This week we introduce a new awardee, new resources for Black creators, a past awardee has a new interesting project, and 2 project's share a progress and final grant report. Plus, a Community Call: MozFest Edition!
Welcome new GftW awardee: Black Web Fest
We are excited to announce that Black Web Fest x Web Monetization is a new awardee and a part of our January 2022 cohort. Many of you have interacted with Victoria Coker on this space, so please welcome her and project on the newest part of their journey.
Project details:
The pandemic disproportionately impacted creators of color. According to a report by the "Americans for the Arts," Black, Indigenous, artists of color had higher rates of unemployment than white artists in 2020 and lost a larger percentage of their creative income.
Black Web Fest x Web Monetization will address these issues by teaching Black creators about the benefits and utility of Web Monetization. During the project, organizers will engage the Black Web Fest community through a film competition, a virtual marketing course, and digital publicity course. All the courses will be recorded, transcribed, and available for playback on Blackwebfest.org.
Team includes: Victoria Coker, Leiana Spooner
Congratulations Victoria, we can't wait to see what’s next!
Victoria Coker shares a list of new funding opportunities from Fearless Fund | Women Of Color Grant Program, Comcast Rise, SOGAL | Black Founder Startup Grant and more...
Hi, It's Black History Month!!! I think it's a great opportunity to support Black creators in the group. Id ask if you want to celebrate this year, if you know of a Black creator doing amazing work please give them their flowers, share their work, and ask how you can help their efforts. I wanted to share some resources for Black creators and entrepreneurs. Please stay encouraged.
To find out more head over to Victoria's post for additional details.
Past Grant for the Wed awardee Catalina Goanta shares details about new project and you can participate
With a wonderful interdisciplinary team, I had the privilege of being part of the first round of Grant for the Web projects. Building on this insight, and in the hope to create more convergence between pockets of researchers, creators, developers and pretty much anyone interested in the content creator economy and its business models, is the upcoming European Research Council Starting Grant project HUMANads.
In this project, I aim to investigate this issue of transparency. If the social media economy is increasingly based on deceit, it leads to new forms of vulnerability for both consumers and citizens on digital markets.
If you're interested in this project, do reach out! Also worth noting that the project entails 2 PhD positions (law + computer science), as well as 2 postdoc positions (social science + computer science), that will be hosted at Utrecht University's Faculty of Law (The Netherlands). I'll keep giving updates of the project in the months to come.
Carolyn Malachi of project Call & Response has a solution for virtual performers in progress report and rubensworks of project Incentivizing Decentralized App Development’s final report is Solid
The Call & Response â„¢ system leverages blockchain and digital signal processing technologies to address for virtual environment performers two key problems: silenced audiences and slow, inadequate compensation. The system absorbs audience response data, delivers digital asset payments to performers, and sends to performers sonified audience data which allows them to hear audiences as they might experience them in a physical performance venue. Importantly, Call & Response â„¢ preserves the privacy of audience members by using only information from their provided comments to guide what the performer hears. Performers interact with Call & Response via decentralized application or website.
We intended on a buildout of the Call & Response â„¢ (CR) system as described in our 2021 US Patent Application 17/451,243. This initial design calls for the creation of a new smart contract, one that performs API calls, sorts audience response data into a format readable by MAX / MSP, and triggers the exchange of digital assets from virtual concert sponsor to performer. Conversations with virtual platform performers (artists, DJs, etc.), audio engineers specializing in surface property modeling and rendering, developers in the blockchain space, and Grant for the Web representatives provided insight which refined our concept.
After our initial smooth progress on the application to assign payment pointers to a Solid WebID, we struggled a bit on the next part of the project. An initial scan of the Interledger technology stack gave the impression of a mature ecosystem, with ample library and documentation support. This lead us to believe that it would be straightforward to perform Interledger Protocol based STREAM payments, right from the user's browser to the target payment pointer of a content creator (present inside the HTML of his/her website).
We decided to take a deeper dive at how Coil works, since they are the only party that we know of who does Web Monetization in practice. That made us realise that even Coil doesn't execute ILP payments from a user's payment pointer to another user's payment pointer directly. Instead they offer a subscription-based service (via credit card payments) to users that can run Coil's browser extension. This extension can act like a local service (browser extensions are more priveleged than javascript executing in the browser), but as far as we known the extension also just contacts their servers to execute payments on behalf of the user, by making a payment from Coil's wallet (which holds the funds generated by the subscriptions) to the Wallets of the content creators.
Grant for the Web Community Call: MozFest Edition
We’re excited to continue our monthly series of community engagements and are pleased to invite you to the next Community Call, MozFest Edition on Thursday, February 24 at 12:00 pm EST hosted by the Grant for the Web Program Team.
This is an ongoing series of live community gatherings that will focus on building connections, sharing knowledge, and advancing the Web Monetization ecosystem.
During this Community Call we will discuss our plans for the upcoming Mozilla Festival and how to participate. We know the Grant for the Web community has been awaiting an opportunity to experiment with new Web Monetization features. Finally, we have our chance! In partnership with Mozilla and Coil, we are excited to host a MozFest-wide experiment in tipping!
This call will be an hour and will take place on Zoom. We acknowledge that for a global community this time may not be friendly to all timezones so we will be recording the call to share and commit to moving these monthly meetings to different times going forward.
You and your team can register (free) for the Community Call here. The Zoom link will be shared in the Eventbrite invite and note taking document to all those who register for the session ahead of the call.
We will discuss:
- Details on how to participate in the tipping beta
- How you can make sure your content and projects can participate and be available for tips from MozFest Participants
- How to help advocate and talk tom others about Web Monetization and your projects
Before Community Call you might want to:
- Get a ticket: The best way to join the experiment is to get a MozFest ticket. This gets you on the mailing list for the Coil accounts with tipping. Tickets are ‘Pay what you can’. Feel free to use award funds to purchase a ticket, and if you are unable to contribute much at this time, know that the Interledger Foundation is supporting the festival as a top-level sponsor.
- See examples of project content featured last year
- Let the Program Team know if you are currently involved in MozFest in another capacity
We do hope you can join us! To register go to: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/266176550227
Looking forward to seeing you on February 24th!
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