Community Outlook with Gabriela Jara
Keeping a finger on the pulse of the community is easy to do if you’re only looking for daily or weekly sentiment. But as you expand your time horizon, people and projects come and go over the years. Sentiments change with each new obstacle. Milestones are reached and new pathways are opened up.
Candidly, it’s very difficult to remain circumspect in the midst of a deluge of instant news. With that in mind, let’s make a concerted effort to take a step back, chat with a long-time IOTA community member/organizer, and get a feel for where we’ve been. Studying the past might give us a hint into where we’re going in the future. There’s no better person to have this conversation with than Gabriela Jara.
Long-time IOTA enthusiasts will already know Gabriela Jara, and that’s especially true for those in the hispanic community. We’ll delve into her background with the first question, so in lieu of a lengthy introduction here, let’s jump straight in!
Before we get into the IOTA topics, let’s learn about YOU! The location that you list in your Twitter profile is San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. Bariloche is a beautiful town set on a picturesque glacial lake in the Andes Mountains. Are you originally from there? Where did you grow up? Bariloche is famous for its outdoor activities (hiking and skiing) – do you do anything like that for fun? What were some of your early interests, and what was your early education like?
I am originally from a city by the sea, even further south in Argentina called Caleta Olivia. I studied in public schools, and had many extracurricular activities such as piano, dance school, and English (this was the most important tool to reach the crypto world). My parents impressed upon me a love for reading, for music, and the desire to discover and learn things from a very young age. I think that the whole combination made me get into this world later on. As an adult, I reached an age where I could not find answers to the demands or needs I had on a personal and professional level in my hometown and decided to make a drastic change. I came to the conclusion that I had to go and live somewhere else and two months after having that thought I found myself quitting my job to settle down in Bariloche. It will be 11 years since then, in January 2021.
I consider myself really lucky to live here, it is a quiet place full of nature and dazzling landscapes near the Andes Mountains. I went from the sea to the mountains. In Bariloche there is a great variety of cultures and interests, it is a fertile place to develop, and that is an advantage for what I am doing now. Besides that, some of the most important technological centers in the country and in the world are located here, such as INVAP (in which several satellites have been built and are now in space), the CNA, and the Balseiro Institute which is a seedbed of great brains. As for my outdoor activities, I like to hike up the mountains or walk along the lake’s shore, and of course finish the day with a good homemade beer while looking at the lake and the mountains.
What were you doing when you first stumbled upon the idea of cryptocurrencies? Was your work/education related to technology at the time? Was Bitcoin the first crypto you came across?
