The Interledger Community 🌱: Sharon

Akita Project Feedback Report

Sharon — Mon, 24 May 2021 20:23:24 +0000

Introduction

As part of the Akita Project, @elliot and I created 'A Web Monetization Story' and the Akita browser extension. We've asked users of both 'A Web Monetization Story' and the Akita extension to fill out surveys. The goal of the surveys is to try to understand:

what parts of Web Monetization people are struggling with,
how the projects we've created are helping people understand and engage with Web Monetization, and
what parts of our projects we could improve. Below are the user feedback reports from the surveys.

'A Web Monetization Story' Feedback Report

‘A Web Monetization Story’ is an interactive, story-based Web Monetization tutorial that seeks to help creators understand how simple it is to enable Web Monetization on their own sites.

We’ve asked for feedback by linking to a survey on the Grant for the Web Forum, DEV Community and Twitter. We also received feedback during the development of 'A Web Monetization Story' for Betahack in August 2020.

We originally created the survey using Typeform (but migrated to Google Forms since Typeform started limiting number of responses) and included the link on the last page of ‘A Web Monetization Story’, as well as on the platforms mentioned above. If you’d like to share your thoughts on ‘A Web Monetization Story’, we welcome you to fill out the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdUzTD8Z4Tz_KO_DSZUJ0-6H_0_-vgWpi9qnFrwSAjPRnJvQg/viewform! So far, we’ve received 9 responses which we’ve summarized below, grouped by question.

Were you using Web Monetization before you came across 'A Web Monetization Story'?

5 people chose "No, but I was already interested in it"
3 people chose "Yes"
1 person chose "No"

Which categories would you place yourself in?

6 people identified as Developers
5 people identified as Online Creators
1 person identified as an Influencer
1 person wrote something else (not included here to protect their privacy)

What was your overall impression of 'A Web Monetization Story'?

Average response: 4.78 / 5

How would you rate your Web Monetization understanding before/after visiting 'A Web Monetization Story'?

Before visiting 'A Web Monetization Story':

Average response: 6.89 / 10

After visiting 'A Web Monetization Story':

Average response: 8.56 / 10

Which parts of Web Monetization did 'A Web Monetization Story' help you understand?

5 people selected "The Monetization Meta Tag"
4 people selected "The Web Monetization Javascript API"
3 people selected "How Web Monetization works"
1 person selected "How you can leverage Web Monetization"
1 person selected "Payment Pointers/Digital Wallets"
1 person selected "Web Monetization Providers/Senders (like Coil)"
1 person selected "Other" and wrote "I didn't learn anything new, but enjoyed your presentation!"
0 people selected "Why Web Monetization matters"
0 people selected "The Web Monetization Community"

Was there anything in 'A Web Monetization Story' that was not explained in a way that helped you understand? Do you have any questions remaining after visiting 'A Web Monetization Story'?

1 person said they knew about Coil, but were wondering about other providers.
1 person suggested expanding 'A Web Monetization Story' into a choose-your-own-adventure demo.
1 person asked how a static site or blog can use Web Monetization. They wondered if the meta tag was enough or if JavaScript was necessary.
1 person said that although we say where to go to get a payment pointer, an explanation of how to actually get the payment pointer is missing.
5 people said nothing or expressed that the explanation was sufficient.

Were you able to navigate through 'A Web Monetization Story' easily? Did you get lost at any point?

Everyone expressed that it was easy to navigate and that they did not get lost.

Do you have any other questions or feedback for us?

1 person said that 'A Web Monetization Story' should let people know that Web Monetization is not at a point where you can make substantial money from it, since there are not enough Coil subscribers. This person said their Web Monetized site gets many visitors per day, but the Web Monetization income they get is mostly from when they visit their own site. They also said that the time and effort required to get involved in Web Monetization is totally worth it, and that we don't want to scare people off. They concluded by asking how we can make people aware that Web Monetization is in the early (low money making potential) stages while still communicating that it is worth it.
A couple responses with words of encouragement.

Other Feedback (not from survey)

We developed ‘A Web Monetization Story’ as part of Betahack ‘Fix The Internet’ Hackathon. Some of the helpful feedback we got during the hackathon:

Interactive storytelling interface is awesome
Interaction could be easily transitioned for other use cases: training employees for a certain workflow, introducing a new app feature, service focused on providing businesses to build this for their platforms
Value proposition of ‘A Web Monetization Story’ interface: intuitive way to introduce consumers on how to use the new platform/workflow
Possible prototype: provide an adopter of the interactive tutorial interface with a form/markdown file to upload and tag images/captions, interface would convert/animate the form/images into components of the story Story could highlight and interact with DOM elements of the webpage during the onboarding/training process
Could use this format to enable onboarding and education through incentive

Akita Extension Feedback Report

Akita is a browser extension that presents your top visited monetized sites, how much time you’re spending on them, and how much you're contributing (or could contribute) to them.

We asked for feedback by linking to two surveys on the Web Monetization community, which we also shared on Twitter. One survey was for people who use Coil, and the other was for people who do not use Coil.

We created the surveys in Google Forms. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the Akita extension, we welcome you to fill out one of the surveys:

If you’re a Coil user, please fill out this Akita feedback survey.
If you’re not a Coil user, please fill out this Akita feedback survey instead.

So far, we've received two responses from Coil users, and no responses from non-Coil users. Since there is very little data, we give some broad interpretations from the responses below.

Both people responded positively (gave at least a 4 out of 5) to the following questions:

Would you say that it's difficult for you to find Web Monetized sites related to your interests?
Would you say that Akita helps you understand how your Web Monetization Provider (e.g. Coil) distributes micropayments to the websites you visit?
- If you answered no, can you tell us why not? If you answered yes, can you share how Akita helps?
Would you say that Akita gives you a better understanding of which websites you support through Web Monetization?
Would you say Akita encourages you to spend more time on Web Monetized sites?
Does the Akita tutorial provide an effective overview of Web Monetization?
Does the Akita tutorial provide an effective introduction to the Akita extension?

Both people responded negatively (gave at most a 2 out of 5) to the following question:

Do you feel like the recommendations in "These monetized sites could use ❤️" are useful to you?

Conclusion

Summary of Feedback

We saw that 'A Web Monetization Story' helped improve people's understanding of Web Monetization overall, and particularly helped people understand the meta tag, the Javascript API, and how Web Monetization works. Although 'A Web Monetization Story' was easy to navigate, people were left wondering about providers, whether or not it was necessary to use the Javascript API, and how to get a payment pointer. A few people expressed that the 'A Web Monetization Story' format could be expanded upon, and another person expressed that the reality that Web Monetization is new and still hard to make money off of was left out.

We received overall positive feedback on the Akita extension, but learned that the "Sites that could use ❤️" section was not very useful. We used this information in our decision to prioritize hosting the recent Grantee Hangout event over developing more site discoverability features in the extension. We may also remove the "Sites that could use ❤️" section in the future if we find another use for that space in the UI.

Learnings

A major takeaway from our surveying experience so far is that we’re not promoting our surveys enough. As a result, we have not gotten a significant number of responses. From ‘A Web Monetization Story’ surveying, it seems that it’s effective to include the survey link as part of the project. In ‘A Web Monetization Story’, we include the survey link in the last page of the site, so users are prompted to share their thoughts immediately after using it.

We have not received many responses to the Akita browser extension survey (only 2 responses from Coil users and no responses from non-Coil users). We intend to address this lack of responses by adding the survey link into our extension, so that users will be able to head to our survey from the extension itself. This should help us get to the non-Coil users of the Akita extension, who likely aren’t hanging around the Web Monetization Community Forem or Twitter communities (where we’ve been asking for feedback). We’ve implemented adding the survey link to Akita and will be pushing this change in our next release to the Chrome, Edge and Firefox add-on/extension stores.

Going forward, we plan to:

seek out more avenues to request feedback (i.e. other forums and Slack/Discord communities)
directly integrate/link our feedback collection into our projects.

Final Thoughts

Our grant period is coming to an end this month, so we’re wrapping up development and will be putting together our final grant report soon. Thank you to everyone for sending us your feedback—we really appreciate it!

What the WOOF 🐶 is Web Monetization? — Akita

Sharon — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 05:43:38 +0000

10 months ago, we learned about Web Monetization. A few keywords stood out to us: open, fair and inclusive. These words weren’t something we were used to seeing amongst monetization on the web, which generally involves targeted ads, paywalls and other unfortunate things.

But we found ourselves struggling to understand and find resources to learn about Web Monetization. To tackle this problem, we began the Akita project. We created resources which introduce Web Monetization through easy-to-use tools, storytelling and community outreach. Scroll down to see what we've made!

Our Team

Hi there! We’re @elliot and @sharon, the co-creators of the Akita project. We’re both software developers, but also find ourselves designing, speaking, writing and illustrating. Here’s our socials if you’d like to reach out!

Elliot: Twitter | Website | LinkedIn
Sharon: Twitter | LinkedIn

Akita Browser Extension

Whether or not you’re using a Web Monetization Provider such as Coil, you can get started with Akita to find out how you engage with Web Monetization on the internet.

GitHub — Our open-source code repository for the extension.
Install on Chrome
Install on Edge
YouTube Demo Video
Request for Feedback — Please let us know what you think of the extension!

'A Web Monetization Story' Website

Check out our interactive Web Monetization tutorial for online creators. We give you the basics of how to add Web Monetization to a site through the story of Auden and Chicken.

Website — Try out the interactive tutorial!
Demo Video
GitHub — Our open-source code repository for the website.
Process — How we built the website.

Community Outreach

Over the past six months, we've spoken at two conferences, posted two articles and engaged with the community on a bunch of platforms. We hope to see you around the community!

“Doing My Bit To Help Build the Web Monetization Community” — Blog post on Sharon’s Web Monetization journey.
"Cultivating awareness and understanding around Web Monetization" — Elliot’s talk on our efforts in the micropayments space.
Twitter — We post updates here!
DEV Community — We blogged about our early stage Web Monetization efforts here.

Friends of Akita

Being a part of Web Monetization is awesome for a lot of reasons, but the supportive and open people is a big reason we love it. Check out @thomasbnt's list of Web Monetization resources if you're interested in what the community is getting up to!

Link Roundup

Akita — Grant Report #1

Sharon — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 06:17:10 +0000

Hi Web Monetization community! @elliot and @sharon here :)

Project Update

We're four months into our six month Grant for the Web project, Akita. So far we've:

created "A Web Monetization Story" for helping creators on the web engage with and understand Web Monetization;
improved the Akita browser extension and released it on the Chrome Web Store (stay tuned for a post asking for feedback!); and
participated in: Creative Commons Global Summit 2020, Future of Micropayments Conference 2020 and hackathon communities to talk about Web Monetization!

We've been enjoying coding, designing, writing and chatting as part of the Web Monetization community. Some of our big wins have been placing 2nd🥈 in the BetaHack "Fix the Internet" hackathon with "A Web Monetization Story", having our projects and presentations featured on developers.coil.com and receiving our first issue reported by a community member on Akita. Our main struggle has been balancing development of the Akita extension, along with community outreach and development of our website "A Web Monetization Story".

Progress on objectives

Our three key objectives were: creation of a website, building the Akita extension and outreach initiatives. In this section, we'll outline and summarize each of these objectives. In the Key Activities section, we’ll go into more detail and provide links for each objective.

Website

In August, we had the opportunity to participate in BetaHack, a hackathon to "Fix the Internet", where we built our website "A Web Monetization Story". We originally planned to participate in BetaHack as an outreach initiative, but our work for the hackathon evolved into the website in our grant proposal.

In our original grant timeline, we planned to develop our website's MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in September, but we instead decided to go all-in during the hackathon building, open-sourcing and collecting feedback on "A Web Monetization Story" in August.

See the following website milestone statuses or look at the Key Activities section for links and details.

[✅ Done] Designed and built a website ("A Web Monetization Story").
[✅ Done] Collected a first round of website feedback.
[📋 To do] Analyze and release website feedback.
[📋 To do] Add a collection of our Web Monetization content to the website.
[✅↪️ Changed] Help users of the web understand and engage with Web Monetization — we saw an opportunity to instead specifically help creators with "A Web Monetization Story".
[✅↪️ Changed] Add a Web Monetized site discovery feature to the website — because "A Web Monetization Story" is aimed towards creators, we decided to include a curated set of resources on Web Monetization rather than a Web Monetized site discovery feature as we had originally proposed.

Extension

We originally built and open-sourced the Akita browser extension for the Grant for the Web x DEV Community hackathon from late May to mid June of 2020. In our proposal, we planned to release the Akita extension on browser extension stores in July 2020, but were rejected from the Google Chrome Web Store and had to push back the release.

Over the past four months we've fallen behind on Akita extension development while we prioritized building "A Web Monetization Story", spent time learning about open-source and business, jumped on outreach initiative opportunities and faced personal obligations (such as Elliot finishing university and finding a full time job).

[✅ Done] Released the Akita extension on the Google Chrome Web Store.
[🏗️ In Progress] Post about the Akita public beta release with request for feedback.
[📋 To do] Analyze and release extension feedback.
[📋 To do] Release the Akita extension on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons Store.
[📋 To do] Release the Akita extension on the Firefox Add-ons Store
[📋 To do] Add a Web Monetized site discovery feature to the extension.
[🧘 Stretch Goal] Release the Akita extension on the Mac App Store for Safari
[❌↪️ Removed] Add a historical data visualization feature — We don’t plan to add this feature because we don't think it provides value in helping users understand Web Monetization better — it is more of an accounting tool.

Outreach Initiatives

Over the past six months, we've spoken at two conferences, posted two major articles and engaged with the community on a bunch of platforms 🙂. We're always on the lookout for more opportunities to grow the Web Monetization community!

[✅ Done] Elliot presented a lightning talk at the Future of Micropayments conference.
[✅ Done] Sharon was a panelist at the CC Global Summit "Can Web Monetization support digital creators?" roundtable.
[✅ Done] Sharon published "Doing My Bit To Help Build the Web Monetization Community" on HackerNoon.
[✅ Done] Posted about our process building "A Web Monetization Story" for BetaHack.
[📋 To do] Plan outreach for February and March.
[📋 To do] Post two more blog posts.
[📋 To do] Publish website and extension feedback.

Key Activities

This section is a collection of links for the specific items that were carried out for each objective, and provides some more detail on key activities.

Website: “A Web Monetization Story” (AWMS)

Built for the Betahack “Fix the Internet” Hackathon
- GitHub repo
- Basic Web Monetization code introduced in AWMS tutorial
- Devpost hackathon submission
- Demo Video
- Won 2nd place overall! Winners Announcement
Feedback on AWMS
- Feedback session (with Reggie) during hackathon — helped us focus on the story behind the tutorial, to help creators relate to our character Auden
- Betawork Camp Pitch/Feedback from Danika and Fahim of Betalab
- DEV Community post requesting feedback
- Grant for the Web forum post requesting feedback
  - Also chatted with @chrislarry and @erikad about including AWMS in Web Monetization onboarding :)
Other Mentions of AWMS
- On HackSultan’s thread on HashNode thanks to @cyberdees!
- Coil Developers Blog Resources
- @thomasbnt’s Awesome Web Monetization under Tutorials

Extension: Akita

Notable Advancements
- Implemented changes for our development milestone, which contained items we wanted to complete before releasing Akita on the Chrome extension store. For all closed issues and merged pull requests for this milestone, you can check out our GitHub Milestone
- Received our first user-raised issue! We fixed the issue as part of our development milestone
- Fixed several bugs related to using Akita on Adapted Sites (i.e. Twitch, YouTube, monetized iframe) bugs: issue #79, issue #97, issue #101
- Created V1 beta release on GitHub, which contains all the changes for the milestone
- Wrote a Privacy Policy
- Released Akita on Chrome Web Store!
- Reviewed code/asset licensing of content hosted in our GitHub repository, such as external assets
  - Added new documentation and attribution for assets from external sources (not created by Elliot or Sharon) — see our external sources directory
Other Mentions of Akita
- Coil Developers Blog Projects
- @thomasbnt’s Awesome Web Monetization under Tools
- Defold Forum Thread “We are hosting a Web Monetization game jam”
- Itch.io Forum Topic Thread “Web Monetization support added to itch.io uploads!”
- ts-defold/tsd-template-web-monetized GitHub repo README

Outreach Initiative

Blog Posts
- HackerNoon Blog Post: Doing My Bit To Help Build the Web Monetization Community
Conferences
- Sharon was a panelist for the Creative Commons Summit 2020 discussion on: Can Web Monetization Support Digital Creators? in October 2020
  - No replay video, but Sharon makes a 2 second cameo in the very beginning of the Summit wrap-up video
- Elliot was a speaker for the Future of Micropayments conference in November 2020
  - Elliot and Sharon prepared a presentation on: Cultivating awareness and understanding around Web Monetization, highlighting our efforts in the Web Monetization space with Akita and A Web Monetization Story
  - Elliot’s talk replay video
Personal Discussions with Friends, Family, Coworkers
- Explained our efforts behind the Akita project, what Web Monetization is and the goals of Grant for the Web
- Took note of feedback, suggestions and questions about Web Monetization
- Encouraged them to explore the technology, get involved in the open source efforts and check out our work :)
Other Mentions
- Sharon received 3rd Place for Best Web Monetization Innovator Award in the 2020 Noonies
- Coil Developers Blog Resources
  - Cultivating awareness and understanding around Web Monetization Video
  - Doing My Bit To Help Build the Web Monetization Community

Communications and marketing

We won’t go into too much detail here, since specific blog posts/links were included in the Key Activities section above.

In general, we’ve been posting to our personal Twitter accounts (Elliot’s Twitter, Sharon’s Twitter) on any news related to our grant project efforts. We’ve recently created a Twitter account for esse-dev, an unofficial “organization” which represents our dev work as a duo. We plan to make development updates related to Akita and "A Web Monetization Story" (such as releases) on the @esse-dev Twitter account, so that information can be seen in a central spot.

Much of our discussion as it relates to development can be found in our open source repos for Akita and "A Web Monetization Story". We make use of GitHub issues to log bugs, enhancements, general feature development and facilitate any further discussion on implementation. We have also created an issue to explore setting up GitHub Discussions in our Akita repo.

We’ve had a couple opportunities to participate in online conferences related to Web Monetization (Creative Commons Web Monetization Panel; Future of Micropayments Conference), which we’ve really enjoyed! We are keeping an eye out for more opportunities to get involved in this format, as we find the engagement with audience members to be especially helpful and enjoyable.

Lastly, we have made use of DEV Community, Hacker Noon and the Grant for the Web Forum to post and discuss our efforts with the broader community. DEV Community and Hacker Noon have a primarily software development-centric audience, which helps us reach developers who may be interested in exploring Web Monetization. Going forward, we plan to share our major updates on both the Web Monetization Forem and DEV Community, i.e. create a duplicate post on DEV Community.

Links to Our Socials

What’s next?

Here are our To-Dos for the remainder of our grant period:

Website
- [📋 To do] Analyze and release website feedback.
- [📋 To do] Add a collection of our Web Monetization content to the website.
Extension
- [🏗️ In Progress] Post about the Akita public beta release with request for feedback.
- [📋 To do] Analyze and release extension feedback.
- [📋 To do] Release the Akita extension on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons Store.
- [📋 To do] Release the Akita extension on the Firefox Add-ons Store
- [📋 To do] Add a Web Monetized site discovery feature to the extension.
Outreach
- [📋 To do] Plan outreach for February and March.
- [📋 To do] Post two more blog posts.
General
- [📋 To do] Identify KPIs and set milestones based off feedback
- [📋 To do] Continue learning about: the tech around Web Monetization (Interledger, blockchain), running a business, licensing, etc.

What community support would benefit your project?

Our goal with the Akita project is to create content and resources that help our users better understand and engage with Web Monetization. So, the most helpful community support we can receive is you trying out our stuff and sending us your feedback! We want to know how (and if) our projects are helping you.

If you have some spare time, check out "A Web Monetization Story" and fill out the survey at the end to let us know your thoughts! (If you’ve already checked out the website, but missed the survey, you can fill it out here: "A Web Monetization Story" survey).

Coming soon: we’ll be posting an update on the Akita extension on this forem, with download links and a feedback form.

We’re continuously looking out for opportunities to speak at conferences, engage in community calls and participate in Web Monetization advocacy efforts, so feel free to reach out to us if there’s an opportunity that we can get involved in!

Finally, we’ve created a Twitter account for us to communicate updates on our progress going forward — we’d appreciate it if you gave us a follow: @esse_dev. Not much going on there yet, but stay tuned! :)

Additional comments

Over the course of the project we've learned about open content and open source licensing, incorporation in Canada, privacy policies and browser extension development, among other things. Elliot gave his first conference talk and Sharon published her first browser extension: Akita!

Shout out to the Web Monetization community! We've appreciated all the support we've received since we started on Akita nine months ago. It's been awesome to speak at conferences, receive feedback from the community and meet so many cool people.

Thanks,

the esse-dev team (Sharon and Elliot)