The Interledger Community 🌱: Hackathon for the Web

Grant Report 2: From Hackathon to Web Monetization Learning Fellowship

Uchi Uchibeke — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 13:13:19 +0000

After joining the Web Monetization Challenge at the AfricaHacks 2020 Hackathon, participants wanted to learn about Web Monetization. So we launched the Web Monetization for the Passion Economy Fellowship. The program brought together Content Creators and Builders to learn about Web Monetization for the first time, create content, and build solutions to enhance free, fair, and transparent open revenue models that gave the creators and consumers the power back.

Program Process

Weekly reading list, event, and milestone submission
Mentorship from the AfricaHacks team and the Web Monetization community
Content creation challenges
A Hackathon
Access to tools and products ranging from cloud, marketing, sales, operations, and other tools needed to run an early-stage business.
Airtime and internet data from Chimoney for all participants
Coil credits for participants
A year of egghead.io for all participants that demoed

Highlights

Projects

The participants built so many unique projects. Some that stood out to us are:

TREBLE: Victoria Ayodeji created a TREBLE, a platform for web monetized live events where users can stream music or live shows with payments streamed to the Artist's wallet. Read more
Express Disposed: Muhammad Umar Inuwa and his team created a prototype of a platform for African Creators to host and earn from their content
Trotro Live: Godfred Addai Amako, Michael Akala, and Isaac Avoseh created Trotro Live, a digitized system to know actual 'government' or national fare when traveling via minivans taxis. Read more

Participants

For Cohort 1, active participants from Canada 🇨🇦, Nigeria 🇳🇬, Lesotho 🇱🇸, and Ghana 🇬🇭 and a mix of Builders and Creators. Many participants were new to web monetization, so it was inspiring to see them go from newbies to web monetization builders and creators in 6 weeks. Some comments from participants are:

Michele David said:

I have never thought of blogging or writing articles until I joined this program. And with the deadline on every breakthrough, I have learned to be self-disciplined and eager

Victoria Ayodeji said that:

I had no idea what Web Monetization was until I enrolled into this program. I learnt a new way to monetize contents without using ads to invade users privacy and that is, Web Monetization using Coil.

Now, I can categorically say I'm pumped enough to pass down the knowledge to the newbies.

Content

Michael Akala created a Content Channel for Educating content creators to monetize their content on youtube and blogs.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTtQoKrwvU0&feature=youtu.be
Victoria Ayodeji published an article on how to use Coil for web Monetization as a content creator. The article featured a step-by-step guide process of implementing web monetization on Coil.
1. https://coil.com/p/Victoria/How-to-Use-Coil-for-Web-Monetization/CPdkurJSN
Rachael David published articles on monetizing Hashnode blogs and all the steps involved in adding web Monetization as Content Creator on Hashnode.
Lebohang Bernard Motseki published an article on different revenue models used in Web Monetization. The blog post explored each revenue model's pros and cons and how content creators and product builders can use revenue models.
1. https://motseki.hashnode.dev/different-revenue-models-for-online-creators-ckkv42lim03v3bxs11ile0f1n
Isaac Avoseh published articles on what Africans need to know about Web monetization and How Content Creators can successfully use Web Monetization in their work.
1. https://sunsearch.hashnode.dev/what-you-need-to-know-about-web-monetization
2. https://sunsearch.hashnode.dev/how-to-become-a-successful-content-creator
Tanoh Jean Achile published an article on how technical and non-technical people can monetize their blogs.
1. https://achiletanoh.hashnode.dev/how-to-monetize-your-blog

Learnings

Overcommunicate: We learned the importance of overcommunicating because we initially assumed that participants would follow the program calendar and event app's schedule and study materials. But we were wrong. We later realized that we needed to include more live events to provide reminders, handle Q and A, and have peers lead sessions. We also leveraged the text/SMS reminder feature from the AfricaHacks virtual learning and lab platform to send timely reminders for upcoming deadlines and events.
Provide multiple touchpoints: If we combined the milestone-based program structure on all AfricaHacks programs with progressive content reveals and byte-sized content summaries, we would likely have provided a better experience and had more engagement. This is because many participants were not always connected or were busy with other engagements. A daily 160 character text/SMS highlighting a critical point with a link to further reading would have helped.

Opportunities

Builders and Products

There is an opportunity to support projects like TrotoLive, TREBLE, and others to take them from MVP to launch in the next 4-6 months. This could bring us closer to having Artists like Burna Boy, Davido, Wizkid, and others hosting web monetized live concerts on something like TREBLE, which will drive traction to the ecosystem and increase subscription to providers like Coil.

Creators and Content

There is a more enormous opportunity to engage and attract creators from Africa. This is because, from a recent clubhouse room, many content creators (mostly Yotubers and bloggers) of African descent who were in a room I spoke at have never heard of Web Monetization. It felt like magic when they learned about the potential of it.

A Web Monetization Course

There is an opportunity to partner with online learning platforms to create a Web Monetization tutorial for both Builders and Creators.

Future cohorts of the program will be launched at apply.africahacks.com. Please, comment or email team at africahacks.com to work with us.

Web Monetization hackathon challenge — Grant Report #1

Uchi Uchibeke — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 13:35:12 +0000

Hello everyone, Uchi here. I am the Founder of AfricaHacks, where we create platforms and programs for Africans and everyone to create value to improve their lives, their families, and the world at scale.

Our grant is to create a Hackathon that introduces more people to Web Monetization and enables Devs in Africa to integrate Web Monetization into their projects/startups or think of new ways to innovate around fair and creator-friendly revenue models.

We originally scheduled the Hackathon for the Web for October, but due to the #EndSars uprising, we moved it and cohosted it with our Global Innovation Competition, #AfricaHacks2020.

Project Update

Cohosting the Hackathon for the Web with AfricaHacks 2020 meant Web Monetization was a category/challenge among three categories; thus, some participants chose to work on other hackathon challenges, reducing the number of WM projects from the Hackathon. The upside of cohosting was that we had more collaboration between skills and projects and as such, we are planning a new Web Monetization program starting next week. Read on...!

Progress on objectives (milestones)

✅ Decide the prizes, potential sponsors, and others:
- We awarded laptops to all team members of AkuafoLink, the winner of the Web Monetization prize.
- We welcomed Vonage, Linode, Auth0, and others to provide their API and present prizes to amplify the Hackathon.
✅ Build the Hackathon planning team
Christine Dikongue and I added the following to lead different aspects of the Hackathon
- Hillary Masha - Tech and Hacker Experience
- Toni Ogunmade - Logistics
- Princess Ovavie - Inclusion
- Hammed Babatunde - Community
- Mariam Hamzat - Marketing
✅ Hackathon Website, Judges and prizes finalized and virtual platform
- We launched a new naijahacks.com website
- Launched an innovation lab platform to power the Hackathon
- Revamped the participant profile resume and portfolio page
✅ Call for application, finalize Judging App.
- We had 2,500 applications and accepted 1,100 participants.
- And had 35% women.
- With participants from 15 countries

Key activities

Hackathon Website ✅
- Launched an updated naijahacks.com
Host at least 100 Projects submitted to DevPost
- Achieved for the general Hackathon
- Did not get up to 100 teams building with WM due to cohosting with AfricaHacks 2020 ⚠️
At least five teams converted to Startups
- 100 teams from the Hackathon have applied to join the Startup sandbox program
- We will have the % of them that are building with WM at a later update ⚠️
At least 31% women participate ✅
- We got 35% women. Working toward 50% in 2021
Web Monetization Keynotes and workshops at AfricaHacks 2020
- Adrian Hope-Bailie - Coil and W3C
- Sultan Akintunde - Grant for the Web Ambassador
- Uchi Uchibeke - SecureKey and AfricaHacks

Winner of the Web Monetization Prize

AkuafoLink, a team of University students from Ghana, West Africa, built a project that applies Web Monetization to Agriculture to encourage users to shop online from farmers. The team built a platform that connects customers to farmers to enable seamless purchase of agricultural produce. Their value proposition and impact is to increase revenue for farmers, reduce food waste and increase sustainability.

On their platform, they offer a discount code to users that have Web Monetization enabled.
- Breakthroughs
- Demo.

Communications and marketing

We ran social media contests
Had participants share their story
Featured and spoke at DeveloperWeek Global
Featured in some media platforms

Budget and expenses

Volunteer and admin budget ✅
- Volunteer
Laptops for team ✅
- 2 Laptops for Africa-based team members
Marketing / Communications / Public Relations ✅
- See communications and marketing above
Twitter #AfricaHacks2020 contest
Prizes ✅
- Laptops for winners (Team )
- More prizes to be awarded in the Web Monetization for the Passion Economy program (see below)

What’s next?

Web Monetization for the Passion Economy Program

The Web Monetization for the Passion Economy Program is a 6-week program focused on introducing 50-100 youth to Web Monetization focused on two tracks. First, Builders track to provide them with mentorship, tools, and resources to create platforms that promote fair and creator-focused revenue models. Second, the Creators track to provide them with tools and mentorship to develop and monetize their content.

Starts January 25, 2021
We created a program Calendar here.

Startup Sandbox program

In our Startup Sandbox program, we will incubate Hackathon projects, including those that were built with Web Monetization to transform their projects into Startups. We are still on track to get up to 5 planned Web Monetization projects and work with them to become Startups in 2021.

What community support would benefit your project?

Mentors to support teams in the 6-week program starting next week
Speakers to speak on the following topics throughout the year
- Content Monetization and the potential of Web Monetization for Creators
- Why Web Monetization
- Build for the Web: How Developers can build projects for a fairer web
- And more focused on Web Monetization and the potential for early-stage projects.
Collaborators on projects with because we have 30k builders and creators in our community. I already see an opportunity to collaborate with Cinnamon for the video content created by participants at our Web Monetization for the Passion Economy program and others.
Funding to enable the sustainability of the Web Monetization for the Passion Economy program

Relevant links/resources

Application for the Web Monetization for the Passion Economy program
Hackathon Website
Hackathon winners
AfricaHacks 2021 plans