With the help of funding from the Filecoin Foundation, the Blockchain Law for Social Good Center at Golden Gate University announced the creation of a new blockchain technology lab to teach students about decentralized storage, Web3 and blockchain technology.
According to a press release, the university’s new Filecoin Foundation Blockchain Academy lab will host meetups and training seminars that will help “broaden the understanding of open and decentralized technologies, and how they can be leveraged for new purposes.” good” as students get interested in cryptocurrencies and the like. Emerging technology fields continue to grow in higher education.
“Over the past year, we’ve seen growing interest in the technology that powers cryptocurrency and Web3,” Michele Neitz, founding director of the Blockchain Law for Social Good Center, said in the statement. “As a Bay Area law school, we want to provide our students – and our wider community – with the resources they need to learn more about these innovative and emerging technologies and their socially beneficial uses.”
Marta Belcher, President and President of the Filecoin Foundation, said Government Technology that the lab will provide “government officials, professors and many others with the resources they need to understand decentralized technology,” as well as how this technology can be used for social good.
The announcement added that the lab plans to create specialized programs to train faculty, including one specifically for community colleges, to teach decentralized technology and other related topics, as well as monthly blockchain and Web3 workshops for state and local government officials. The lab will also launch its Teaching Fellowship Program, which aims to prepare the next generation of blockchain experts working in legal education.
“One of the biggest barriers to adopting new technologies is education,” Belcher said in an email to Government Technology. “We want people to understand how centralized intermediaries can act as single points of failure and undermine privacy and expression. We also want people to see how decentralizing the web can help preserve humanity’s most important information.
Belcher believes that “blockchain technology will do for value what the Internet has done for information,” as the emerging technology field advances and develops thousands of blockchain platforms for functions such as paying royalties to musicians, paying people for using their data, paying journalists for each view of an article, and incentivizing consumers to use renewable energy, among other uses.
“One of the most exciting things about blockchain technology is that it creates the ability to program money, which can happen instantly and automatically without an intermediary, even across borders. This type of transaction would be untenable with traditional payment systems,” she said in the email. “On the decentralized web, multiple nodes can fail without the entire system collapsing. When data is distributed rather than siled by platforms, users can control their data and choose where and with whom to share it.”
“It would have been a mistake in 1995 to think we understood internet usage in 2022,” Belcher continued later. “While blockchain is in its infancy, the uses of cryptocurrency could be just as extensive.”
Neitz said the lab will bring together students from around the world and underserved student populations underrepresented in tech through virtual events and conferences. She said one of the main goals of the lab and the center in general is “to educate people that the tech industry has traditionally ignored.”
“The partnership between the Filecoin Foundation and the Blockchain Law for Social Good Center allows us to achieve both of these goals by creating diverse communities of blockchain champions and creating future leaders from various industries who understand and appreciate the benefits of open technologies. and decentralized. In turn, those trained by Blockchain Law for Social Good Center will teach their communities, communicating the benefits of these new technologies to a wider audience that will continue to grow,” Neitz said in an email to Government technology.
“With these goals in mind, the lab will provide a physical space with state-of-the-art technology for in-person training and meetups in San Francisco and online events with global reach,” she continued. . “We plan to host government officials and policy makers, professors from law schools and other educational institutions, lawyers and industry leaders, and students from all walks of life.”
Neitz said the center and lab have recently received training requests from government entities to help educate and inform staff and officials about key issues and current legal and ecosystem developments as the lab seeks to develop in the years to come. Among other plans, Neitz said, the lab will host its first annual conference Oct. 20-21, before the teaching fellowship program begins in 2023.
“We have a lot of interest in the community [in the new lab]“, Neitz said in the email. “There is significant momentum and growth ahead of us!”