ProtoSchool is an educational community dedicated to making it easy to get started with decentralized technologies. It's a community-driven effort that relies on our many awesome contributors to develop coding tutorials and make this content available at chapters around the world through live events. We always need more help, and there are lots of ways to pitch in and take an active role in supporting our work.
ProtoSchool has two main initiatives:
- Building and maintaining tutorials that teach about the protocols underlying the decentralized web, hosted at https://proto.school/#/
- Organizing educational events around the world
Learn more in our launch presentation.
As a community, we support the following principles:
- Beginners should feel welcome
- Chapters should operate autonomously
- Chapters should experiment with new ways to engage their community, and share approaches with other chapters over time
- Events should be affordable and should strive towards diversity and inclusiveness
- We are 100% open source and like to license things as open source/creative commons
The "Proto" in ProtoSchool represents the networking protocols that support the decentralized web.
We also take a lot of inspiration from NodeSchool. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and all that jazz.)
See if there is a chapter near you. Each chapter gets their own github repo, e.g. https://github.com/protoschool/san-francisco. These repos usually serve at least two purposes (maybe more):
- host a chapter page on the
gh-pagesbranch (example) - provice a discussion board for the chapter using GitHub Issues (example)
There might be an issue for new or prospective members to introduce themselves, or there may be one that is an announcement/planning for the next event. To receive emails when new discussions happen, be sure to click "Watch" on your chapter's repo.
If there is no local chapter near you and you'd like to start one, check out our guide for instructions on how to get started.
All of our tutorials point people at this issue board when they get stuck:
https://github.com/protoschool/protoschool.github.io/issues
Questions we receive there range from beginner to advanced. You can click "Watch" on that repo to get emails in your inbox when new people ask questions. This helps us out a lot!
In some cases, the best way to help will be by answering questions directly. In others, it will be to improve the tutorial so the instructions are more clear (see below).
We'd love your help improving our tutorial content!
The code for our tutorials lives at https://github.com/protoschool/protoschool.github.io and active maintainers include:
- @terichadbourne
- @mikeal
New contributors are welcome! You can check out the open issues to find one you can jump in and help with.
We're excited to add new tutorials to our collection, and we'd love your help generating ideas or building the code. Currently the primary focus is on IPFS, but we'll be adding tutorials on IPLD, libp2p, and Multiformats as we go.
Have an idea for a new tutorial?
Take a look at the tutorial ideas flagged with the new-tutorial tag in the ProtoSchool issue queue. If there's a similar idea there already, join the conversation!
If you have an idea for a new tutorial that's not yet been proposed, please open an new issue so we can share feedback before you get started. (Don't feel like you have the skills to build a tutorial yourself? Please still go ahead and share your idea.)
ProtoSchool tutorials are built using Vue.js. Check out our instructions for developing lessons. If the type of lesson you're hoping to create isn't supported by the current lesson structure, please open an issue to tell us more about what the format you have in mind.
A big part of ProtoSchool is documenting our process in a way that helps other organizers build successful communities around the world.
If you come across something that is unclear, either in a tutorial, elsewhere on our website, or in our organizing guidance here in GitHub, please send a pull request with your proposed changes in a new branch.
We have an issue tracker specifically for organizers, which is a great place to start discussions about best practices for leading your local chapter.