Your Weekly Roundup

We're back from Summer Break catching up on what's been happening here in the Web Monetization Community Space.

We end the week with project updates, grant reports, ILF updates, upcoming community engagement opportunities and the final hours of open call for proposals.

Final hours to apply to ILP Financial Services Open Call for Proposals

There is still time to submit your business case to develop an ILP-based Financial Service. Interledger Foundation is committed to supporting innovative solutions that advances open payment technology.

This is your chance to get grant funding of US$75K to support your research efforts.

To Apply:
https://submit.grantfortheweb.org/submit/225504/ilp-based-financial-services

Application deadline is today, July 8, 19:00 UTC

Watch Now!!!

If you missed one of the ILP Financial Services CFP Info Session, you can watch the recording from June 2

Have questions about the application, we are help!

• Join the Interledger Slack Channel

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Updates & Questions

Project Update from gFam for gFam.live

Hi everyone!
We've been putting together monthly reports on our progress over at gFam since January, and here is June's edition:
gFam Monthly Progress Report - June
If you'd like to see the other months, please check out the gFam Blog.
We're excited about our new web monetization functionality and we're hoping to have a couple of new things released in the next few weeks.
Thanks for reading!

Meghan Laclé for Free Music Archive announces new music releases

Tribe of Noise, with financial support from Buma/Stemra and the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, invited 5 musicians to create new music and explore a wide range of licensing models.
The five brand new music albums and tracks are here and ready to be explored, enjoyed and shared with the WM Community!
Besides the fact that Free Music Archive is hosting these new releases, we have more great news; all artists agreed to license the songs on these albums; over 40 new tracks, to YouTubers, podcasters, and other media makers via commercial licenses on Tribe of Noise PRO.

To listen to these new album releases, head over to Meghan’s to hear the music.

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Grant Reports

Lior Zalmanson discusses the progress of project Sharing values, sharing funds - Web Monetization as a catalyst for social change Grant Report 1

Project Update
In this project, we continue our work on the effects of online content monetization models on user behavior. Building on our previous findings, we now explore how different monetization models, and the level of users’ awareness of the monetization model, affect their content consumption choices.
We are interested in studying if users who adopt Web Monetization become more aware and mindful consumers. We are especially interested in learning whether such users become more socially conscious and use their content consumption to support causes and initiatives close to their hearts.

Progress on objectives
Literature survey of relevant scientific streams:
Our first objective is the literature survey. The literature survey is the base for our theoretical framework and informs the design of our surveys and experiments. Moreover, we believe that it could be of relevance to other members of the community and inform and inspire further discussions and ideas.
Our review begins with research on online activism. First, we examine what online activism is, the advantages of activism online, the challenges that need to be overcome, and why we see the Web Monetization protocol as a potential solution to some of them. We then turn to look at relevant theories from behavioral, cognitive and social psychology and create an initial theoretical framework of the relationship between online activism and Web Monetization.

Takunda Chingonzo for project TechVillage Trust
writes about game development in Zimbabwe in Grant Report 1

Project Update
Game On is a game development program that was started in 2019 to support game development in Zimbabwe. It started of as a game development accelerator, the first ever in Zimbabwe and through that program it became clear that a lot more foundational work needed to be done in order to effectively support game development in Zimbabwe. Part of the prior work around the project revealed monetization is a crucial component and part of the infrastructure that has to be made available if this industry is to truly take off. This is especially true for Zimbabwean developers as they do not have access to basic digital payment infrastructure such as PayPal and Skrill. This project sort to explore the depth of knowledge and extent to which game developers were leveraging on different web monetization models. Building on that, the project will improve the adoption of web monetization through workshops and the formation of a local community of interested developers, designers and innovators and lastly, to profile active game developers in the ecosystem and their work.

Progress on objectives
We began by mapping out the ecosystem in Zimbabwe. This entailed reaching out to the existing developers that we know and, through referral, identifying additional developers. We also reached out to the educational institutions, Coworking Spaces, E-sports clubs and associations as well as companies that have dabbled in game development and "gamification." (This was very rudimentary gamification in things like loyalty programs.)
A big deliverable of this project is a research paper focusing on the adoption of web monetization models in game development. We commenced our research work and are in the process of collecting data leveraging on the mapping work that we undertook at the start of this project.
We also reached out to game developers to identify specific topics and areas of interest that we used in the formulation of the workshop series that we have started hosting. It was interesting to learn that the bulk of the developers requested content and material on the fundamentals of game development with topics such as "How to successfully launch a mobile game" as well as other technical questions that are tool/platform specific like using Unity and Unreal Engine.
We hope to invite attendees to join the Game Development community that we will host and convene at our coworking space in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

Tabi Bonney shares new updates on the progress of the The ITADI Digital Sustainable Farming Initiative in Grant Report 1

Background
The ITADI Digital Sustainable Farming Initiative will design and pilot the first direct to consumer farm that leverages the power of web monetization to prototype solutions addressing issues of transparency, sustainability, and equitable market access that plague coffee and other cash crop farmers around the world.

Project Update
We have had an interesting, exciting and adventurous couple of months. We hit the ground running in Togo, West Africa and had many logistic, technical and creative hurdles we had to navigate. That was expected but it’s always a surprise when things happen. Overall we are pretty much on schedule with our timeline. Our farmers are extremely happy to be involved in the project and their faces lit up when we put them in front of the camera to interview them, take their pictures, and film their farming techniques. They have never been interviewed in their entire lives so that brought much joy to see that they felt valued that someone wanted to hear what they had to say outside of the village.
One of the main goals is to connect communities worlds apart and to keep that communication going well into the future. We feel we are on our way to achieving this, we just have to readjust logistics that we thought would work and supplement them with other systems in the meantime.
Our websites are web monetized enabled by ILP and we have begun populating our sites with content from the farms on a consistent basis. We feel as though over time this will garner a beautiful community of people who come to learn, share, buy exclusive products and gain access to another world.

Progress on objectives
We feel enthused about our objectives that we put in place. Our sites are monetized and we have begun populating them with consistent content. Micropayments are going to our farmers but not in the simple way we had hoped for. Only one of our farmers has a bank account. Due to the extreme remoteness of our farms the rest of our farmers do not think it’s practical to have to go to a bank. We have put a system in place where our farm manager visits our farmers once a week and gives them their stipend/micropayment as well as captures content. Another note is that Uphold does not work with banks in Togo. They do not take the cfa/xof currency which means they do not work in France or any other francophone country. The Uphold team said they are working on adding additional currencies and suggested crypto as a substitute in the meantime.However we think there is an opportunity with mobile money. Instead of going to the bank our farmers and many people throughout Togo use a system/app called Flooz and TMoney. It’s similar to how people in the the US use Venmo and Cashapp, except it is not connected to a bank. They are little cash stands manned by a person where you can send and also receive money via mobile. They are populated throughout the country even in the most remote areas.

Thank you to Lior, Takunda and Tabi, to learn more about each project full progress reports, you read the full reports at the links above.

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ILf Updates

Vineel R. Pindi for Interledger Foundation shares updates on ILF, Coil, Rafiki and more from the June 8 ILF Community Call

You can also listen to this community call here:

• Soundcloud: Stream episode Community Call - June 8, 2022 by Interledger podcast | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

• Cinnamon: Community Call - 8 June2022

Upcoming Community Call:

• 13 July 2022 | Agenda and link to join here.

Take the Developer Nation survey

Uchi Uchibeke writes

Hi all, every year, the Developer Nation survey gets feedback for 10s of thousands of Devs globally
If you're a Developer or interested in sharing your experience building a project, please join this year's
survey using the Coil survey link https://developereconomics.net?member_id=coil
At the end of the Survey, you'd be able to redeem 6 months of Coil membership + $10 in tip credit and other Perks for partners

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Community Engagements

Stay tuned for details on our July Community Call!

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See you next week and good luck to everyone submitting their applications!