Celo University Guild - upcoming program & request for feedback

Author(s): TC Dong, supported by the wonderful community team Daniel Olarte & Anna Kryukova

Celo is looking to launch a new program - Celo University Guild. A gamified way for students and institutions to receive support to host independent events and activities, and earn rewards for their efforts.

Summary

The Celo University Guild is structured around ranks and guild activities. Everytime a guild activity is performed by a member chapter (Blockchain club, institution or any general academic entity) of the Guild, they earn points and occassionally, individual rewards for the activity. Once enough points have been earned, the chapter would rise by a rank. Raising by a rank earns both financial and non-financial rewards for further events. Points and ranks reset each academic year, September - August.

Vision

The Guild aims to empower the community to connect with each other and host independent events. Much like how TEDx became grassroot, independent programs which came from TED’s motto “ideas worth spreading”, the Guild wants to inspire independent events organized between institutions, clubs and the wider community. The Guild serves only as a platform to provide resources, networking and rewards.

Proposed Guild Operations and Activities

1. Sign up and legal processing

Sign up is via a form submission with a short description of proposed activities that a chapter wants to perform for the year. After review, successful chapters would be added to the Discord and receive an email detailing the activities and Guild structure. At this point, any member can post or sign up for public events in the channel.

Legal processing (KYC) is only required when financial rewards or assistance is requested. This process will generally consist of understanding who the entity / person receiving the financial incentive is and the amount tied to each milestone.

2. Ranks

There are 4 ranks. As chapters raise through the ranks, they are becoming more capable at hosting large, independent events and forging wider networks. The ranks are:

  1. Baby Bonsai - First stage. Open to all to join the conversation and participate in public events
  2. Wood Wide Web - Starting to host small events and talking with others
  3. Elden Tree - Hosting a few large events and inspiring others in the Guild
  4. Lord of the Wilds - forging partnerships with institutions, incubators and creating publicly available content.

As chapters rise through the ranks financial rewards are unlocked at each level and non-financial rewards such as travel scholarships to events, POAPs and ability to customize support and events becomes available.

3. Rewards

There are three types of rewards:

  1. Event Rewards for completing certain Guild activities.
  2. Rank Rewards described above for reaching a certain rank.
  3. Bounties are temporary rewards which incentivize different activities within the Guild. These rewards will change according to the overall state of the Guild.

What’s Next?

The team is aiming to launch Celo University Guild on 26 May at Kuneco. To celebrate this launch, we will be providing travel scholarships to the Celo event at Ethcc Paris in July!

Looking forward to feedback from the community! Please view the preliminary Guild website here.

5 Likes

This will improve Team formation and can filter projects that require grants. But what’s amazing about this is when great minds collide in becoming one.

2 Likes

Iam very excited about the initiative of Celo University Guild program. This is what may be the world has been waiting for, to focus more on the University students whom we believe are young and eager to discover new opportunities and Blockchain being the new technology now .I believe this will yield to the world of technology and help to eliminate some of the existing problems in blockchain space since it is new initiative. I will be the happiest if am given the opportunity to attend the first in July.

2 Likes

This is a wonderful idea. Congrats! I am going to refer some people from our university, UFPE, to commit to this program!

1 Like

One thing that I feel is missing from Celo ecosystem is a streamlined university talent → recruitment pipeline. It’d be great to see such a Guild play a role in matchmaking graduating students or students seeing trainerships with projects in the ecosystem. For reference, Curve Labs has a few master’s student trainees, and we’ve successfully transitioned one to a full-time position after their education was completed.

1 Like

Awesome, I could help connect some juniors to take part and support the University Guild program.

1 Like