Founders

We are scientists that entered the blockchain space in 2021, started to develop a privacy-preserving dApp called Abakhus (https://linktr.ee/abakhus) and realized that (i) building a community to bridge portuguese and spanish speaking people and (ii) onboarding scientists and minorities was a gap to be filled, then IberoAm initiative was born. One of the founders is a native spanish-speaking of indigenous origin, the other is a native portuguese-speaking of mixed origin (as most Brazilians are).

Mission

IberoAm is a non-profit and three-fold initiative aiming to identify, promote and then support iberoamerican blockchain/web3 projects with a clear social and/or financial impact for the region and prioritizing minorities.

Goal

The goal of this project is to organize Conferences/Meetings, Hackathons and NFT Exhibitions as means to onboard then support the most impacting and innovative iberoamerican projects with a clear social/financial impact for the region and always prioritizing minorities. To partner with several other web3 actors/initiatives, and prioritizing minorities (based on DEI principles), in order to build a bigger and more inclusive community.

Previous Gitcoin participation

We participated in GR15 and Grants Protocol Simulated Round. The funds obtained were used mainly to pay for logistics, including photography, video-recording, snacks, beverages and transportation of the events we organized.

Achievements

Our first and successfull achieved goal in 2022 was the organization of an online conference (containing 15 talks and 3 short-courses) that was streamed to our YouTube channel: https://tinyurl.com/ysand33a and also aimed to identify at least 3 iberoamerican impact projects. An independent committee was assembled for that task and 6 iberoamerican impact projects were identified and rewarded using tokens from (i) a CrowdFunding initiative in partnership with NFTfy (https://www.nftfy.org/), BlockchainRio (https://www.blockchainrio.com.br/), Ribon (https://ribon.io/), BanklessBr (https://artigos.banklessbr.com/) and PlustusFi (https://plutusfi.io/) and also from (ii) Shade Protocol (https://shadeprotocol.io/).

The six selected Impact Projects are:

Favelaverso https://twitter.com/Favelaverso

Gran Chaco https://twitter.com/granchaconft

Brashill https://twitter.com/BrashillNFT

Crypto Samba https://twitter.com/cryptosamba7

Brasil com S https://twitter.com/brasilwithsnft

Coletivo Oyxabaten https://twitter.com/lucianoducirilo https://twitter.com/oyxabaten

IberoAm Online Conference Program (August 26-27th): https://iberoam.xyz/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/iberoam-conference-program.pdf

Our 4 main achievements in Q1 2023 were:

(i) We successfully organized a disrupting IRL event to onboard scientists, data privacy advocates and social impact leaders on the blockchain ecosystem called "From Genomes and Privacy to Social Impact using Blockchain" funded by Eth-Colombia and Clr.fund. The whole event was recorded and is publicly available (to serve as an educational resource) at the Technological Park of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/live/FxnJ-pJgRsU?feature=share

(ii) Participated as speakers in the first ever Decentralized Science (DeSci) panel organized by Ethrereum Brazil in the Ethereum Rio 2023 conference (https://www.ethereumbrasil.com/ethereumrio).

(iii) We also successfully organised the first ever Decentralized Science (DeSci) event in Brazil called DeSci Rio (https://iberoam.xyz/?page_id=582) having DeSci World (https://desci.world/), DeSci Latam (https://linktr.ee/descilatam), Ibmec (https://www.ibmec.br/) and Favelaverso(https://linktr.ee/favelaverso) as partners.

(iv) A meetup with students of the Computing Institute (https://www.dcc.ufrj.br/) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (https://ufrj.br/en/) was organized in March 30th, having as speaker Steph Orpilla from Polygon Labs and to talk about "Intro to the Polygon Ecosystem and Polygon zkEVM"

The pics composing the banner in this project page summarize our main activities to date

Next steps and long term goals

We are planning to organize additional IRL Decentralized Science (DeSci) conferences and meetups at Innovation Hubs (inside and outside University campuses) and in partnership with impact projects, in order to onboard more people and always prioritizing minorities into the web3/blockchain space. Onboarding scientists is a challenge as most of them dont know the web3/blockchain technology and its ecosystem and are too busy with day-to-day academic demands. We also believe that one of the major DeSci contributions will be social inclusion since the traditional science system has not been so inclusive, and only during the last years it started to change in countries such as Brazil with the adoption of affirmative actions and quota policy aimed at social inclusion, so DeSci embracing DEI should be a natural process. Funds to be raised will be used to pay mainly for logistics, including photography, website maintenance, video-recording, snacks, beverages, meeting/conference room leasing and transportation.