Rebooting the IOTA Evangelist Network
Some history and the IEN hibernation
The Evangelist IOTA Network was founded by Kevin Chen in August 2017. According to Kevin, in an interview I did with him for IOTA Hispano:
IOTA Evangelist Network (IEN) is an eclectic, tight-knit, human mesh network of dedicated IOTA enthusiasts, community leaders, and innovators from various walks of life worldwide. Our DNA make-up include developers, hardware engineers, solution architects, entrepreneurs, data scientists, makers, roboticists, researchers, futurists, designers, project managers, business developers, executives, bankers, business/financial analysts, sales reps, marketers, consultants, filmmakers, DJs, restaurateurs, pharmacists, teachers, and students, and more. We work in startups, large corporates, universities, state governments, and nonprofits alike across diverse industries. We join forces around our passion for IOTA technology and volunteer time and energy to support IOTA Foundation’s goal to educate and promote IOTA globally to achieve ubiquitous adoption via co-creation. We do this through meetups, events, workshops, and use case/PoC implementations.
I joined the IOTA Evangelist Network on March 2018, after a few months of having Kevin Chen trying to onboard me on Slack. On my first call, Peter Willemsen revealed the state of his work integrating IOTA into Ledger Nano. Soon after Lman Chu started working on IOTA based solutions with Taipei, Nino Ulrich came out with what would end up being Iampass, Terry Shane gave his amazing “100 Billion Reasons Why” talk, Daniel Trauth introduced me to the IOTA DataMarket and the amazing work being done by his team in the Aachen Lab, Dennis Shönke founded Skaly, Kumar Anirudh started working with IOTA and many others started PoCs (it would require another post to name everyone).
Damn, those were amazing days and the amount of talented people you could access by being an IEN member was just motivating: I myself ended up founding a project to bridge the XDK110 with the Tangle (xdk2mam).
Together with all this technological development, Meetups were organized all over the world by IEN members, Paper IOTA magazines were created (EinfachIOTA) and products were sold using IOTA through IOTA Shops.
It really was like an ocean of bright minds and creative people tinkering with all sorts of IOTA related things, producing amazing and innovative results. To me it was just beautiful to see, and I was honored to be part of that group.
