Zcash Latinoamerica - Education and Outreach

Rosmar commented 7 years ago

Motivation and overview

The language is a factor of success or failure when it is planned to create a global scale technological ecosystem.

When people understand the benefits of cryptocurrencies and particularly Zcash, they jump in and try the technology but, what does it happen when most of the educational resources and community support is not available in your mother tongue?

It is said that most individuals are not interested in speaking a second language, like, for instance English, so there is a constraint to reach out non-bilingual communities. So, the only way to lift this barrier is by bilingual people spreading the word about the bright future of the technology.

Taking that into account, I decided to create a facebook community group whose name is “Zcash Latinoamerica” right after its launch with the non-for-profit idea of supporting, sharing knowledge and experience about Zcash to other spanish speakers.

After months of mutual collaboration, this community has growth and currently is composed by 2700 members and has become the largest spanish spoken zcash community.

Seeing the attraction of this community I started thinking about strategies of increasing the use of Zcash by growing the community.

I believe that the best way to encourage people to use and adopt Zcash is by educating the population and inviting them to come in.

The current proposal is focused in promoting Zcash by:

Giving conferences about Zcash benefits, blockchain benefits, zcash technical aspects, wallets, how to buy and sell it, how mine it.
Creating marketing audiovisual spots, to attract new users to the Zcash website.

Technical approach

Conferences:

Blockchain is a technology that is being adopted progressively in Latinoamerica but, the use of it is not as massive as developed countries so, the only way to promote the use of blockchains. As, Bitcoin, Zcash or any other cryptocurrency has been unrecognized by many Latinamerican governments as official money for being used, many people are afraid of using it because of the lack of a proper regulation. Even they think that it is illegal because the law discourages its use explicitly. It is needed to change people’s mind by educating about the benefits of cryptocurrencies (with focus on Zcash). Taking into account that Zcash Latinoamerica is not being advertised through any social network, it is believed that the people who joins have eared about Zcash or is involved actively in it. The best way to attract new people and promote its use is by conferences. Zcash Latinoamerica group insight shows the top cities and countries where there are more Zcash enthusiasts:

It is clear to me that the best strategy to attract new users is to grow the cities where there is more presence and enthusiasts. As a starting point, considering that currently I live in Colombia, Bogotá and Medellín are the cities where it is more suitable to start the pilot and after evaluating the success I could replicate the conferences in the top 10 cities in Latinamerica. The goal is find an auditorium with at least 100 sits to offer conferences of 3 or 4 hours free of charge to the community. The audience will be encouraged to create wallets to receive some Zcash giveaways, which are going to be given randomly at the end of each conference.

Audiovisual spots (After Effects):

Taking into account there is not any marketing or audiovisual content in Spanish to encourage people of joining Zcash, Elva Ramos could support us as a provider for developing this kind of content. This is an example of the videos that could be produced:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA1Aqp0sPQo

The metaphor is developed by instructional and graphical designers based on the content suggested by Zcash Co/Fundation/community. The video(s) include(s) the source code so, Zcash Company or foundation could decide to open the source or edit by themselves anytime. If modifications are required in the future and there is not people qualified for doing the modifications, the provider could be contracted again to update the desired content. Elva Ramos suggests that a video should not be greater than 3 minutes because it is highly likely that the viewer could loss his/her attention after that period. Due to confidential agreements, Elva Ramos is not able to upload publicly some content created to other customers, but she agrees to arrange a web meeting with the judgment board to show some extracts of content created to other customers.

Team background and qualifications

Rosmar Prieto (Project Lead - Zcash Latinoamerica creator) Master of Information Security – University of Los Andes (Colombia 2016). Informatic Enginner (Computer Science) - University Experimental of Tachira (Venezuela 2007). Solution Architect at Nokia with more than 10 years of experience in IT, Telecomm and Information Security deploying solutions in Latinamerica. TOGAF 9 Certified. Attending to CISCO CCNA CyberOps Sholarship Program. Bilingual (Spanish – English) For more details: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosmar-prieto-32871911/

Elva Ramos (logistics/advisor for conferences – provider for Audiovisual spots) Master of Education major in curriculum and educational community (Chile). Bachelor in International Relations (Mexico). Country Manager at IOGroup – Elearning company Polyglot (Spanish – English – French – Italian). For more details: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elva-ramos-318a203b/ (Spanish version)

Evaluation plan

The conferences will attract more people to use Zcash and they will be encouraged to join the Zcash Latinoamerica group. According to the last 2 months of growth, the trend of the amount of people who join the group is 200 per month. So, I would expect to increase a 50% of this trend (300 people) per month. There will be registered the emails of the people who attend to the conferences for satisfaction surveys and feedback.

Security considerations

The execution of this project will educate individuals to start using the technology and eventually growth and outreach of the Spanish spoken Zcash community. As this is an educational project, the privacy, integrity, availability and decentralization will be the main areas of interest to create awareness as key benefits of Zcash.

Schedule

2018

Jan:

Developing of the conference content.
Request the creation of audiovisual spots.
Logistics for arrange the auditoriums for every conference.

Feb:

Logistics for arrange the auditoriums for every conference.

Mch:

Advertising campaigns of the conferences.

Apr:

Conferences in Bogotá and Medellín.

May:

Conference in Caracas and Valencia.

Jun:

Conference in Maracaibo and Mexico City.

Jul:

Conference in Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Quito.

Aug:

Conference in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile.

Budget and justification

As the Zcash Latinoamerica community is a group with the non-profit goal of teaching, educating and promoving the colaboration of its members I do not have the economic resources to execute this project. Because of this, I apply to the grant for getting the resources.

Conferences Costs: USD $1000 for the rent of an auditorium. (Qty 10: USD $ 10.000) USD $150 for round trip flights from Bogotá to Medellín. USD $800 in average per round trip travel outside Colombia. ---- (Qty 9: USD $7200) USD $400 lodging per 2 nights per conference outside home country (Qty 9: USD $3600). USD $200 meals per trip (Qty 9: USD $1800). USD $50 per Airport taxi (Qty 20: USD $1000). USD $500 Effort per conference. (Qty 10: USD $5000) SUB-TOTAL: USD $28650 OVERHEAD (10%): USD $2865 TOTAL: $31615

Costs for audiovisual spots: USD $500 per minute. As the budget for this will vary depend on the amount of spots and the duration proposed for each one, I will put this topic to be decided by judgment board.

tromer commented 7 years ago

@Rosmar, this filing is still very vague. Can you please add more details on the planned work?

acityinohio commented 7 years ago

Every informal proposal has multiple reviews by the review committee. The reviews are being collected and discussed in a private google doc (the 5 reviewers all have edit access to it, no one else can view it). By way of early, informal feedback, the reviewers would like to inform you that your proposal is not a leading candidate for funding in this round.

You may still choose to submit a full proposal by October 6th, and it will be evaluated. But if it’s substantially the same as discussion so far reflects, then we suspect it is unlikely to be chosen for funding; and if it isn't, then we encourage you to post a draft as early as possible, to allow for community feedback. Regardless of your choice we thank you for participation thus far.

Rosmar commented 7 years ago

Hi @tromer and @acityinohio,

Thanks for your input. I apologize for not having had the chance of updating my proposal completely in advance. I understand the risk of being discualified because of this delay but, I hope you find the project interesting. I am working on it, I will update this draft today.

tromer commented 7 years ago

@Rosmar, I see you've extended the description above. Do you intend this to be considered as your full Submission? If so, please save an "authoritative" version as a file and attach it here.

Rosmar commented 7 years ago

@tromer attached you can find the full submission:

Zcash Latinoamerica Education and outreach - Proposal_Q4_2017.pdf

Additionally you can find attached the Zcash Latinamerica facebook group insights:

Facebook_Group_Insights_10-04-2017.xlsx

ioptio commented 7 years ago

In particular, I'm excited about the idea of user outreach and education events in Latin America. Having a model for other regions of the world to emulate for their own local education events would extend the benefit of this project beyond Latin America.

It seems like these short conferences could be followed up with regular meetups in each city by locating organizers who would be interested in sustaining education beyond the initial events. And if this project does get funded, it would be worth coordinating with ZcashCo Latin America community manager, Jonathas.

Additionally, it would be a shame if these events were not documented for others who are not able to attend in person so I highly suggest having resources set aside for livestreaming or recording.

Rosmar commented 7 years ago

Hi @ioptio,

Thanks for your feedback.

I am already in touch with Jonathas. Indeed, I was not aware about this call of proposals before talking to him. He encouraged me to submit this proposal with some of the ideas I briefly told him...

I have many ideas for the education and outreach and this project is the phase 1 of a program I have in mind.

Locating organizers to establish meetups in each city, is a good idea! I had a similar idea but, it included online broadcast meetups and education (this is the phase 2). This online meetups could also invite people from zcash company (with some translators) for questions and answers, so the community could feel that their voice is heard...

After seeing the success of the top 10 cities the phase 3 is to give the conferences in the next 10 cities and replicate local meetups.

Then, the phase 4 could be creating massive open online courses about Zcash.

Hopefully If the project is funded I will look for the organizers for encouraging local education and get them ready for phase 2...

Regarding the resources for livestreaming I totally agree with you. I planed an overhead for unforeseen expenses...

I realized that I did not included the marketing costs for the conferences, maybe I could manage to devide the overhead for marketing and buying the resources for livestreaming.

acityinohio commented 7 years ago

@Rosmar: I regret to inform you that your submission was not selected by the Grant Review committee to receive an award. We very much appreciate your contribution—know that the Zcash Foundation is very likely to have another grant program in the future. In case you didn't see the recommendation from the committee, I'm pasting the relevant comments here. We hope you continue to stay involved and thanks again!

Proposed by a group of Zcash enthusiasts in Latin America. They have a Facebook group with 2700 members and propose to create a large number of events across Latin America and providing an "all expenses paid" trip for the organizers plus compensation for time.

The committee felt that such an ambitious project would take extensive planning and a well thought out communications strategy. The committee is not confident in the experience of the organizers to create such an event and represent Zcash, how realistic the expected number of attendees is, the cost of the venues and the clarity of the message to be communicated. Funding of this proposal is not recommended.

ZcashFoundation / GrantProposals-2017Q4

Zcash Latinoamerica - Education and Outreach #17