Mentor Of The Week: Meet Wim!
Because technology is evolving. And so do consumption behaviours.
Florinel: Who are you and what is your expertise?
Wim: My name is Wim Stalmans and I’m the founder of The Blockchain Academy®. We are a young structure that provides Blockchain courses and consultancy services to international corporate and public decision makers, in order to help them understand what Blockchain is, what its implementations and strategic implications are.
Florinel: How has your personal journey led you to Blockchain?
Wim: The underlying thread in my career choices has always been the pursuit of the understanding of society and economy. Trying to grasping Blockchain, forces you to understand the economic and societal interactions from the ground up. Blockchain is so incredibly system-fundamental and all-encompassing, that it is the logical continuation of my pursuit. The incredible privilege and opportunity that Blockchain brings about resides in the process of rethinking completely how society and economy functions.
Florinel: Why do you think is it important to teach children about Blockchain?
Wim: Like the millennials are using the internet as integral part of their every day lives, our younger children will be tomorrow’s integrated Blockchain users. It’s always important to know how things function and what their role is in order to be able to give them the right place in our lives and be the master of the thing instead of the inverse. This applies particularly to Blockchain as it is a tool that enables people to take on ownership and accountability for the management of their societal and economic relations and interactions.
Florinel: What will the children have learned at the end of your 2 hours workshop?
Wim: The workshop puts the children in hands-on practical situations in which they will learn: 1) that money is an agreement on a number that represents the value of all goods and services in the economy 2) how the exchange of ownership and money functions in a centralised system managed by someone else then themselves and a decentralised system managed by the children themselves.
Florinel: One more thing: three takeaways you wish parents, teachers, schools would know about how Blockchain can contribute to their children’s education:
- Data ownership away from trusted third parties towards sovereign individual ownership;
- Project management away from classical monolithic corporate structures towards a cloud based presence of goods and services around which project management can rapidly be organised by global contributions of individuals (gig-economy);
- Responsibility and ownership of one’s relations and interactions with society and economy, away from a centralised third party led organisation towards an individual empowerment and organisation.