Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise
As many of you may know, I serve as Director of the Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise (ISFE) at Oklahoma State University (OSU). I also teach Entrepreneurship at the University and serve as faculty co-advisor to the Free Enterprise Society.
I am currently in active discussions with University administrators to obtain authorization to seek funding to create a new center within the Institute. The center would focus on promoting, facilitating, and disseminating academic research related to decentralized management and governance. I am also actively seeking input from the Hive community with respect to the proposed mission, vision, and activities for the center. I have had specific discussions with @theycallmedan, @starkerz, and @guiltyparties, and heartily welcome others to join in those ongoing discussions. If you would like to participate, please contact me via Discord at trostparadox#8559.
New OSU Class Submitting Weekly Essays via Hive
First, I want to apologize for not posting about this earlier in the semester. This has been an exceedingly hectic semester for me -- a big part of that has been the planning, organizing, and hosting of a Blockchain Ideas Summit (more about that below) and work related to the aforementioned center.
In any event, I want to inform you all that one of my Entrepreneurship colleagues here at OSU, Dr. Per Bylund, is teaching a new course this semester, entitled Entrepreneurship & Society. At the beginning of the semester, Dr. Bylund agreed to require the 50 or so students in the class to submit their weekly assignments via Hive. This is something I have been doing with an honors seminar I usually teach every semester (but am not teaching this semester): Entrepreneurial Value Creation in Society.
In Entrepreneurship & Society, the students' weekly assignments include a 500- to 750-word essay on the entrepreneurial principles they observe in a specific movie or podcast that they are required to watch or listen to each week.
Their essays are due each Wednesday evening at 11:59p (CDT/CST).
Whereas I do not have any dedicated class time with these students, I was not able to give them any hands-on direction with respect to how to structure their posts, etc. I provided them with written instructions via the class's learning management system (LMS), but it's unclear how many students paid close attention to those instructions.
As such, in order to give them some real-world feedback, I urge you to:
- Check out their posts and upvote content that you find well-articulated and well-presented.
- Provide constructive comments on the things they are doing well and/or the things they need to improve on.
In addition, I have announced to the class that ISFE will be providing at least one $250 scholarship to whatever student from that class can earn the highest cumulative Hive rewards during the semester. So, your upvotes will have a direct impact on that competition. The competition will be based on all Hive-related rewards earned by a given student, regardless of whether those rewards were directly related to the class assignments. With that in mind, please consider 'following' any student whose essays you find particularly thought-provoking or well-written.
The class has been instructed to use the tags #gradnium and #eee-2083 for each of their weekly-assignment posts. These can be immediately filtered from various front-ends using 'created' in the URL, as in the following examples:
Of course, anyone can use those tags, whether they happen to be students in the class or not.
With that said, if you want to filter exclusively on students, you can use the following front-end (which is currently configured to mute all accounts except student accounts):
As a side-note, the TA for the class recently discovered that a student had been spinning / plagiarizing other students' essays. In addition to dealing with those infractions at the University level, I alerted members of the Hive community who are actively involved in anti-plagiarism efforts. If you notice any such activities, please contact me asap via Discord at trostparadox#8559.
Blockchain Ideas Summit
On Tuesday, September 27, we had George Gilder on campus lecturing about Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (actually, his lecture was a segue from his 2018 book Life After Google and his 2023 book Life After Capitalism). That lecture can be viewed here.
The next morning, we hosted a Blockchain Ideas Summit, where four projects were presented to a panel of experts.
The projects presented at the Summit were:
- Value for Value (v4v.app) and PodCasting 2.0 (podcastindex.org), by Dr. Brian Bishko (@brianoflondon)
- HiveAuth (hiveauth.com) by @arcange
- SPK Network (spk.network) by Matt Starkey (@starkerz)
- Compensara Open Money Protocol (COMP) by David Trost
The panelists were:
- John Tamny: author of The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy About Currencies and Inflation Sets the Stage for the Crypto Revolution and 5 other books.
- George Gilder: author of Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy and Life After Capitalism and 22 other books.
- Jonathan Button: digital assets portfolio manager; consultant to FIFA on FIFA+ Collect.
- David Trost: cybersecurity engineer; founder of Compensara Open Money Protocol (COMP).
- Mike Trisko: CEO of Phore Blockchain project.
- Matt Starkey (@starkerz): co-founder of 3Speak and SPK Network.
- Dr. Jesse Reich (@aggroed): co-founder and CEO of Splinterlands; former chemistry professor.
- Dr. Brian Bishko (@brianoflondon): founder of v4v.app; inventor of Podping for Podcasting 2.0.
- @arcange: founder and developer of HiveAuth.
- Dan Hensley (@theycallmedan): co-founder of 3Speak and SPK Network.
Here are links to posts containing videos from the Summit:
- Opening Remarks by George Gilder (7 minutes)
- Introduction of the Panelists (7 minutes)
- Value 4 Value Project Presentation and Q&A, by Dr. Brian Bishko (@brianoflondon) (46 minutes)
- HiveAuth Project Presentation and Q&A, by @arcange (42 minutes)
(Unfortunately, a memory card failure resulted in the loss of the video and audio for the final two project presentations. Also, the audio quality of the remote presentations is marginal due to technical issues on our end. I did my best to improve the quality via post-processing of the audio files, but the quality is still not as crisp as I had hoped.)