I don't have any project up and running, but I had tried in the past(and still looking) to get like minded people to work on an open source project to make education equity-based rather than loan-based. It has a genuine use for federated/permission-oriented distributed ledger. Iroha under the hyperledger umbrella was a good choice for the project.
This project idea falls under the category of "moonshot project". And it is an open source and not for profit idea. I don't think anyone will invest in the usual sense.
Basic idea is to use a federated blockchain platform to form a graph of students, teachers, employers and relevant government agencies. When a student gets a job and starts earning income, a percentage of the salary paid via the employer is sent to the education institution and teachers related to that student. More details are here: https://loan-free-ed.neocities.org
> 2 is wiktionary, I think?
Not exactly Wiktionary. Wiktionary is a static type of dictionary. What I envision is a more dynamic multi-lingual dictionary where there is link for a word from one language to other languages. That way users will be able to explore other languages and learn.
I have two ideas. But, as I said in my post, I am open to ideas from others. Here are my two ideas:
0. Making education funding sustainable without putting student into debt. Businesses will directly fund education as they are one of the major beneficiaries.
1. Creating online, live and interactive multi-lingual dictionaries to help reduce language barrier.
You also need to account for exchange rate and processing fees. Some recipients may not receive 1 dollar.
Edit0: Also, I just realised, many poor people do not have means to exchange dollar into their local currency. So sending them 1 dollar through post is going to be a waste.
Edit1: Most countries will not allow this due to hawala which creates black money.
Some people have ideas to fix something within the society that they think can be better. Engineers also have some such ideas. I would like to get together engineers so that we can work together on some meaningful project with an aim to solve some social problems.
> The world has a ton of nonprofits
Can be a social enterprise?
> Most humans aren't very effective.
If that is the argument for any new idea/venture, then nothing will ever get done.
Education funding should be based on equity, and not on debt. And it should be funded by the society as a whole and not by some private for-profit entities.
It is outrageous that we make young students debt-laden even before they have any income source. This is not only unethical, it also sets a wrong example for the younger generation.
Possibility of Microsoft buying Facebook is not unthinkable. Microsoft is already an investor in Facebook. Both HoloLens and Oculus are already moving in the same direction with enterprise play.
It is at present just at conceptual level, but I am talking to the stakeholders.
Why is this cool? Well, if this works, then not only will it make education easily accessible to everyone but it will also fundamentally change how education benefits society.
> You may not have a single entity controlling it but you still have a group of entities who already trust each other and have agreed to create a shared database.
That is the reason why blockchain was choosen.
> My point is, private blockchain doesn't seem to be having any additional advantage at the cost of efficiency and speed of traditional database.
It is not about cost or speed. It is about securing the data in such a way that no single entity controls it. Because the data will be of students, it is better to have multiple trust-worthy entities having an oversight rather than a single entity.