This week! Things to know about the open call for proposals, project updates, grant reports, and upcoming community engagement opportunities.
Applying for the open call for proposals for ILP-based financial services, here’s what you need to know
About the open call for proposal
The Interledger Foundationis allocating $1.5 million USD in grant funding to organizations with an interest to build financial nodes in the Interledger Network.
We encourage companies, NGOs, educational institutions, government agencies, or other documented collectives across the globe with innovative ideas and solutions for Interledger Protocol (ILP) enabled financial services to apply.
Enabling financial innovations, inclusion and access
The Interledger Foundation champions advocacy for Interledger, an open protocol that permits frictionless payments and micropayments across currencies and ledgers enabling opportunities for broader global financial inclusion. The Foundation in its mission to build equitable pathways to financial access and digital participation launched its Call for Proposals for ILP-Based Financial Services to help organizations research and plan concepts that will help catalyze more financial services nodes in the Interledger Network.
Supporting those who facilitate and utilize open payments for financial equity
Through this grant, we seek to support communities that have – and continue to be – systemically and deliberately excluded from financial access and empowerment opportunities. The Interledger Foundation by providing grants that total $75,000 USD to up to twenty (20) recipients will fund 6-month research and development projects with a compelling idea for an ILP-enabled financial service that understands the problems and explores innovative open source solutions.
Encourage your communities and local organizations to apply and collaborate with us.
Build your idea in the Interledger Network
Do you have an idea for a compelling ILP-enabled financial service? Here’s how to apply for a grant to explore and develop that idea:
Use or create a (free) Submittable account.
Complete the application outlining the proposed concept, its applicability to the Interledger Protocol, practical work plan to create a prototype and preliminary budget.
How to apply: https://submit.grantfortheweb.org/submit/c20a29f5-6624-42ba-bd4a-5c58a79ebbc3/ilp-based-financial-services
The application is open until July 8, 2022
Attend a weekly office hours session!
We have 2 more weekly sessions and encourage you to drop in. This is a great opportunity to ask your questions and share useful tips for applying.
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
9:00 pm EDT / 1:00 UTC
To Register: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/359447024727
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
3:00 pm EDT / 7:00 pm UTC
To Register: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/359448529227
Stay Tuned!
If you’re unable to attend office hours sessions, you are welcome to join the Interledger Slack and the #cfp-financial-services channel or reach out to us at info@interledger.org if you have any questions.
Updates & Questions
Countdown to js13kGames 2022
Andrzej Mazur for Enclave Games shares
This year’s countdown to js13kGames, the online competition for Web Game Developers running yearly since 2012, is starting exactly two months before August 13th.
Comparing that to recent years (April 30th in 2019, June 26th in 2020, and July 13th in 2021), it seems this one is right in the middle.
The 2022 edition will be our eleventh (!) already, which I think is quite impressive on its own. We do have plenty in store for this year, as we aim to improve the overall experience every single time, but since many of the new things are not yet confirmed we’ll wait with the official announcements till they are.
Enclave Games also needs your help, click the link to learn how you can support.
Grant Reports
Eleni Maltas of Soul in the Horn shares progress on developing new website
Project Update
The Soul In The Horn team has been working tirelessly on developing a new website for our creative community that is airtight and ready to go for Interledger Protocol technology.Our first phase has been transferring our old website from Webflow to a new and more customizable website on WordPress. Our first round of payment has gone to research, development and deployment for this process. We ran into some hurdles with design architecture and this has pushed back testing the Interledger API to this current month.
It was important that from the beginning we set up a website that was designed for our creative community to take complete advantage of and eventually adopt as their own. For this reason, every artist on our website has their own unique user page very much like Instagram or Facebook (unique user profiles pictured above with names crossed out for privacy). Creating a unique page for each artist allows us to implement payment pointers on their specific user page (with the Coil plugin for WordPress) allowing them to receive funds directly to their account.
Last month, we invited 50 creatives from our community to a virtual meeting and spoke to them about the opportunities of interledger protocol and the main concern was “what if my followers and supporters want to send me more money than what is streamed to me through micropayments?” This is where we hope to see some development with Rafiki in the next coming months and would really love to learn the best way to implement this for our community.
Tadej Štrok (https://community.interledger.org/tadej) of project New Day successfully launch platform in final report.
Project Update
We have successfully launched the New day platform that has attracted over 30 monthly subscribers in its first three months. Relative to the size of Slovenia (population 2 million) and a modest reach that the 5 media outlets participating in the project have, we consider having over 30 recurring paying subscribers (5 € monthly) that have also installed and are using our browser extension, a success and a good proof of concept of using WMS in practice.The development and the launch of the platform was quite straightforward, but in the first half of the project, we experienced some setbacks with 2 bigger media outlets declining participation, due to concerns the New day platform would cannibalize their existing donor base (as outlined in our Interim report). We also had to deal with promoting the platform during a time of an extremely heated parliamentary election campaign, during which the public discourse tensions were high and hyper focused and therefore our message was harder to get across.
However, we are happy with the final outcome and with the groundwork now completed, we now plan on focusing more on quality of life platform improvements, new features and additional promotional activities, as well as the slow expansion of the media outlets participating in the project.
Ogoluwa Ojewale for HostBeak Kreators share their success connecting a community of creatives in final report.
Project Update
Our grant period has finally come to an end. So far, we have had over 52 completed websites connected to Coil from the Kreators and others are almost done with continuous guidance from the community, resources and video recordings.
You can access articles from all the completed websites here: https://kreators.africa, we will continue to update the site as more kreators complete their websites.Recap
The HostBeak Kreators Program set out to select 1000 Creators across Africa in their different spheres; fashion, entertainment, writing, blogging, design, photography, and whatever skill they excelled in and give them an opportunity to build their own personal website and monetize it via web monetization. The program offered Free Domain names, Hosting Plans, Training, Resources and Web Monetization.
After making our selection from the entries submitted, we sent Emails, and SMS to all the 1,000 Kreators. We also called the phone numbers of some that inputted wrong contact details out of which 276 joined the programme.
We resent newsletters/mails and SMS to those who didn’t respond earlier.
Some later reach out to us weeks into the programme and we found a way to fix some into existing groups or handled them separately.
You can read the Eleni'sfull report and learn more about the Soul in the Horn project at the link above. Many thanks to Tadej Štrok for project New Dayand Ogoluwa Ojewale for project HostBeak Kreators for being Grant for the Web awardees. We hope you’ll continue to update about your projects on the community space!
Community Engagement
There’s still time to register for next week's Community Call hosted by GftW awardee Andrey Torres of project PipeWebMonetization on June 23, 2022 at 4:00 pm EDT / 8:00 pm GMT-3
To register go to: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/359607615057
Andrey and guest speakers Gabriel Eiji and Danilo Mirandawill will lead a conversation about Web monetization into the WordPress ecosystem.
Have you ever tried to use the web monetization technology in your WordPress website? Was it hard for you? Come here to talk and learn about the utilization of the web monetization technology into the WordPress ecosystem.
Join Gradual’s Session Web Monetization earning with tutorials on gFam Learn Tuesday, June 21st, 2022 at 4-5 PM CET
gFam.live aims to introduce new storytellers into the web monetization community with its social media posts, and now new functionality called gFam Learn will attempt to enable teachers to earn directly from students via web monetization and/or tips.
If you have an idea for a skillshare with the community or a session in any format you can now also propose them directly from the community page.
Join Quirine of project MicroMemberships online public event June 23rd 8:00 pm CEST
Join our online public event in June 23rd (20.00-21.30 CEST)
Are you a creative maker looking for ways to sell your illustrations, writing, or video art to an online audience? Then we would love to hear what you look for in an online revenue model. Even if you don't have experience with online business models (yet!), we want to know what is important to you and why. This way, we can look for and design solutions together. Become part of the community that investigates what 'open, fair and inclusive' online earning models for creative makers look like.
Sign up here
We hope to see you at these exciting community events!
Summer Siesta!
The Interledger Foundation is taking a summer break beginning June 24, we will be back on July 5!
Have a great weekend!
Top comments (1)
So much happening!