Welcome to Carmel

The Decentralized Open Source Tech Education Platform that helps aspiring and seasoned Software Developers grow their skill set and track their growth through tokenized peer challenges.

Decentralized Education

Carmel is architected as a Decentralized Community of Teachers and Students, with absolutely no dependency on a central third party authority. With Carmel, developers are in charge of their own learning journey and they decide what's best for the community as a whole.

Hands-On Learning Experience

Carmel is designed as a radical departure from the typical video-based lecture model, as it provides a learning experience much closer to how professional software developers learn on an on-going basis, rather than mirroring how computer science is taught in a traditional classroom setting.

Tokenized Growth Tracking

The Carmel microlearning approach means that the material is smaller and easier to produce and to consume. The peer approach ensures that the content can be produced in a scalable way, as the network increases. And the tokenized challenges allow for fine-grained tracking of progress.

Made For Learners

This is the hero of the Carmel Story and the main protagonist. We want to come together as a community to primarily solve Chris' problem before all other problems. Remember - Chris can't sleep at night because he is worried he will lose his job to a robot. Soon. Very soon.

Chris earns Carmel Experience Points (CARMEL XP) for every Carmel Challenge he successfully completes. He may either purchase Carmel Challenges with Carmel Tokens (CARMEL) or he may receive them freely from any of the other stakeholders in the community.

A Completely Decentralized & Autonomous Community

The Carmel Community is designed to be a learning community and so the primary stakeholder is and always will be the Learner - ie. Chris. But in order for Chris to be successful, our community needs to include supporting stakeholders - much like any story is simply not the same without its own supporting characters. What would Batman be without Robin... But that's for another time.

Tokenized Challenges

A Carmel Challenge is authored by someone who is familiar with the problem at hand and is in a position to challenge someone else while providing guidance and is also able to write the validation code required. In essence, developers challenge each other to climb the digital mountain so to speak, a daunting task to say the least. The ultimate goal is not how far a developer grows in their career, but that they keep growing. That they keep climbing.

Token Economy

A significant problem yet to be solved in the learning and development fields, particularly as it applies to software development, is the fact that it is extremely difficult to measure learning progress. Development Managers have a lot of tools available to them to accompany developers on their learning journey but none are accurate predictors of the actual progress being made. The primary challenge is the fact that as knowledge workers, the act of acquiring new technical skills is a fluid and creative process, making it practically impossible to measure as one would measure a purely manual or physical process.

Token Distribution

There is a total supply of 70,000,000 Carmel Tokens of which 60% are available for distribution, 20% are reserved for founders in a Founders Fund, 10% for partners in a Partners Fund and 10% are used for bounties, rewards, scholarships and incentives in a Fluid Fund. The Carmel Token Distribution of the 60% of tokens starts on February 26, 2018 and ends on August 20, 2018, for a total of 25 weeks.

Platform Architecture

Carmel is designed from scratch to be decentralized, flexible, highly scalable, low maintenance and easy to use. The backend of the platform is a hybrid blockchain-cloud for performance reasons. As much as a blockchain-only architecture would be ideal, for the amount of transactional power Carmel requires, there is no available blockchain that can support those needs yet. The architecture is designed to be flexible so that as such a blockchain becomes production ready, Carmel can be transitioned to that infrastructure exclusively. Until that phase, the backend will incorporate a serverless cloud that will allow fast on-demand computation and will scale as needed.

Security Model

The bulk of the cryptographic security in Carmel, resides within the Carmel Desktop App. That's where the Carmel Wallet lives and that's where blockchain transactions are signed. The way Carmel secures the Desktop App is through a secure vault, tied to the developer's machine and heavily protected by both symmetric and assymetric encryption, as well as password hashing and secure local password storage. The Carmel Vault is secured using advanced cryptographic algorithms and it is practically impossible to compromise.