# Blockchain Summer School Retrospective

The Blockchain Summer School in Pula was our first experience as teachers and panelists. Despite some difficulties in terms of lessons time scheduling or last minute implementations, the event experience was quite smooth. The organizers were happy about our work and interesting questions and discussions came up.

The topics we covered included theoretical/basics concepts on ZKPs, the Circom language, Semaphore, and MPC Phase2 Suite. About 1/4 of the class was able to complete the exercises on Circom and contribute with the Phase2CLI to the ceremony, while almost all participants were able to use the Semaphore boilerplate and generate their proofs. Many of them asked interesting questions, and some also seemed interested in integrating our projects into their academic path or into personal projects.

Many other questions covered non-technical aspects, such as how we work, what skills are required in our team, or even questions about the Merge or Ethereum competitors (e.g. Algorand and Cardano).

## Academic Networking

We have been proposed to start research grants probably funded by the Sardinia region on zero-knowledge technologies. This could be a great way for students to start using our technologies during their university path (Master's thesis or P.hD). We are seeing this as potential first step for hiring.

[Bartoletti](https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Massimo-Bartoletti-10753835) was our professor at the University of Cagliari. He was pretty excited after the panel and he's currently studying attacks on DeFi protocols. He's a privacy-oriented individual, so I think we could try to understand if he's interested on ZKPs and possible academic collaborations.

## Hiring

Unfortunately, the students were pretty "beginners" in terms of ZKPs. Just one guy cought our attention because he was able to solve the exercises very quickly and interacted with us after each session. However, his Github profile is actually empty. Therefore, we can't evaluate him so well. We are investigating if it makes sense to get in touch with him and try to understand how much is interested in studying our technologies and if he would like to create a personal demonstrative project on Github.

## Improvements & Ideas

### Communication

Since the background of the audience was extremely mixed, it was not easy for us to capture everyone's attention during the different sessions. We tried to direct our efforts on abstracting the concepts of our projects. Therefore, we think that stimulating discussion among people with different backgrounds (e.g. designers, programmers, cryptographers) within our team, can be extremely helpful to find the right words and best explaining our projects to the external audience.

The work done with [Semaphore](https://semaphore.appliedzkp.org/) and with our new [PSE website](https://appliedzkp.org) goes in the right direction. An educational approach supported by good documentation, clear code and effective design can be extremely useful in expanding our community and engaging new people.

### Be Aware of Ethereum Ecosystem

At these kinds of events it is very important to have an opinion about what's going on in the Ethereum ecosystem. So, this is an intermediary step in order to be ready to discuss about everything. However, sometimes it's important to admit our ignorance and avoid talking nonsense; for our integrity and because we don't know how much knowledge have the people behind us.

### Hackathons

Workshops can be a great opportunity to gather feedback and ideas, but hackathons might be better spots to find talented people. For example, we probably have to think about [ETHBerlin³](https://office.ethberl.in/) as a great opportunity.

## Other considerations

* Circom seems to be a difficult language to understand for those coming from more popular languages (i.e. Python, Java, JavaScript). The syntax is a bit counterintuitive, and without some knowledge of SNARKs it is difficult to understand certain concepts.
* We need to plan more. Privacy-preserving w/ ZKP is a niche tech; so we need to start by assuming that is not for everyone's understanding (at least, in the immediate).

@cedoor
@Jeeiii

### After Retrospective Tasks
* Check w/ Ph.D students about their research trails to see if some interactions are possible
* Setup a call w/ MdF for scholarships/grants
* Chat w/ Bart

###### tags: `pse`