Hey everyone! I'm excited to be writing my first post for this amazing community. My name is Fernando Nicolas Buero Trebino but to make it simpler you can call me Fer :)  I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina 33 years ago, and while this isn’t my favorite thing to do, i’m going to introduce myself!

The beginning

I started to develop websites when I was in high school, with an amazing teacher who introduced me to the world of technology and to the tools I would need to become a developer. However, my first passion being music, I wanted to give it a shot and studied music straight after my graduation, for 5 years. I played the bass in several bands, recorded a couple of albums too. All in all it was a great experience, but I started to realise that the current market society is basically unfair and leaves only tiny opportunities for projects that are not meant to make money with.

Presentation of our record with my band Tripp

Working 9 to 5

Although I dedicated most of my time to music, I was still working on various side projects in programming, and I also joined front end developing and Actionscript courses. I worked as a developer from the age of 22 until 26, soon to become digital producer, manage broader projects and be in charge of the digital department of multinational advertising agencies.

All these years working for advertising agencies strengthened my experience in the industry. I enjoyed developing digital products and, most of all, enjoyed fighting with the agency’s dinosaurs thinking that internet is just a trend among others. But, progressively, I started to realize that I was working after hours and during weekends, and that I was having crazy deadlines just to sell products that mainly people don’t need and even worst, I had to elaborate the best way to trick the masses into making them believe that they needed these products. It took me almost two years to have the balls to quit and started to work on projects that have a purpose and a meaning, but I did it! My main goal was to become happy with what i was working on, not just to be happy being useful for someone else. I started to believe in what I was doing, without thinking about the money I could make, but, on the opposite, about how happy it would make me.

You can travel, if you want it

At the age of 25 the advertising company I was working for sent me to Detroit to work for General Motors Online Ads, and the feeling of being away from my country and being able to travel was life changing for me. Since then, i never stopped travelling: I spent four months travelling around South America, 9 weeks in Asia, two trips to Europe (one month each), and two visits to the US (three months each). I met my girlfriend in Hanoi, Vietnam, when I was backpacking through Asia and we’re getting married next June in France!I wish to keep travelling as much as possible and I encourage everyone to do so. I believe that there is no better way to deeply understand who we are, than discovering all the different cultures and ways of living on our planet.

I want to change the world

When I came back from travelling South America in 2014, I felt a strong urge to become an active citizen and to try to change the world for the best. During a hackaton back in 2012, together with fellow programer Oscar Guindzberg we pitched our project Votamos Todos,  a platform where people - instead of Congress - would directly vote the bills. These were the times where the Liquid Democracy term started to spread across. We got to the final stage of the Hackaton, rewarded with mentoring from tech leader Santiago Siri who, at that time, was founding the Net Party. He’s now leading an amazing Liquid Democracy project called Democracy OS.

Soon after meeting Santiago Siri I joined the Net Party. We lived some exciting moments, peaking in 2013 when we almost got a congressman elected to represent the system. However, I started to realize that most of the people participating in the party were people with opportunities, mostly upper middle class; therefore the idea of liquid democracy is amazingly powerful, but it becomes a problem when only one part of the entire society is represented in the system. As a matter of fact, this could lead to a dangerous Weighted Vote democracy, based on who is able to access to a computer. I started to get involved in an NGO called Somos, that operates in excluded neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. I wanted to help people who don’t know how to use a computer or the internet and at the same time, be able to learn from the students interactions with a technology they’ve never used before.

Learning

I spent the past four years working with Somos: the first two years, as a volunteer participating in the art workshop for kids and preparing my project of internet classes in the Villa 31 neighbourhood. While the classroom was getting built, i managed to gather all  the computers students were going to study with, set up an internet connection (much harder that it sounds) and started to prepare the course itself. In 2015 Javier Cerra came to Somos to try to bridge the gap between blockchain technology and the society - it was my first real encounter with Blockchain and it blew my mind.

During the past two years, we expanded the courses to two new excluded neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. The idea of the project was to learn from all our experience in the Villa 31 neighbourhood and apply it to others, while enrolling new teachers to keep expanding to new places. We designed and put together a Summary for the course, got in touch with local organizations in each neighbourhood, acquired computers and set up a viable internet connection for the new classes, but also helped to spread the word about the classes. In return, the organization should meet us with two volunteers willing to teach the classes (usually young adults, around 20). After a quick training the teachers were able to give their first classes - nowadays we just need to supervise once in a while that all is working well, and try to solve the problems that may occur.

Our goal with this course was to be practical: we weren’t going to teach them how to use Word or Excel, but rather teach them how to use internet with the explorer: search the web for information, learn how to use new tools like Duolingo. During the last semester of this year, we realized that there’s a need to learn how to use mobile phones, so we adjusted our lessons to include the best practices with mobiles. This mobile course will be implemented in other neighbourhoods in 2018. 

Blockchain

I can’t recall the exact moment I first heard about Bitcoin, but I guess it was about 5 years ago. I’ve only recently started to own cryptocurrencies, at the beginning of this year when I received two salaries on BTC. I kept them in the wallet for three months, and then withdrew the original payment - this year was great, but in reality I don't own many cryptos.

My whole knowledge of the blockchain technology was, like I said, introduced by Javier Serra, who was an essential part of the internet courses helping us to get all the resources we need. These courses are part of a project called SystemD, and the team of people that have joined this project is amazing. We got funding from the FOMIN, the innovative division of the BID. Our project for next year is to create a wallet that enables social inclusion for the excluded who could then access to credit with the help of non-traditional meritocratic ratings.

I met Pablo Tutino (@dargonar) and Matias Romeo (@elmato) in 2016 at the Buenos Aires Bitcoin Embassy. They’d both been working with Bitshares during the past couple of years, and they created Moneda Par, the first mutual credit token of latin america and one of the first cryptos with social goals for the world. As soon as I heard about their project in details, my mind was blown (again!).

Since then, I’ve been working on the Moneda Par project, helping the communities to get familiar with the currency, together with an incredible team rich of different profiles and excellent backgrounds. We’ve been travelling around the country, connecting communities of the Non-observed economies: just great people who want to make the difference. Every time that we observe a new transaction of products with Moneda Par we feel the same amazing feeling and a boost of energy to continue on this path. While we were working on Moneda Par, different projects started to knock at our door, asking for their own token with their own particularly goal. That's hows WABA was created.

 “WABA is the first blockchain based platform that hosts, interconnects and scales up a wide variety of complementary economic systems -hubs- driven by communities. WABA network is designed as an open and extendable modular platform that allows communities to rapidly prototype, test and implement their own money and governing system.” – waba.network 

We’re now working full time on WABA, creating new hubs in order to make blockchain a real solution for real people and I can't be happier to have made that bold decision of quitting my job two years ago. I wake up happy every morning, knowing that i'm trying to change the world, that the goal is always two steps forward but also sure that the ride is what really matters.

I started by saying that i don't like to introduce myself, but in the end it was a good exercise to summarize my path and to explain how I joined the Blockchain community. More detailed articles about the different parts of this post coming soon! Thanks for reading :)

Linkedin: FerBueroTrebino / Facebook: FerBueroTrebino