The Interledger Community 🌱: filomenaslovak

Everything Is Connected — Grant Report #1

filomenaslovak — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 15:01:06 +0000

Project Update

I started hoping to facilitate empowering community where the creators could share their learning journeys. I have struggled until this report's deadline to figure out how I could do it. I started Eduforem, where I hoped to build the community. The struggle was fivefold. First, I groped for the way to remunerate the co-creators fairly. Second, I took too large a scope - learning anything. Third, I doubted the sustainability of Eduforem beyond the grant and did not want to get people there and close it shortly. Fourth, I did not know how to get around compulsory GitHub email collection. Finally, I ran into a chicken and egg problem - if I opened it and the platform would be of little content, it would be unattractive for people. Thus they would not come. Therefore, there would be fewer postings.

I am aware that there would be a solution to all those problems. However, I wanted to ensure that I finished the project with some outcome, so I formed a partnership with an already established organization - 100daysofnocode, who agreed to share the Upwork posting I made for the creators. The organization has a lively community empowering creators to build the products they envision. Increasing tech literacy and the low threshold that allows inclusion has been important for my project. Project learning and reflections are other necessary components. I will wait for the responses on Upwork, which should come within a few days.

Progress on objectives

I shifted from the second-brain-like vision to something more feasible - to a partnership with a community working on projects that matter to them.

Key activities

Supporting a community of creators going together on a learning journey morphed: From providing an Eduforem platform to creating a partnership with 100daysofnocode. The community was already there. The vision was similar. The people already wrote about their projects.

Communications and marketing

I did an Upwork job posting to support the projects' authors' documentation. Below is the related tweet of the founder of 100daysofnocode.

What's next?

I plan to collaborate within the community during December, building along.

What community support would benefit your project?

Feel free to apply for or share the job posting, jump in the 100daysofnocode, or engage with the emerging web monetizing authors whose work I will link.

Edu Forem is Live! Join with Your Project

filomenaslovak — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 13:53:28 +0000

Edu Forem is the new web monetizable platform to host your content related to learning. If you have not yet seen the article describing the vision and subcommunities it can serve, jump here.

So far, the platform is closed for those invited by email. Reach out if you want to get in. I will open it once there is a reasonable amount of content. Feel free to crosspost your original content or post links to others' work.

The platform will be web monetized for individual users only, not as a whole, so that those who wish to create content without it can do so. However, if you want to experiment with WM, you can ask for a grant.

Communities Are the Cure. Do You Want to Co-create One?

filomenaslovak — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 12:22:39 +0000

The Fact

Isolation is the dream killer. A healthy community or the lack of it is the decisive factor for the thriving of its members. The feeling of being part of something bigger than oneself is transformational. Meetups, online forums, congregations, cohorts, support or study groups, communities abound and provide accountability, identity, and mastery.

The problem?

Humanity faces challenges that it can only address with global collaboration. So far, the solutions are primarily closed in silos and fragmented all over the Internet and on its peripheries. Imagine the vision of building a global knowledge graph like Roam coupled with a community. There needs to exist a platform, or, better, the broad network (wide walls) of interconnected platforms, yet focused on targeting community creation around some niche.

Edit (a spoiler): I figured the communities below can be hosted by the same instance of the forem as they are all relating to learning and the hashtags can serve for distinguishing subcommunities. Tomorrow, this platform should be alive and ready to host your subcommunity. The Web Monetization of it should come soon.

The platform should be open, safe, private, empowering, and sustainable. It needs to be open for ideas to flow freely and build on each other with no limit (high ceiling), radical inclusion (low threshold) and supporting decentralized content via cross-posting. It needs to be safe to protect from attacks. It needs to be private to allow free expression and guard the information and ownership. It needs to be empowering to enable customization in discoverability, feed, and choosing who to follow. It needs to be sustainable with the opportunity to monetize the content to allow creators to devote to the work.

The good news?

The tools to set up a platform like that already exist. You are just using one. Another good news? If you are reading this before the following Wednesday, you can probably apply for the grant. Here are some subcommunities that I would love to see and help emerge:

Art Exhibit allows artists of any stage and background to present their work and receive feedback and funds.
Best Practices allows educators to collaboratively scrutinize the learning and teaching dynamics and grow through that.
Book Club allows anybody to create and join a book club to gain a wide range of views on the critical readings.
College preparation is a community for students, parents, teachers, and alumni to guide their journey.
Entrepreneurship and leadership is a site for founders of initiatives and organizations to support themselves.
Helping Stories allows helping initiatives and NGOs to present their work to get inspiration, partnerships, and funding.
Ideas is a community where the conversations on materializing dreams and testing new product ideas happens.
Journalism is a site where journalists worldwide can open up new perspectives by publishing or linking original content.
Language Lab is a place to exchange learning know-how, community feedback, and conversations on topics.
LocalX is a place where conversations relevant specifically to a physical location and its inhabitants can occur.
Mental Health Club is a community for those struggling to get peer support and disperse the isolation and suffering.
MOOCX is a community for hosting open course(s) and facilitating the community around them to boost completion.
Music is a site for all music lovers to discover new, discuss favorites, add their own, collaborate, and learn to play/sing.
Nature Saving disseminates info on the preservation of the environment and organizing collective impact.
Papers is a community for hosting discussions on research, bridging the gap between academy and laypeople.
Play! is a space for discussion of games, toys, and plays and allows makers to present their creations and get feedback.
Service is a community where people can ask for help and do service, consultation, and support others.
Stories International is a site for collecting the unique stories of individuals as recorded by themselves or their close ones.
The Minimalism community allows anybody to share their journey to a simple lifestyle and gain support and accountability.
The STEM community facilitates K-12 STEM education and individual and collaborative tackling of problems.

Feel free to take any of the ideas above and use it for your proposal. You can then start building on the platform once it is out.

Image Credit Kevin M. Gill on Flickr, modified by me.