The Grantee Report: Quarterly Roundup!

Hi all! Here’s a roundup of grant reports from our Ambassadors and Grantees submitted over the past few months. If you missed them, here you go!

Ambassadors

Santosh Viswanatham, Web Monetization and Open Source Ambassador, shares the progress and achievements of his ambassadorship his final report, such as developing Get Involved guides for Web Monetization, Rafiki, and Open payments. Authored a Developer Guide for migrating Web Monetization code and much more.

In Smriti Parsheera’s Pinging Paradise interim report discusses her work understanding the experience of digital financial inclusion among the people of district Lahaul & Spiti in Himachal Pradesh, India. This interim report presents an overview of the activities that I have undertaken as part of this project over the last five months. Being a research-centric exercise, this has involved activities such as literature review, interaction with experts, design of the questionnaires and implementation of the interviews.

Interledger Ambassador Ayden Ferdeline's proposed research raising awareness and understanding of the Interledger Protocol (ILP) and writes in his interim report that our ecosystem has ambitious goals, and in order to realize them, he believes we need more people championing Open Payments, the Interledger Protocol, and responsible regulatory frameworks that enable and provide viable business models for digital public infrastructure. As a public interest technologist , Ayden has been working to raise the awareness and understanding of the Interledger Protocol (ILP) within various external tech policy fora.

As an ILF Research Ambassador Stephanie Perrin's proposed research on privacy framework for the implementation of the ILP. In her interim report Stephanie discusses drafting a model privacy framework for implementing the ILF protocol and training materials for those unused to thinking about privacy best practices. Stephanie identifies the heart of the problem: in order to come up with a privacy policy and risk assessment you need an accurate personal data map, showing who collects, uses, and shares personal data, and with whom.

Future Money Grantees

Xiaoji Song’s writes in her final report on project The Parallel Society, a cyber drama taken in the form of a web-based game and interactive fiction on narratives of two main characters. Xiaoji's report explores the poetics and the politics behind the stories of historically marginalized communities.

Felipe Brugués project Resimulate: Economic agendas to (get rich and) stop worrying about the future delves into the inputs that would allow us to better understand both the conceptual framework (the theory of counterfactuals; the epistemology that reflects on data; the artistic representation of data), material that yielded the criteria (four financial self-help books), processing of data (from Ecuadorian citizens that was extracted from public records available online) to be processed and represented in the totems. The final report expands on their research on the limits of the material and the medium to translate narratives from data.

Carlijn Kingma’s project The Waterworks of Money states the structure of our money system is not a natural phenomenon. The way ‘the waterworks of money’ is organized, is ultimately a political choice. Carlijn writes in final report about choosing to change this architecture, so that the financial sector serves society and helps to tackle the major challenges of the age.

Digital Financial Services Grantees

Mifos Initiative’s Dave Higgins brings us up to speed in final report. Dave shares that the team has concluded both its interview/research and design activities and we are delighted to share with the community what we have discovered and our proposed next steps. Mifos’ goal was to research how ILP can be part of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and contribute to democratizing financial services through its open protocol suite for sending payments across different ledgers.

Thitsaworks Nyein Thiri Han in collaboration with the Mexican Association of Credit Unions of the Social Sector (AMUCSS) and The People's Clearinghouse (PCH), details implementing an inclusive and instant payments network at the subnational level for credit union members across Mexico. In the interim report ThitsaWorks reported significant progress in expanding the application of ThitsaNet beyond its initial scope. In addition to ongoing work with the People's Clearinghouse for deploying the payment hub and customizing the Thitsa Payment Portal in Mexico, we are now embarking on an exciting new venture in South East Asia.

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