The Interledger Community 🌱: Filomena Slovak

EIC — Grant Report #2

Filomena Slovak — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 16:47:27 +0000

Project Update

I have struggled to frame the project for the whole period of project. At the very end, after 2+ years of research, and thinking, I figured out I need to facilitate live community, which I did. I summed up the principles behind the community in this article which is really short but is the outcome of thousands of hours of process. I plan to develop the draft by each week one more page until it reaches 50+ pages.

Progress on objectives

I facilitate the live group where I brought into practice the principles that I recognized as needed. We would create educational content that will be Web Monetized.

Key activities

I did write many pages, but I am releasing the tip of the iceberg. I plan to release the content we create in the group as web monetized.

Communications and marketing

https://hypothes.is/users/filslo - I annotated some content.

What’s next?

I plan to use web monetization on the content we create in the learning community.

What community support would benefit your project?

You can build your circle hybridly, document your efforts, and link it below or via hypothes.is.

What to do with the crises?

Filomena Slovak — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 16:47:01 +0000

What is violence? Spam - the act of giving what was not truly asked for. Choosing disconnection instead of building trust. Breaking the contextual norms and rules for any reason other than love. Ridiculing religion, background, and family. Labeling that restricts growth. Dehumanizing. Destroying the environment.

Violence breeds violence. The journey to embracing the enemy brings immense clarity of purpose and understanding. For we all have the capacity to do both good and evil in us. Only through connecting with the enemy’s world we create a space in us to be kind, including to ourselves and those we care for. The space can be empty but needs to be there. What we exclude returns like a boomerang.

How to stop the vicious cycle? The answer is simple to say but difficult to do. It is through catalyzing the emergence of decentralized circles where people can learn to dance with their aggression working for a common goal. For under any violent act, there is an infinite wound that nothing else but community creativity can heal. Only in the safe space, the #meBrutusToo painful cleansing can take place. Meaningful heaviness. Collective intelligence. The common goal can be the climate. However, the circles can connect over any meaningful goal and should be interconnected like a mosaic.

The circles need to be offered to all - children and adults, prisoners and rulers of the countries, the hurt and those who hurt them, those who work full time on the circle, and those who can devote an hour a week. Those who are caught up in insecurity and greed can be the given promise that they and their children will always have food. The motivation is that everybody can connect with the person they trust the most - under the condition that they will connect with the person they feel the most disdain for. It is as with addressing the poisoned well - we need to address both the symptoms and the source.

The circles need to be hybrid - local and online. Local to allow the exchange - public fridges, a library of things, learning labs, free schools, addressing the problems relevant for the context, human interaction that is irreplaceable, knowledge of the local culture and synchronizing. Online, as these can offer variety and connection of various points of view.

The circles need to be open, sustainable and provide scholarships for the needy. What I call for is a Global Wisdom Graph - a collaborative visual network of knowledge gardens with total inclusivity and monetization, similar to Agora. The Hypothesis with Obsidian and Sigma.js and Networkx. FAAGM can help through collaboration. Functioning curricula can be bought from the slavery of copyright. Imagine a crowdsourced and crowdfunded hybrid community on any topic with web monetization. It can spread on the whole internet.

Web Monetization missing on Wiki: Let us change that in an editathon

Filomena Slovak — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 13:31:12 +0000

When I was writing my last post about peer education and monetization of educational content, I noticed that Wiki does not include content on Web Monetization. So, I thought the 'metamonetization' editathon could serve both communities.

The process is simple:

Create content for the relevant Wiki page (see below).
Publish it elsewhere.
Submit the link on the Reward Board.

You can also:

get inspired by looking at an awesome list by thomasbnt
publish your content on a Web-monetized platform
include a ko-fi button for editathon or community prize donations.
publish your content directly on Wiki instead of leaving that on others - just be sure to submit the link to the Reward board.
announce and organize virtual meetups in the pages' Hypothesis annotations.

The editathon starts today, Nov 17, 2022, and ends on Nov 30, 2022. Afterward, I will map the content relevant for web-monetization on Anagora and distribute a total of 1000 USD to the most prolific, quality, and helpful authors via ko-fi. I plan to continue to support the vision less intensely afterward.

Some of the needed articles to edit are:

Web-Monetization for Wikimedia to Support Authors and Peer Connections

Filomena Slovak — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 13:55:07 +0000

Edit:

I called an editathon to try out the proposal outlined below. You are invited to join.

How to support authors’ donations to Wiki? Donate to them elsewhere.

I have been long thinking and looking into research on how education can be sustainable, safe, quality, accessible, and scaleable. I see three issues with sustainability that influence the other features: The under-representation of lower-resourced communities that have a higher threshold to development of and access to the content relevant to them; the shift toward a lack of open licensing to gain finances for high-quality content; and the financing models that compromise the safety/privacy/comfort (ads) or divert the focus from the crucial work (grants, crowdfunding).

A solution could be to create a pay-what-you-want remixable space where people could search, donate to, and interact with openly licensed resources and each other via collaborative editing and discussions. The closest I found are Amazon Ignite, Gumroad, TeacherPayTeachers, MOOCs, Scratch, OER Commons, GitHub, Itch, Roam, Learning Webs in Deschooling Society, Schoolhouse.world, Patreon, Anagora, and Wiki. Out of these, Wiki is the most malleable and possesses enough momentum to serve as a crossroads to other sites such as those mentioned.

Authors can link to their donatable openly-licensed content on the talk page of a Wiki article. I also put an offer on the Reward board in line with Safe Harbor paid-article policies. The upcoming grants of the 2030 Movement Strategy go in the direction of sustainability, accessibility, and bridging content gaps as well. There are risks in introducing monetization. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to experiment with it as there might be extensive potential benefits.

How to augment Wiki for collaborative learning? Add searchable conversations.

Wikipedia is a go-to place for the first contact with a topic. It is accessible, addresses multiple views with accounting for the bias, and has quality and breadth. Directly linked ways to connect to discuss the material would help. The readers can come from diverse backgrounds and points of view, which is ideal for enrichment.

The editors could add the conversation hubs on other sites such as meetups, VoiceThread, Scratch, free4talk, Schoolhouse.world, discord, Jitsi, Eventbrite, or Reddit on the site annotation via Hypothesis. A date can be set there for the synchronous events. Linking to the existing meeting sites with a facilitator present and safety measures would lower the common risks. The relevant resources could also be listed. Hypothesis is searchable, too - see here.