OUTREACH TO WEB DEVELOPERS — ILF Grant Progress Report

In my October 2023-February 2024 grant period I started working on outreach to web developers. Now that my grant period has ended I continue this work under contract with the ILF. This report treats the February to June period.

Target audience

The situation I sketched in my previous report hasn't fundamentally changed. Web developers, who I see as our early target audience, continue to be interested, and Web Monetization continues to be unavailable. Still, there are some improvements to report.

In late January we had the first Web Monetization Work Week in Cape Town, and there the web developers first strategy was formally decided on by the entire team: they will become our most important target audience in the early stages of Web Monetization. When we discussed the fundamentals and features of Web Monetization, we did so with web developer concerns in mind, and we continue to do so to the present day.

Banners

In January I wanted better banners. We got them in May: they said Web Monetization in large, soothing letters, and relegated the ILF logo to a secondary position. This is the way I think we should handle outreach to web developers in the short term: focus everything on Web Monetization, and don't talk too much about who is enabling it - that part is not yet important. In the future, we'll be able to introduce the ILF as "the people behind Web Monetization", and if all goes well web developers will understand what we mean and chalk up a few coolness points for the ILF.

We field-tested the new banners at the Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf conference that Alex Lakatos, Ioanna Chiorean and I visited in May. The ILF stand shared out t-shirts and stickers, but in the absence of Web Monetization we couldn't ask people to sign up.

Presentation

I held a 30-minute sponsored lunch talk for about 30 people. Since it was not possible to sign up for Web Monetization, the presentation was mostly a dress rehearsal for the next conference (see below). Nonetheless, it turned out that the people who came to the talk were really interested, asked the right questions, and sometimes even remembered Coil.

Describing WM "like Coil, but with real money" made the concept instantly clear to some of them, and the general tenor of their replies was "Oh, yes, Coil was a cool idea. Pity it didn't go anywhere." This is a really hopeful trend for the future. If we can succesfully link Web Monetization to the positive image of Coil in their heads we can win some web devs over.

We did get the old cryptocurrency question, and I now standardized on the reply: "What does the ILF have to do with crypto? A few of the old hands come from the crypto world, and there's 'ledger' in the name. That's it." So far this reply has been accepted by the audience with a slight smile. (If the audience is small and interested in linguistics I might also go into the etymology of 'ledger'.)

In September the Web Monetization teeam will descend on the Smashing New York conference where I will once again do a lunch session. In November we'll return to FFConf in Brighton. That will be the first time we sponsor a conference for the second year in a row. Sponsoring the same conferences year over year remains something I want to try; we'll see how well it works in November.