And we’re back to our regularly scheduled program.
This week we catch up on grant reports, project updates, community posts and more!
Grant Reports
Fernando Daguano shares what's next for Alquimétricos digital platform in progress report
Alquimétricos was founded in 2015 as an open-source initiative to bring STEAM educational resources to low-income communities, especially in Latin America. Over the years, the project has gained scale, prizes, and followers, becoming an international community of educators, designers, makers, communicators, and visual artists.
Thanks to the GFTW initiative, we now have the Alquimétricos LAB digital platform (https://lab.alquimetricos.cc/), which offers content such as videos, PDFs, and handouts, with instructions and tutorials to be applied in the classroom, in various pedagogical projects, or at home.
Our aim is to build a case study on Web Monetization of the platform through Coil, contributing to the sustainability of the project and benefiting a Brazilian ecosystem of public schools and social institutions.
On 10th March 2022, we launched the Alquimetrics LAB platform in its planned full version and the Social Call for Training in STEAM Education for teachers working in vulnerable communities. This Call will select 50 educators belonging to schools and other educational institutions to have free access to the platform via Coil with all the features and content that WM subscribers have. We also created more content focusing on the premium users, for monetization through subscriptions. We are analyzing alternative subscription and monetization methods to offer to Brazilians.
Registration is open from March 10th to March 31st and the teacher training program will take place from April 25th to July 25th, 2022.
Imani K Brown shares the challenges, turnarounds and progress happening with The Black Tattoo Anthology project
BTA is finally moving along. The infrastructure was a challenge since it does require a great deal of tech work to start. And as the low tech girl, I truly underestimated time and availability for tech needs as the project progressed.
But we pulled through! We were able to build a site, brand the project's social community - being hosted on Mighty Networks and map a strong user experience and brand awareness campaign.
We got the best response from artists when we reframed our main objective of Black Tattoo History to specifically talk about tattoo therapy and how modern tattooing helps heal within the Black community.
That small shift has turned our non-response from artists into 13 interviews thus far, in less than 2 weeks!
Quincy Larson for freeCodeCamp shares progress on new course offering
freeCodeCamp has made steady progress on the development of our Web Monetization + Interledger Protocol course.
We hope to finish the course by summertime.
Things we could build after the basics are covered:
- Build a Web Monetization resource page using what we learnt above? https://www.grantfortheweb.org/blog/community-next
- A simple website that shows ads for people without a wallet enabled (but replaces them with a "thank you" message for people who do have the wallet enabled) would be a good starting point.
Lauren Lavin shares new developments with the Los Suelos project in final report
We launched the Los Suelos, CA web anthology as anticipated in February 2022. We successfully raised over $750 for our charitable partner the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation in the first week after launch. All the content, including stories and art from more than 40 contributors, developed over the course of the grant period is live on the website and will continue to raise money through web monetization and direct donations in perpetuity. We experienced some difficulty getting enrolled in the Coil affiliate program in a timely manner, however we were able to resolve this almost immediately after launching the site and still within our project period.
We engaged an experienced web developer and Coil consultant (previous Grant for the Web awardee Sam Allemang) and set up social media pages and a Discord server for contributors. This website serves as the platform for a wide variety of interactive media.
As the project continued to expand thanks to the enthusiasm and input of our large contributor base, the rpg we developed, "Welcome to Los Suelos", became a bigger part of the overall project scope, far beyond the original point-and-click map we had envisioned in our proposal. All other planned key activities, such as the musical and audio components, fiction, art, and Coil monetization have also been successfully implemented.
Project Launchpad brings new game Rush for the web to multiple platforms in final report
🌟 We have been able to create and publish the game -- Rush for the web -- on multiple platforms since we last updated you of our progress 🌟
Our initial objective was to create an easy to reproduce game on web-monetization that educates players around the basics of web-monetization in the context of practical examples of monetizing their content over the web.
We're happy to say that have successfully been able to pull off our primary objective. But like any other creative process, the outcome did not completely match the path we had envisioned. In the process of game design, we had many learnings and realizations that considerably steered our next steps. Late in the process, we came to understand the performance related challenges of our game apps. We continued our work on producing a game application, but at the same time reused the assets to host a version on tabletopia to provide users with a better and well assisted gameplay.
Click the links to read and learn more about each project. And many thanks to projects Los Suelos,CA & Launchpad for being Grant for the Web awardees!
Project Updates & Community Posts
Sophie for project Prototypr goes back to the basics…
What do we want? Openly accessible, quality design content! When do we want it? Well, permanently, actually…
Earlier this month, whoops and hollers rang out from Prototypr HQ as we became awardees of a flagship grant from Grant For the Web/Interledger — and we’re planning on doing great things with it.
We’re developing Prototypr to be an inclusive, privacy-first publishing platform that rewards our contributors whilst democratising design education. Contributors will be in with a chance of winning monthly rewards for their top-notch writing. And we haven’t forgotten about our readers; we’re exploring ways to reward our readers involving unique artworks, collecting tokens, and leaderboards — earn as you learn. 🤓
Catalina Goanta shares the details of contribution to a new study
In the past months, I had the opportunity to contribute to a study for the European Parliament, at the request of the Internal Market and Consumer Protection committee (IMCO): The impact of influencers on advertising and consumer protection in the Single Market.
Executive summary
The influencer marketing industry has grown significantly in recent years. Consumers engage with influencers voluntarily but are at the same time exposed to advertising that relies on the relationship between the consumer and the influencer, which raises concerns about the protection of consumers. The objective of this study is to provide information and analysis on the impact of influencers on advertising and consumer protection in the Internal Market.
If you'd like to learn more about Sophie's project or Catalina's study, head over to each post and leave a comment to continue the conversation.
Upcoming Community Event
Join Us! We invite you to the next Community Call on Monday, March 28 at 1:00 pm EST hosted by GftW awardees Philo van Kemenade & Gunnar de Jong of project Gradual.
During this GftW Community Call, we'll hear from the team behind Gradual: a tool for connected community learning, helping GftW grantees to share skills based on common interests.
Gunnar and Philo will introduce Gradual and share why they believe social learning is so important in a community like ours. Earlier this month, Gradual powered a brand new Emergent Sessions track at MozFest. Gunnar and Philo will present what happened and most importantly; what they learned from this experience.
To register go to: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/298309781587
News from our Team
Vineel Reddy joins Interledger Foundation as our new Community Manager
Hello everyone, I’m Vineel Reddy, the new Community Manager at the Interledger Foundation. I’m super excited to be here and look forward to engaging with you and learning more about the Web Monetization Community.
With a background in Community Strategy and Advocacy, I have spent the last 12 years in community building and user engagement across Technology, Education and Creator ecosystems. I helped build global programs, campaigns, and events.
Before joining the Interledger Foundation, I was the founder at Collab House. Collab House designed programs, products, spaces, and services. Microsoft, PwC India, Société Générale, U.S. Embassy, EO, GreenPark Hotels, and several others partnered with Collab House to engage in the areas of Community & User Engagement, Emerging Technology, Design Thinking, and Innovation.
Please take a moment to welcome Vineel to our team and the Web Monetization community space.
See y'all next week and at our upcoming community call!
Header Image by Alexas_Fotos from
Pixabay
Top comments (1)
thank you for the showcase!
We're anxious to share our experiences with other grantees (even more if you're from Latin America and/or Portugueese-speaking countries or educational projects!)