The Interledger Community 🌱: Udit

COMPOST / Distributed Press — Grant Report #2

Udit — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:08:46 +0000

Project Update

Hi everyone! We're from COMPOST magazine. We're wrapping up our Grant for the Web grant in the creative catalyst track.

Short for the "commons post," COMPOST is a magazine that publishes creative works reflecting on the web as a digital commons. It's an intimate publication that covers stories about people building the web as shared resources. Our grant enabled us to launch and publish two issues of the magazine. Issue 01, Fertile Grounds, came out in March. And Issue 02, Inoculate, came out a couple weeks ago, in September. Both issues have Web Monetization integrated (check out our Web Monetization mushroom on the top right of the magazine)!

COMPOST Issue One cover, Fertile Grounds

COMPOST Issue Two cover, Inoculate

Overall, we feel very happy with our progress during the funded period. Our two issues have been well received and we have started to a build an engaged community around our project. Aside from a delayed timeline, we feel we have largely achieved our objectives and learned a lot through the process.

From the very beginning, we wanted to take an approach where we weren't just writing about the digital commons, but actively participating in commoning, practicing sharing our resources. We wanted to publish our tools and processes so that others could use and build upon them.

This approach has worked well. Through our sister project, Distributed Press -- which we have started to build using our GFTW funds -- we have created an open source tool to publish content to the Web as well as Decentralized Web protocols, which allow content to be stored and shared in a distributed manner. On the magazine side, working closely with contributors, we've been developing processes for collaborative editing, writing, promotion, and monetization. Sharing our tools and processes have helped us cultivate a small but growing community of like-minded writers, editors, technologists, and activists. We believe that this community can help us grow a patchwork of publishing projects -- magazines, tools, services -- that support each other in building the web we want to see.

COMPOST is a fruiting body of people who come from intersecting networks, and our deepest hope is that the ideas contained here scatter like spores in the wind.

- Issue 01 Foreword

Unsurprisingly, working remote through a pandemic has been challenging. The team and contributors all surfaced issues with burn out, particularly with video-conferencing.

Even still, working closely with contributors has been a highlight of our experience. We treat each issue as a lab, where we, the organizers and contributors of the magazine, experiment with ways of working together -- doing peer reviews, sharing readings, playing games, and collectively interviewing inspiring individuals. It has helped create a tight feedback loop between the development of our organization, our technology, and the real needs of creators. We think it's been fun for our contributors too. What can otherwise be an isolating creative experience, is now a collective process where peers share and learn alongside each other.

As many other grantees have reported, we were unable to generate any significant revenue through Web Monetization. We think it'll take a few issues until we're sustainably financed by our community and settle into a business model that works for us. Until then, we're excited to continue building on the foundations laid during this grant period. We couldn't be more grateful for the opportunity that was given to us by Grant for the Web.

Progress on objectives

Looking at our original objectives, we have largely achieved what we set out to do:

1 - Two web monetized issues published to the Web and DWeb

We integrated Web Monetization into two issues of COMPOST and distributed them via WWW and DWeb protocols, including IPFS and DAT/Hypercore, and validated the end-to-end monetization process from collecting payments from readers to distributing revenue among contributors. You can check out our web monetization mushroom on the top right corner both the issues, which animates when payments are streamed!

We developed and released open source software and associated documentation, which when deployed, enables authors and artists to publish and monetize their work through the WWW and a selection of DWeb protocols. You can check out the Distributed Press API for documentation!

This is a list of projects published using Distributed Press.

staging.compost.digital: Example website for Distributed Press
one.compost.digital: Website of COMPOST magazine Issue 01
two.compost.digital: Website of COMPOST magazine Issue 02
hypha.coop: Website of Hypha Worker Co-operative
sutty.ml: Experimental website mirror of Sutty

Issue 02 published via IPFS as viewed on the Agregore browser

2 - Working towards an equitable publishing model

An important objective for us was to compensate the labor of all contributors equitably. We tried to compensate our contributors fairly while setting a flat rate for the organizing team. We used Open Collective to pay out contributors and keep the finances of our project more transparent. We will continue to see how and where we can make our processes more equitable for creators.

3 - Building a strong community

We are starting to build a supportive community of readers. We've been receiving positive, constructive feedback from readers through Twitter and Mastodon. We have started to grow a monthly paid readership through our Open Collective subscriptions

We've fostered a small community of editors, authors, and artists who are interested in developing our project further. We've started to apply to new rounds of funding with our growing team. We've received attention from our allies, press and media outlets, especially those focused on technology, the solidarity economy, and platform co-operativism.

4 - Experimentation with premium experiences

One planned objective we were unable to complete was using Web Monetization to unlock premium experiences into the website. While we stream payments for users who have a Web Monetization provider (e.g., Coil) enabled, we haven't created specific experiences that are gated by Web Monetization. We found that even by our second issue, we did not have a large enough audience with Web Monetization enabled to warrant specialized experiences.

Similarly on the creator side, we feel that reducing the burden on creators in the KYC processing and set up for an ILP-enabled wallet (e.g., through Uphold) would improve accessibility in the ecosystem. It would allow more experimentation with direct revenue disbursement schemes to individual creators who contributed to our magazine.

Key activities

COMPOST magazine community and editorial

As planned, most of our effort went into developing our magazine concept and working with two cohorts of contributors to publish two issues of our magazine.

Here's a picture from our Issue Two release party 🎉

Technical development distributed.press API

We developed a publishing tool to:

host the project website on WWW and seed it to DWeb networks (i.e. Hypercore, IPFS)
serve the Distributed Press API on WWW and seed GET responses to the DWeb networks
experiment with Web Monetization on DWeb protocols, using Brave (with its IPFS + Web Mon extensions)

This tool also has a monetization endpoint, allowing us to display the magazine's revenues that are pooled to an Open Collective account. To check that out, visit our support us page for our Digital Bake Sale. This bake sale is a way for us to monetize our magazine according to goals that have been collectively set by the contributors of the magazine.

Aside from the API, we also developed an engaging front-end for our magazine with templates that are adaptable for future issues.

Project management and operations

Since our project had two distinct sides -- editorial and technical development -- the role of project management was to ensure that workstreams were synchronized.

We documented our editorial and organizational processes for COMPOST and Distributed Press in this Github wiki.

Communications and marketing

Surrounding the release of the two magazine issues, we gave talks about COMPOST and Distributed Press at several virtual events, including at MozFest, MozFest Community Fridays, and the Decentralized Web Meetups. We held two virtual parties following the release of both issues. One of our co-founders, Mai Ishikawa Sutton, was featured in LOGIC Magazine where they spoke extensively about COMPOST and Distributed Press.

At the beginning of this grant period, we did not have any following on any social media platforms. Due to our engagement, over the past eight months we have gained 1,020 Twitter followers, over 250 followers on Mastodon, over 115 followers on Instagram, over 50 followers on Are.na, and 24 backers on Open Collective.

Lastly, we have designed and produced physical stickers with the COMPOST logo and the kaoani aniGIFs produced by our Issue 01 visual contributor, Angelica Blevins.

Our stickers!

What’s next?

Since we have completed the objectives we outlined for this grant, we'd like to build on the success we have achieved over the past nine months to release more issues of COMPOST. We believe COMPOST can be a powerful means to strengthen the community of creators, developers, and designers who are imagining new ways to share labor and ownership over digital infrastructure.

We would also like to build Distributed Press into a reliable open source product that allows magazines like COMPOST, as well as other digital publishing projects, to easily publish to the DWeb. We believe access to audience and direct monetization are crucial to content creators, and would like to explore how Web Monetization will fit into emergent DWeb publishing practices.

What community support would benefit your project?

We'd like to talk with others who are working on creative projects that function cooperatively or horizontally with artists, journalists, academics, and others interested in publishing to the DWeb.

We've learned many lessons through our collaborative publication and transparent organizing process, and would like to learn how others are navigating the challenges that arise in more participatory governance/ownership practices.

COMPOST — Grant Report #1

Udit — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 01:57:53 +0000

COMPOST magazine viewed over Hypercore on the Agregore Browser.

Project Update

COMPOST is a magazine about the digital commons that provides fertile ground for creative and collective experimentation. Our project is unique in that we not only publish on the World Wide Web, but we support Decentralized Web (DWeb) protocols like IPFS and Hypercore.

Last year in November, we had announced our inaugural Call for Pitches and received more than 100 submissions! From there, we found our co-conspirators and set sail for Fertile Grounds (the theme for our first issue!).

We are so excited to have launched our first issue with Web Monetization on March 8th, 2021! View it here 🎉 (more links to the DWeb at the bottom)

Progress on objectives

One of our key goals was to foster a small community of editors, authors, and artists, to join us in building an author-owned co-operative. After careful selection from the Call for Proposal submissions, months of co-working with our ten authors and artists across four continents, and feeling energized by the shared enthusiam for this project, we feel we have seeded a community beyond our expectation.

This magazine isn’t a product, it’s an artefact of a process that we feel is even more valuable than the issue itself. Through COMPOST, we’re adding to an existing network of people, tools, experiences, and knowledge systems. Our team of contributors and collaborators work in and for solidarity economics, co-operatives, copyleft, free and open source development, IndieWeb, and DWeb. By creating the magazine and evolving tools, we are metabolizing the structures that are failing us. We use what’s remaining — designs, protocols, and organizational practices — to build trustful networks of digital commoning.

---COMPOST Issue One: Foreword

Two key objectives in our proposal---publishing the magazine to the DWeb and holding an in-magazine crowdfund, are also accomplished with the launch of Issue One, and they are described in the next section. As proposed in our grant, we also expect to release a second issue this year, where we will investigate probabilistic revenue sharing to multiple payment pointers.

Another objective we hope to accomplish is to build a supportive community of readers willing to give us constructive feedback and pay for memberships. Well... this is where we'll need your help: tell all your friends about COMPOST!

Key activities

Building our magazine co-operatively

Along with the democratization of monetization mechanisms, we believe there's a need for participatory and democratic organizations to help ensure meaningful livelihoods and steward the web of the future. That's why we started COMPOST magazine. We approach COMPOST as a process to metabolize and renew our relationships with the web, to imagine and build interdependent, equitable, and solidarity-based systems of communication and knowledge sharing.

Each issue is itself an experiment: a lab where creators, organizers, and technologists support each other to build new spaces for dialogue and creativity. Together we test boundaries of governance, collaboration, and publishing online.

---COMPOST Issue One: Foreword

Having these collective discussions, in addition to indiviudal sessions planning for the content of the magazine, helped our young community build trust and expectations for our collective endeavour. Through this process, we generated new resources, some of which are published to our project wiki and more will soon be added.

Developing the Distributed Press

We built a new publishing tool for the Decentralized Web called Distributed Press to publish content to IPFS and Hypercore. Here is the source code and documentation, along with deployment Ansibles. Our instance hosted at Hypha is now used by several early-adopter projects to publish their websites to the DWeb!

Here is the COMPOST magazine viewed over IPFS on the Brave Browser with the Coil extension and Web Monetization active.

Running a Digital Bake Sale together

We need better business models for creative projects. We don't think we have all the answers, but with collective experimentation we can find a model that works for our community. We treat each issue as a lab for trying new experiments with fundraising.

As decribed in our proposal, together with our contributors, we built an in-magazine crowdfund and collectively decided how to allocate raised funds. We prototyped the end-to-end monetization process from collecting payments from readers, to distributing revenue among ourselves. Check out our digital bake sale in Issue One!

In this process, we also identified several friction points for individuals to adopt Web Monetization. The process to obtain a payment pointer, then transferring balances to a bank account, is both procedurally (e.g. KYC, understanding financial and legal risks) and technically (e.g. multiple new concepts, how do you test this) intimidating to an average person. We do not feel asking each magazine contributor to open an Uphold account and obtain their own payment pointer is the right approach and are investigating alternatives. We have documented some processes on two GitHub Issues (#12 and #16) and shared some thoughts here on using a fiscal host.

Another technical challenge we ran into is fetching real-time balances in Web Monetization accounts. Some findings are documented in this GitHub Issue #15 and discussed here.

Communications and marketing

We engaged designers at Made By Super and web developer Benny Lichtner to help us build a visually beautiful website and brand assets
We set up accounts on Are.na, Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, Open Collective, and Gitcoin
Since launch we have started working with many groups in our space, including grantees in our cohort like DisCO and Simply Secure
Distributed Press is in several discussions with content-publishing groups like Sutty.nl and Internet Archive
Our Twitter has gathered almost 500 followers before launch of Issue One
We started getting subscribers on our self-hosted newsletter
We presented COMPOST: Exploring artist-centric development through Distributed Press at FOSDEM
We are facilitating This Is What Solidarity Looks Like — Emergent Practices from the Decentralized Co-operative Web at Mozfest and showcasing our magazine in the Decentralization Space and using Web Monetization's #mozfest hashtag
Both COMPOST and Distributed Press will be speaking at San Francisco DWeb Meetup (Virtual) on March 25

What’s next?

Over March and April, we will focus on the marketing of Issue One while exploring ideas that came about in the last couple months of working with contributors and other collaborators.

Distributed Press will start planning for its next set of features to support the publishing of Issue Two. This includes delivery of content into decentralized social networks such as Aether and Scuttlebutt. In parallel, we will start planning for Issue Two, where we will explore probabilistic revenue sharing and investigate ideas to streamline the Web Monetization -> Uphold -> Open Collective -> Contributor monetary flow.

Most importantly, we will continue spreading our culture, tools, and practices to like-minded folks who wish to work with us, and to build a better web together.

The people featured in Issue One show us that the web can be a place of personal growth and intense feeling. They challenge universalist views of technology, revealing how locally situated networks give voice and agency to marginalized communities. They show the web’s potential to redistribute power and interoperate with other regenerative human systems. They explore how the internet is things.

---COMPOST Issue One: Foreword

What community support would benefit your project?

Share COMPOST with everyone! Tell them about our DWeb-native cooperative magazine of the future Web! Support us so we can reach financial sustainability 💰 We also made shout outs to several Web Monetization projects in this community on our Support Us page!

We build openly and love collaborating with others. If anything here interests you, and you want to explore collaborations, get in touch with us at hello [at] compost.digital.

Additional comments

This is our Web Monetization mushroom. It uses the exclusive content example as detection to trigger the animation. Find it at the top right corner on all pages of our magazine.

Relevant links/resources

Check out Issue 01: Fertile Grounds and tell all your friends!

Read more about our approach on our Wiki

Explore our DWeb publishing API with Distributed Press

Stay in touch through social
You can @ mention us at @COMPOSTmag (Twitter) or @compost@social.coop (Mastodon).

An artist-centric magazine on the web and DWeb — COMPOST

Udit — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 03:14:23 +0000

Image

COMPOST magazine issue one, viewed over Hypercore on the Agregore Browser.

Project overview

COMPOST is a magazine about the digital commons that provides fertile ground for creative and collective experimentation.

Our first issue with Web Monetization just launched on March 8th, 2021! View it here 🎉

COMPOST curates works of art, reflections, and experiments about building the Web as a shared resource and commons with active stewards. We are testing Web Monetization to help make this creative project sustainable.

Our project is unique in that we not only publish on the World Wide Web, but we support Decentralized Web (DWeb) protocols like IPFS and Hypercore.

Project team

Our core team is Mai Ishikawa Sutton, Benedict Lau, and Udit Vira.

Our partners and supporters include Grant for the Web, Hypha Worker Co-op, Made by Super, Simply Secure, Open Collective, and Gitcoin.

What we are doing

Building a magazine collectively

We've just launched Issue 01. This issue was developed over December 2020 - February 2021 through dialogue and experimentation among creators, organizers, and technologists. It's our first step as we lay the organizational groundwork to develop an artist-centric co-operative publication.

🎥 Learn more about our goals and process this video

Running a Digital Bake Sale together

In Issue 01 we prototyped the end-to-end monetization process, from collecting payments from readers to distributing revenue among ourselves.

Check out our digital bake sale in Issue 01!

In future issues, we'll try new experiments with probablistic revenue sharing. With this, we can automatically split revenues among multiple payment pointers (e.g., accounts for creators, organizers, technologists).

You can read more about our approach on our project wiki.

Developing the Distributed Press

Here is COMPOST magazine viewed over IPFS on the Brave Browser with the Coil extension and Web Monetization active.

What community support would benefit your project?

Share COMPOST with everyone! Tell them about our DWeb-native cooperative magazine of the future web! Support us so we can reach financial sustainability 💰 We also gave some shout outs to several Web Monetization projects in this community on our Support Us page!

We also love feedback! Tell us what you think about our experiments with fundraising, content, and technology.

Hit us up if you want to collaborate. If anything here interests you, and you want to explore collaborations, get in touch with us at hello [at] compost.digital.

Link Round Up!

Check out Issue 01: Fertile Grounds and tell all your friends!

Read more about our approach on our Wiki

Explore our DWeb publishing API with Distributed Press

Highlight other projects

We love the work that DisCO and Simply Secure are doing! We've also done some shout outs to Web Monetization projects in this community on our Support Us page. We're excited to be a part of the Web Monetization community and meet new collaborators.

Don't miss our mushroom art!

This is our Web Monetization mushroom. It uses the exclusive content example as detection to trigger the animation. Find it at the top right corner on all pages of our magazine.