Provide better documentation/explainer videos for the Interpeer Project
Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad
Problem Statement: The Interpeer Project is building a next generation Internet stack that re-imagines the way we connect people in order to better reflect individual human use cases (as opposed to the current internet's focus on business use cases). The aim is to better facilitate e.g. bottom-up organization and governance around as well as mundane use-cases social media currently fulfils. Current technology already fulfils many such use-cases, albeit in a fashion ranging from mildly undesirable to downright dangerous. Currently, most activities are channeled through and arbitrated by some third party, which is usually corporate and has their own goals in doing so. Nonetheless, for the majority of folk focused on solving a particular community or personal problem, there are solutions - which makes the prospect of fixing how those solutions are provided a relatively distant concern. The problem then lies in communicating the mid- to long-term need for such improvements and their benefits to people not immediately concerned with technical details. But also developers may be susceptible to caring more about an immediate solution for their issues rather than the specifics of the solution. The communication problem is on the side of the Interpeer Project, and the target audiences are developers on the one hand, and non-technical folk on the other.
Proposed Activities: The feedback we're getting is consistent in stating that we can explain these things well, but people are not necessarily compelled to seek understanding (given the reasons above). The proposed activities are then to first remove the obstacles here by making introductions to the problems we're fixing more accessible, via short explainer videos. We then intend to expand upon them with still introductory documentation that provides more depth.
Openness: All of our work products are openly accessible via our website or git repositories; we intend to follow the same open practices with producing the above outputs. Additionally, we intend to solicit feedback from the wider community in the early (textual/visual) stages of production, where feedback can still be incorporated relatively cheaply.
Challenges: In our organization, we do not have the required skills; however, we have contractors at hand that can help. The main challenge is indeed financial, as this effort significantly distracts from our main purpose, which is to build said technology stack. Nonetheless, education is part of our mission, which we'd like to tackle more seriously with the help of this grant.
Neglectedness: We have not applied for funding this particular work.
Success: The main success criterion will be the publication of explainer videos and documentation texts. We envision an overview of the problem domain and proposed architecture to solve it, as well as individual explanations of each of the major components (currently 6, expected to reach 8). These will be made accessible on the project website, disseminated on social media, etc.
Total Budget: 24000
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: Yes, this would be affiliated with Interpeer gUG of which I am the CEO/founder.
LMIE Carveout: I do not believe we fully fit here, no. In this project, we expect me to project manage (Germany), an external contributer from the USA to provide scripting, a designer from Brazil to provide visual designs, and potentially workers from Venezuela to provide the animation.
Team Skills: As the initiator of the project, I have a fairly good overview of what needs to be included, and as CEO I manage other grants - as such, I will project manage this (at no additional cost, my salary is covered). The remaining people are contractors and have provided estimations which sum up to the budget items listed. Outlining the content in more detail and scripting the explanations is an education expert from the USA with a decade+ of teaching experience. Our Brazilian designer is responsible for the visual language our website and other design materials employs. We expect to partner with an organization providing additional skilled labour for animation, which draws talent from countries in crisis.
How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)
TLDR: Towards a human-centric, next generation Internet.
Submission Number: 2
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