Diversity and the Blockchain

Two of my favorite things are coming together at the MIT Media Lab (another favorite of mine).

The Media Lab is hosting a bootcamp on blockchain technologies for underrepresented minorities and women.

The blog post announcing this event is here.

I will reblog the top part of that post:

The MIT Digital Currency Initiative is excited to announce a week-long intensive bootcamp covering key cryptocurrency concepts for women and underrepresented minority (URM) students. The event will take place at the MIT Media Lab August 21–26, 2016. The Kapor Center for Social Impact and Xapo have generously donated $70,000 to cover each student’s flights, hotel and other expenses to cover the cost of the bootcamp.

To apply for the program, click here. NOTE: all applications are due by July 11th.

If you are in their target group and want to work in the blockchain sector, this has your name written all over it. Make sure to apply by July 11th.

#blockchain

Comments (Archived):

  1. William Mougayar

    What a great way to spread the education around.

  2. pointsnfigures

    Interestingly, minorities are using Bitcoin ATMs in far greater numbers than others.

    1. creative group

      pointsnfigures:What analytics are you using supporting your post? Thanks in advance.

      1. pointsnfigures

        anecdotes from startups

    2. William Mougayar

      Then, this means there is a good pool of talent that might be interested. I think the program could take them to another level.

  3. Mario Cantin

    If I were 30 years younger — and from Sri Lanka…. 🙂

  4. jason wright

    the factor that really matters is economic disadvantage. fix that and other inequalities will largely cease to matter.

    1. Lawrence Brass

      We have so much prejudice to overcome yet.Will this happen in your neighborhood?https://www.youtube.com/wat

      1. jason wright

        the greatest prejudice comes from a small group of people who use economics to abuse the much larger group of people (across gender, geography, and race) by hoarding vast amounts of capital as if their very survival depends on it, and in doing so deny opportunity to their fellow human beings.wealthy and privileged people come up with these subjective schemes to assuage their guilt to feel better about themselves.

        1. Lawrence Brass

          I have seen people change so much while they climb up the ladder, just a selected few firmly holding to their principles and idealistic views. That makes me think sometimes about if there is a fundamental flaw in human nature or if just that is the way it is.

  5. LE

    Coincidental that just last night I forked and was reading up on Dan Bricklin and Mitch Kapor. I have no clue what made me do that.For those who don’t know, Bricklin did Visicalc but produced a poor version of it for the IBM PC. Kapor came along in 1983 [2] with Lotus 123 and Bricklins company was literally out of business in a few years.The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, had helped launch the Apple II as one of the earliest personal computers in business use. With IBM’s entry into the market, VisiCalc was slow to respond, and when they did, they launched what was essentially a straight port of their existing system in spite of the greatly expanded hardware capabilities. Lotus’ solution was marketed as a three-in-one, integrated solution, which handled spreadsheet calculations, database functionality, and graphical charts. The Lotus Development Corporation was founded by Mitchell Kapor, a friend of the developers of VisiCalc.As anyone who was around in that era would remember, it was common to ask if a PC Clone “would run lotus” it was the defacto benchmark and literally a way to certify clones (from memory at least).I can’t find any reference to the software that I used on Unix in the 80’s at all.I also had a PC Clone back then (Eagle, founder killed in his new Ferrari the day it went public) on which I used Ashton-Tate’s dbase. [4][1] http://www.bricklin.com/%5B2%5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

    1. Jess Bachman

      I’ve read this comment a few times.. still no idea what “forked” means.

      1. Lawrence Brass

        I think LE is using the term deriving its meaning from unix operating system ‘fork’ operation, which occurs when a process creates another process. That is my guess.Today you will spawn a thread instead of forking a process or even quit using multithreading altogether, as people using node conveniently but unwisely imo do.

        1. LE

          Exactly.

  6. Kirsten Lambertsen

    It would be interesting to know what MIT does to make sure the word gets out to the people they’re trying to recruit here. Maybe it’s more straight forward in the college world than in the employment world. I can’t help but wonder if, say, Brookdale Comm. Coll. knows about it.

    1. fredwilson

      one thing they do is reach out to me and ask me to blog it

      1. Kirsten Lambertsen

        And I tweeted it 🙂

      2. Kirsten Lambertsen

        Oh, and I let my friend who works at Brookdale know about it. I realized it was lame to just question and not actually help!

  7. Jess Bachman

    URM.Women and URM.WURM?There is a great branding opportunity/disaster here, I just know it.

    1. Twain Twain

      Are you and Jim secretly the same person? LOL.

      1. Jess Bachman

        I’m just filling in.

  8. LE

    White men can’t get in but everyone else can? Do I have that right? And what groups exactly are the “under-representative people of color?” (there is nothing that details that). I think it’s a great idea. Just curious also about legality. And what is to prevent someone from gaming this in some way to gain admission (ala ‘liz warren).

    1. creative group

      LE:The institutional and systemic racism combined with discrimination is so complex when viewing how people have and are being denied and discriminated against requires others that have no part in it to experience the similar effects but on a smaller scale. There are those of us that realize and acknowledge that there are people who have not participated in the injustices of those who have come before them and are not responsible for an ancestor they never knew or were unacquainted. We also realize there are those who keep institutional racism and discrimination alive and kicking in every form just using different methods, which requires what appears as antiquated means to defend the antiquated actions. (Learned behavior is difficult to change but not impossible to change)When mentoring disadvantaged youths we always remind them if it wasn’t for good people (Abolitionists, Quaker’s, etc) they would be viewing a very different United States far worse than they think of it. The misinformation that all whites are wealthy is erroneous. They are being trained to mistakingly think an entire group of people were born on third base. A visit to HHS and vital statistics sites dispel who are the majority of US citizens on public assistance of all forms. (SSI, Public Assistance, etc)

  9. ShanaC

    Poorly worded – what do they mean by blockchain technologies in this case

  10. creative group

    Charlie Crystle:Are you not viewing the argument the same but from different side of the rump?Free market supporters can understand economic disparity. (Can’t they?)

  11. jason wright

    what structure, what racism, and where?