who the players were, what they're doing with each other and helping beef up the ecosystem governance framework that again, Laura's already got a great start on. We're just gonna bring it up to the next level. Laura, I'm really excited that kind of will close off with this and jumping to questions, which this can be interesting. I'll probably just read through the chat while you maybe talk a tiny bit. So maybe tell a little bit about, what's coming next quarter? Because I'm really excited here that student reader is launching. And that's amazing to me. Yes, yes. So we will be launching, we will be maintaining our NFT in the next quarter. We're identifying students, 100 students from the Power Learning Program. We're gonna be issuing them, student credentials, air dropping them the NFT, which the NFTs are, I've looked at the covers and they just, they're so beautiful. They look amazing. We, yeah, we're gonna air drop them NFTs. We're gonna have them go through the AP 101 course, issue them a student credential and, you know, give them their scholarships. It's... Yeah, and to me that what I really, I mean, there's a level of which, somebody could have just written a check and just done this, right? What I really like about this is you're taking a look at the big picture. And this is where we jumped in. I mean, to say, listen, we need to make sure that governance is nailed so that instead of doing just one off AP 101, that AP 101 is just one of many. So you can work with many more wildly different areas, whether it's related to the Cardio community or whether it's related to I'm learning Spanish from a different institution. And I want my employer to see that I have the credential that I got from a high level Spanish training. No, I don't speak Spanish. To me, that's really, really exciting. Yeah, we've got this NFT in different languages. We're starting to, you know, look at... That's in Spanish and Swahili? Swahili and I believe Japanese as well. So, you know, we're thinking maybe El Salvador for our Spanish, you know, places that are using cryptocurrency within their, you know, ecosystem that, you know, so that we... Because this is all cryptocurrency, our scholarship. So we need to be able to fund these students and have them be able to use that fund. So, yeah, I'm really excited as to where this can go. And I'm excited to have more people contact us and work with others, you know? We're working with the Tala Prism right now, but we're talking to other institutes and having their course readers, you know, their subject matter experts create content for us to be able to mint and keep funding scholarships. So, yeah, it's really exciting. Awesome. I'm gonna jump into some of the questions. Actually, I looked at the most recent chat came in because it actually covers off my little last bullet here that I wanted to jump into. The question is, do we have something on the self-carbon identity side of things? What I find really interesting about this project is it is anchored to self-carbon identity. It's just SSI, decentralized identity. It's not front and center SSI because SSI. That's what all too many projects we typically brought in. If a project is failing, that's one of the reasons it's failing. Is there talking about decentralized identity as the problem and the solution? It's not. The identity is always an enabler. It's always enabling something. But what's actually interesting is this whole solution. So when that scholarship application comes in, I have to prove as a student that I have a student ID verifiable credential. That's SSI. I have to prove that I'm holding a course completion credential. That's a verifiable credential. Again, SSI. So now I have to have these two verifiable credentials, which may come from two or one or more issuers. And now it's using the smart contract and chew through and they say, hey, great, we've done a verification of those things. Everything checks out. Here's your scholarship funds off you go. So SSI kind of disappears into the background. I'm gonna stop sharing here now, because Christine, I asked her to make sure, oh, I lost my chat. And go through, I'm just gonna rip through some of these questions because we've had them flying in. Yeah, we have a lot. Yeah. Where do you wanna start? I wanna start with two from Nikki. If you mind if I, I'm just gonna jump in, Christine, because it's, we only have seven. Yeah, go ahead, because yeah. Nikki has asked, so if someone doesn't have the course material, then they are ramped onto the scholarship funds. So what happens if I don't have the NFT, but I want to get into the course? How do I get that NFT? If let's say I'm a student, I don't have whatever. I don't know what the price is, 48a or something. So that's about what, $10, $15 USD to buy the course. How are you bootstrapping that? I think there's an air, I think there's a course program itself is doing that, right? Yes, so for the students with the student credential, we're air dropping them NFTs. So they don't have to buy the NFT. These identified students get the NFT for free so that they're able to go into the course. Awesome, awesome. And then Nikki also commented, it says, Laura, you should have connected with me. Please beat up Daryl. Yes, I'm gonna get some beats. And I was actually going through, there is a project Nikki has been involved with as have some of the Itala Prism team in a prior life. Yoma is a team, is a project that is about youth in Africa that is about learning to learning. It is about volunteering opportunities and it is a fantastic thing. And Nikki, I was actually looking at that a couple of days ago when I was asking you about that person's name, I'm thinking, I need to connect these two together. But one of the things we're also trying to make sure is that student reader is doing that minimum viable ecosystem to get started. But now the question is, and then where does it go next? And that's definitely one of the areas there. I mean, then Laura will, if Nikki doesn't see me first, Laura will hit me in the head or something when I see her. Yeah, so Neil Thompson shared out the KOR organization, the one from many, that's a fantastic one. Now, Nick Naifak, how do we ensure the integrity of the roles in open governance framework? How do we know the systems of record are providing authentic documents? How will other stakeholders be able to verify that authenticity? It would seem the way to broker certified doc would be needed to exist. Yeah, Nick, there's quite a few questions in there. What we're looking at with this minimum viable ecosystem approach with student reader is, let's get the bare bones going. We know we have a partner who is trying to scratch their own itch. They are funding this power learning program. They want to have students go through a course. They didn't have anything particularly identified. Now we've got this reader they can bring in and do the AP 101 course. We already have a mechanism by which a completion credential. This is not a certified knowledge test. So it's a light bar to hit. So let me start the flow of things because the next question is, okay, great. All I have is a course completion credential. Perfect, it's a start. If I want to get to the point where I have to reach a certain score of expertise and I want a level of assurance that the student has reached this and that we have vetted that is Daryl O'Donnell. It is not someone posing as Daryl O'Donnell. You start to ratchet up the governance requirements to get in, in which points you start to impose consequences. What you've done at that point is started out with a very basic ecosystem and you've grown into a much more real and rigid, real is wrong term, a much more rigid ecosystem. The question we have, the approach we're taking is, let's not get rigid before, we don't want to stifle and smother the baby. The baby is just learning to not even crawl yet. Let's make sure that that is a real need because right now people need to earn, they need to learn, and we want to make sure that they're doing that as opposed to you need to get to this rigid specification. But the answer to your question on each of those, Nick, is that if you need to get that veracity to that level of assurance, you put in tighter governance. One of the things as one of the founders of Trust Over IP, that's what we do over there. You can bring in the auditors, you can bring in the, here's the specifications, the conformance criteria, an auditor comes in and says, yes, you do meet the criteria or no, your systems are insufficient, you're allowing fraudulent students into the system and or fraudulent issuance of credentials. You need to build that momentum in the ecosystem itself in order to get there. And you know, there's lots of different ways to do that. Nicky commented on separation of powers. Yes, the beauty of what Laura has done with the student reader team and the community that's around it is you got some nimble folks who were doing and wearing many hats. You know, the power learning program is registering their students, they're making sure they're doing the registrar role as well as the course management role, the curriculum role. If you don't separate those to Nick's point, you can't get to the bigger ecosystem because you've munched things together and a registrar would be like, I don't pick the freaking curriculum, they're gone. When you deal with people in real operational communities and Laura, you do this in the environment, in the education space, you see the education is they don't get it, they just don't get it because they're looking at their very narrow lens. If I'm a registrar, I really don't care about the curriculum. Did you or did you not pass the course? That's my world. Are you or are you not this student? Are you alumni? Those are the simple questions you're asking, not the broad picture. Separating the roles is absolutely critical. Michael Terrell has mentioned you should connect with the Trusted Learners Network. I believe they, some of them were either at CNFTCon, I believe they had a product from a teleprism was actually talking to the Trusted Learners Network. I think it was based if I'm correct, Michael, out of Arizona or something. There was definitely a linkage there. What's really cool is, Nikki has raised Yoma. It is scratching a very similar itch. Trusted Learners Network scratching a very similar itch. I'm on the board of advisors for Learning Economy Foundation, scratching a very similar itch. It's really, really, Nikki's thrown out the term internet of learning. Absolutely, that's what this is all about. It's how do you build those simple and small systems? Codify them, make them more formal as you need to, but don't again, smother the baby. Don't make it so hard to approach it. It's gonna take me six months of work to get started because I never will, because I likely don't have budget for it. When you can plug into my existing Canvas system, my system of record, fit me in so I can sign on the dotted line for a very basic, lightweight, low consequence governance framework. I can then see the value. I can see it in use. And I will then start to step up to the next level of, okay, cool. We had a minimum viable ecosystem. We need to level up. I'm gonna start doing my degrees, my diplomas. I'm gonna start making sure that the professional accreditation bodies understand what those mean as opposed to a relatively lightweight you completed a course credential. But if you don't start lightweight, you'll never get started on this type of thing. Laura, we're at the top of the hour. Is there anything you would like to add? There's one question just popped in. Just did anybody see a new question? Yeah, I'm just seeing. Oh yeah, well we had, oh, a couple just came in. There's how to avoid someone capturing the license material and share the NFT with someone else. So, Laura, does that- I'm not, yeah, have a look in the, it's in the Q and A there. I'm not sure. I don't want to capture the license material and sharing to someone with NFT. Perhaps this person, an anonymous attendee, is talking about the right-click copy problem where, and this is something I can answer, because if the AP101 course reader, the Italo Prison course reader is on a particular NFT, is issued by book.io, it's very easy for me to go and copy the content that's on chain, make it myself, and I can do the AP101 as well. This is where you get into part of the governance and the trust registries that say, who are the real issuers of this thing? And if I have a tide that says book.io is the publisher of this NFT, and I have a tide that says over here, this is the power learning program and they acknowledge each other. It says, my publisher is using this did. I am this issuer of this credential and it's tied to that. These two dids are tied. You end up creating a web of trust that the external right-click copy crowd, if you're in the NFT realm, right-click copy, basically rip off fake NFT, won't have. They won't have that web that touches the institution. They won't have that web that touches back to the student ID credential. They won't have that web that touches back to the valid bonafide publisher list. It's gonna be harder and harder as time goes on to do the fake publishing because there'll be nothing behind it. You'll look and say, okay, great. Tell me about your provenance. Oh, yeah, I got nothing. So hopefully that answers that question. Okay, folks, we are, I think, out of time. One quick, sorry, Marge's ruined the question. If I complete course A, then get completion credential in wallet one and do the same with course B and wallet two and I need to prove I passed both, can I use one wallet? You could use one wallet, you could use two. It's gonna, your device is gonna get the question. You have to route the question if you use two different wallets. The question will come back, it says, hey, your student ID credentials here, I need to see it. And I need to see your course completion credential. I need to see that whether it's one app or two, doesn't really matter other than it's an ugly user experience if you have it spread across a bunch of different apps. All right, Laura, I've rambled on enough. What would your any closing thoughts? I just look for the mint. Look on book IO for the minting of the NFT. It's coming soon. Yeah, I've been watching the book.io. I just, I like some of their, especially the Gutenberg stuff. Cause I used to download the text files and stuff, but I love the artwork and stuff, the way that they're operating. And also they seem to be having a lot less problems than most of the NFT platforms out there. Because they're, they need that rigor. They also, by the way, understand governance because when they're working with those world-sized publishers, if you don't have your governance correct, you're not working with them. Laura, I wanted to say a big thank you. Thank you very much for this, Christine. Thank you very much for helping out and for everyone who was on the call. Thank you very much and everyone keep being awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.