[Video Disruptors Grant]: SI HER

Please describe your project. Start with the need or problem you are trying to solve with this project. Describe why your solution is going to adequately solve this problem.

We are applying for a grant to support the SI HER collective and onboarding women in the emerging markets. Our organization is The KI, a California-based non-profit with our SI HER Talent Collective:

https://www.si-her.live/

Within SI HER, our goal is to elevate the voices and professional brands of women & non-binary professionals in emerging tech & web3. Our Founder Kara Howard has placed over 350 women in tech in speaking opportunities over the last ten years, and has found that developing one's public speaking profile dramatically improves women's self-confidence personally and professionally. Our offerings support the professional development of our members and prepare them for career advancement in the industry.

We have recently introduced our SI HER decentralized website template:

https://kara.siher.eth.limo/

This template is offered to our members and centers their focus on showcasing their professional brand, including their value, vision and a Livepeer-embedded audiogram speaking to their visions.

We are excited to introduce this to each of our current 50 members. In our membership platform we guide them in creating their Livepeer account, uploading an audiogram of themselves, and sharing that embed code with us as we facilitate the development of their own site. We are excited to introduce our members to Livepeer and it's peer-to-peer technology, and are thrilled to offer in the coming months the ability for our members to livestream with Livepeer directly from their own pages.

We are applying for a grant to support women in emerging markets (Africa, Latin America, India, and Pakistan) in receiving scholarships to SI HER. With a $5k grant, this will support 30 women in joining SI HER to create their professional pages and begin to develop their thought leadership profiles to livestream directly from their Livepeer pages.

Link to public GitHub repo (if applicable)

No response

Link to demo website (if applicable)

https://kara.siher.eth.limo/

Please describe in more detail why this proposal is valuable for the Livepeer ecosystem

We believe this is a valuable proposal for the Livepeer ecosystem as we will be able to further scale our membership collective to include women from the emerging markets. Within our decentralized sites, we are wanting to share the Aurpay cryptocurrency payment button, ENS domains and Livepeer technologies that are critical pieces of a more decentralized and democratized technology stack.

As our platform 'SI HER' denotes, we are highly focused on bringing new media experiences to a web2 and web3 audience. We believe Livepeer's technology and ecosystem is a very important piece to our media tech stack, as we are now moving off of Twitter Spaces and LinkedIn Live's and focused on developing our own live media channel.

Our aim is to become a go-to platform for learning about web3 from women voices around the world. We find it very exciting to envision learning about blockchain and crypto direct from a woman in web3 in Africa, with her sharing updates from her country and her perspective. We envision a more decentralized media landscape with civic journalism sharing information that is relevant to new audiences, targeting one's own country. For example, we have one member from Cuba that is interested in utilizing her SI HER page and Livepeer livestreaming to share what she is up to in the industry and also what is happening in her country with the use of cryptocurrency that is beginning to be adopted and utilized in stores in Cuba.

The $5,000 usd is requested which will cover our costs for onboarding 30 new women with scholarships into SI HER. This also includes a speaking spot at our upcoming SI HER Summit on January 31st with a projected 5k live attendees ($2,500 sponsorship value), and memberships to SI HER for Livepeer’s female team ($555 value each). We would love to have Shannon give a 12 minute thought leadership-style presentation at the Summit and she has agreed on our call to wanting to speak.

Please describe in details what your final deliverable for this project will be.

For this first phase of the project, after receiving the grant we will be inviting 30 women from our partner women in web3 communities in Africa, Latam, Pakistan and India to onboard into SI HER. We estimate up to thirty days for the completion of v1 of their sites.

Starting in November once we have our first 100 members live, we will begin our technology development with our blockchain development partners SpaceDev to build out our livestream directory and execute the implementation of livestreaming capabilities with Livepeer within our members sites.

We are also excited to include Livepeer in our upcoming press release announcement of SI HER and our new decentralized websites. We look forward to a long-term partnership that is valuable for all parties and a meaningful collaboration in the ecosystem.

Please break up your development work into a clear set of milestones

In this first phase of development, each member creates her own Livepeer account, uploads her audiogram and shares the embed code with us. We then utilize this code in building her decentralized site.

In November, we will begin to scope out the next phase of development with SpaceDev to determine how to manage the livestreaming from each member's site.

Sum up the total requested budget across all milestones, and include that figure here. Also, please include a budget breakdown to specify how you are planning to spend these funds.

$5,000 USD goes towards the costs of the 30 scholarships for women from emerging markets. This includes membership management, development of their decentralized websites, and PR and public speaking facilitation. It also goes towards our own internal PR and marketing to further amplify the message of SI HER and our upcoming Summit.

Specify your team's long-term plans to maintain this software and upgrade it over time

Our blockchain development team SpaceDev will be managing the development of this roadmap as mentioned and we look forward to moving into this phase in November.

Please describe (in words) your team's relevant experience, and why you think you are the right team to build this project. You can cite your team's prior experience in similar domains, doing similar dev work, individual team members' backgrounds, etc.

Our Founder Kara Howard is a former VP of Growth & Partnerships at CleverTap, a Sequioa and Accel-backed marketing automation firm. She brings over 20 years of experience in finance and technology to leading The KI and SI HER. She has also led and participated in women in tech-focused communities for over ten years. She is a passionate advocate and experienced community leader and understands the needs and opportunities for women in emerging tech.

Additional teammates include SI HER Educators Trish Lindo, Senior Creator Manager at LinkedIn, Tonia Vincent, Professional Brand Educator, and Raina Kalhan, Confidence Coach.

Our collective educators are supporting our members with the tools and education in building their professional brands in emerging tech and our community is supportive of this process with one another.

Who is your target user group? How do you plan on getting your users to use this?

(no response)

How did you learn about the Livepeer Grants Program?

Alex and Shannon!

Was this project started at a hackathon or another web3 event? Which one?

Please include any additional information that you think would be useful in helping us to evaluate your proposal.

(this application was submitted on behalf of SI HER due to GitHub technical issues)

Original application: https://app.skiff.com/docs/78cc07e9-ecaf-4f03-8c4d-4138bfdea9e9#RGDmZ6DMR8U7fJ2U4f6%2B1E3zQnnOlwxlNAyN194WwOQ%3D

Do you consent to using "Powered by Livepeer" watermark on your application?

[X] Yes
[ ] No

livepeer / grants