The Interledger Community 🌱: Ashvin Parameswaran

Interledger.dev — Final Grant Report

Ashvin Parameswaran — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 11:39:32 +0000

Project Update

Our project is complete. We have built an intuitive and immersive text-based technical education platform from scratch. It has a range of pedagogic tools built in to assist learners and creators. It is now Web Monetized with both basic and advanced features, including our signature implementation of Earn As You Learn.

Progress on objectives

This is a recap of all the features and content we have implemented throughout the project, some of which were previously highlighted in Report 1 and some of which are newly deployed.

Deliverable 1 : A text-based learning platform

We have hit 100% of the goals for this deliverable with the full site live at https://interledger.dev/

Some things that have worked really well and were already in place in October 2021:

The design of the landing page
Search functionality
Pathway, course and lesson structure
Progress Tracking on lesson pages
Prev/Next pages displayed in sidebars
Social sharing
User Profile tracking of lesson completions
Administrator configuration
Hosting and deployment
Basic Web Monetization controlled at a per page level

Some things that were being worked on and are now in various stages of completion:

Login errors
We found that while all our social logins worked smoothly in testing we faced a series of minor OAuth API errors when moving to production.

Some of these have been resolved (Github and Google), while others are awaiting a response from the social login provider's support team. These errors are minor in terms of technical complexity but limit the user experience until fully resolved.

Advanced Web Monetization
We are really happy to announce that our Earn As You Learn implementation is now working. By allowing logged-in users to save a payment pointer in their user profile, and then injecting this payment pointer into a lesson page via probabilistic revenue sharing we have implemented a basic form of sharing revenue between creators and consumers.

Refactoring of existing features
We tidied up a lot of the UI/UX bugs as well as some backend code to make the site more performant and user friendly. We did find a minor bug with loading image URLs from our Amazon S3 folders in the creator interface. While we have a temporary manual workaround, we are refactoring this code to permanently solve this issue.

Screenshots (some old, some new)
Older screenshots are available in Report 1

Our Earn As You Learn feature is showcased here:

Each logged-in user profile now has a field to store the user's payment pointer:

And on each lesson page, the user's payment pointer is injected in on a probabilistic revenue share basis as they browse the site:

Deliverable 2 : Original course content for interledger.dev

This goal is 100% complete but proved a challenging exercise. We successfully onboarded a few external content creators who were willing to try out the education platform and provide new content.

However, with the end of the year fast approaching our creators only managed to create a small amount of new content with more expected over the holidays.

While we have created new content, this is an area for us to keep improving and scaling as we onboard more content creators and fully build out our content models into complete courses and pathways. This will be our main focus in 2022.

Some of the new content includes:

A lesson on creating a testnet wallet for XRPL-PY.

An introductory guide to using centralised exchanges

Deliverable 3 : A Summary Report of the Platform

This grant report serves as the final summary report for our platform. Overall, we take away the following experiences and lesson:

We accurately predicted the timeline and workload required for a full Web Monetized build of an education platform
We completed our technical build to a high standard and completed our education content creation to a medium standard
We learnt that shifting our technical build from test environments to production can break features and deployments and need to consider this phase better in future
We learnt that creating a community of technical content creators is a significant exercise and we need to spend time nurturing and developing a content pipeline in 2022 so that we can scale and move the platform from content (as opposed to technical) alpha to content production.

Key activities

We spent the bulk of our time on the technical build and are extremely happy with our progress.

We learnt a lot about content creation and the need for a time budget and pipeline engineering for this aspect that is separately as complex (or more complex) than the technical build.

As a bonus, one creator requested feature we were able to implement on each lesson is the implementation of basic multiple choice quizzes to test and reinforce learners' understanding and retention of material.

Communications and marketing

This is an area where we spent a good portion of our time but did not succeed as well as we wanted to.

Our original plan was to approach universities in Australia and the United States to incorporate some of our learning material into a university lecture or seminar. The impact of the pandemic and university closures meant that this was no longer possible.

We then kick-started negotiations with an Indian higher education institute to conduct an in-person full day session with students from an Art College. While we managed to come up with a skeleton programme and generated interest from the faculty, this too did not eventuate.

The reasons for this included the pandemic and the fact that the technical material about Web Monetization, blockchain and cryptocurrencies was not immediately relevant to this student group.

Draft schedule for planned university event with Rabindra Bharati University (did not proceed)

Overall, we learnt that we need to refine our communication and marketing strategies and start to build a strong user community in order to reach more learners and scale our platform.

What’s next?

In 2022, we are going to move our platform fully into production with a focus on content creation. We intend to seed a base level of original technical content about blockchain, cryptocurrencies and various ledger related technologies.

We have a marketing partnership with Aquarelle which is building out an NFT dashboard, gallery and gaming experiences, and hope to contribute and gain a stronger community presence as a result.

We are committed to continuing our build and experimenting with new approaches as this is a growing space with limitless potential over the next decade or two.

What community support would benefit your project?

We would love any feedback or to explore any partnerships with related and relevant projects in the space.

Additional comments

One area we have been considering as a limitation to commercialising Web Monetization is the low brand recognition and small revenue return in the broader Web3 space.

This makes it difficult for creators to implement Web Monetization as more than a sandbox experiment as it is not commercially viable in itself.

While it is an interesting supplement or complement to other monetization strategies, we are hopeful that with the advent of Rafiki, the growing presence of Coil, and more general Interledger adoption that this is a space to watch in the next few years as more opportunities become available.

Interledger.dev - Grant Report #1

Ashvin Parameswaran — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 11:39:01 +0000

Project Update

Our project is progressing really well. Especially on the technical front, we have created a text-based education platform that feels intuitive and immersive. Some of our Web Monetization ideas have also been implemented without any difficulty.

We are right in the middle of of our build with some quality control and further feature improvements left for the platform.

Our main focus over the next few months will be to ramp up the content creation in the platform and working to engage university students.

Progress on objectives

We aimed to achieve 3 major deliverables by the end of the project.

Deliverable 1 : A text-based learning platform

This deliverable is 70% complete. We have an alpha site publicly available at https://interledger.dev

To populate it with test data, we cloned the text content from https://javascript.info/ (available under Creative Commons) which we admire greatly. By the end of the project, we will delete all the external content and replace it with our own original content related to blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Some things that have worked really well:

The design of the landing page
Search functionality
Pathway, course and lesson structure
Progress Tracking on lesson pages
Prev/Next pages displayed in sidebars
Social sharing
User Profile tracking of lesson completions
Administrator configuration
Hosting and deployment
Basic Web Monetization controlled at a per page level

Some things still being worked on:

Login errors
Advanced Web Monetization
Refactoring of existing features

Now for some screenshots:

Featured Course on Landing Page

Pathway Cards on Landing Page

Footer on all pages

Search Page with results

Login page

Lesson Page

We took extensive care to design the lesson pages well. In the screenshot below you can see some of the key features including:

In-page navigation
Prev/Next page navigation
Course progress bar
Completion/Bookmark tracking
Social sharing
Code higlighting
Creative Commons licensing per page

Tracking Progress on User Profile

Creator Interface

After exploring many options including our original approach of using Eleventy, we settled on Statamic as the best CMS on which to build out the platform in a way that was easy for learners, creators and administrators.

All lessons are written in Markdown, and Statamic provides a very friendly UI for this.

In addition to the standard content fields, we've made it easy for creators to:

designate open source content
list multiple payment pointers per page
add quizzes
add prerequisites

Deliverable 2 : Original course content for interledger.dev

In the next half of this project, our focus will shift to creating original course content, specifically courses dedicated to teaching Web Monetization.

We're also working with two new content creators to produce additional original content related to blockchain and cryptocurrency

Deliverable 3 : A Summary Report of the Platform

This will be written up as part of the final report, including evaluating the sustainability of this platform

Key activities

We spent most of our time to date on the design and technical build. The entire site is Web Monetized.

Lesson pages have additionally implemented a version of probabilistic revenue sharing which allows for any number of payment pointers to be associated with each page. This is particularly useful for revenue sharing between multiple content creators or content creators and the platform. Content creators do not require any programming knowledge to write articles or add payment pointers.

In the second part of the project we will also be implementing "Earn as you Learn", a way for Web monetized users to revenue share a small percentage of streaming micropayments as they browse the site.

Communications and marketing

We have conducted outreach to some universities in India to discuss hosting a virtual workshop about Web Monetization. These conversations are progressing, albeit with some challenges due to the pandemic and lockdowns.

Once we have written and uploaded the original content and courses, we will begin more extensive social media marketing as well.

What’s next?

Over the next few months, we intend to complete the technical build and ramp up production of original content. We also want to host a Web Monetization workshop with university students.

We think by the end of this year we will be able to move the site from its current alpha into a beta stage and start onboarding more content creators.

What community support would benefit your project?

One aspect we found challenging is recruitment of content creators who are sufficiently knowledgeable in Web Monetization/Interledger or blockchain/cryptocurrency more generally and willing/able to write well structured educational content.

If there are any community members keen to participate in educational content creation we are always open to kick-start these conversations.