Challenges
Improve the efficiency and scalability of public goods funding through deployment of new products, systems, and financial instruments
Our project is working with newsrooms to deploy hypercerts (which stores metadata on IPFS) for better allocation of resources to journalists who create tangible impact from their reporting. The media industry is one that significantly shapes the world we live in and applying the existing primitive of hypercerts to change journalism is an exciting real-world use case.
Gitcoin x Funding the Commons: Best Public Goods Funding project
We're creating a new public goods funding mechanism for newsrooms, to incentivize investigative reporting and citizen journalism that produces beneficial outcomes . The lessons we learn along the way can have deeper implications for outcome funding models in the philanthropic sector
Project details
Introduction
We started out with a simple challenge: 3 citizen journalism media outlets in India got in touch with us wanting to represent their past database of 10,000 impact reports on a public blockchain.
These impact reports are stories from their network of rural reporters who narrate longstanding community problems, such as absentee government teachers , unpaid wages to laborers & lack of clean water or electricity. These are shared by the newsroom with senior government officials, mainstream media outlets and urban activists ; if they get resolved, it counts as an impact report.
Task Completion
We broke down this challenge into 2 workstreams, led by Hangleang (smart contract developer) and Filippa (designer). Devansh (journalist) managed both workstreams and also all communication requirements in the hackathon.
Challenge 1 : Minting impact reports of CGNet Swara, Gram Vaani and Video Volunteers as hypercerts on Goerli testnet (Hangleang)
We spent considerable time working with the SDK built by the hypercerts team for batchminting hypercerts. We managed to uncover an issue preventing the SDK from building, leading to the creation of an issue by a hypercerts core dev (bitbeckers) - https://github.com/hypercerts-org/hypercerts/issues/1053
As the deadline was approaching, we went on a coding spree directly interacting with the contract and avoiding the SDK . We created a script to format the database we received from video volunteers and batchmint 10 stories at a time (rate limiting) into hypercerts - https://github.com/hangleang/hypercert-impact-reports/tree/feat/contract-interations
To test our script, we converted 500 impact reports from video volunteers' impact database into hypercerts. It executed properly!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uTXcOefrEmtOOQwsaqprHJ-WMEi3W6tJP7nE6uPIAQc/edit#gid=544952228
Challenge 2 : Designing the interface letting customers financially support impact-driven newsrooms by purchasing their hypercerts (Filippa)
Journalism hypercerts do not have an obvious target market, unlike carbon credits. We decided to target the gifting market, to tap into the growing trend of donation cards commemorating a special occasion (such as Save the Children's Gift Catalogue.) https://support.savethechildren.org/site/Ecommerce?store_id=1241&VIEW_HOMEPAGE=true
In our design, hypercerts remain locked when there are 0 contributors. The first contributor gets their congratulatory wishes engraved into the cert, while comments from follow-on contributors are listed underneath the engraving. After the cost to create that impact is met, the hypercert is again locked. https://www.figma.com/proto/NDqXubv1Kzi3v27U9By9fb/VoiceDeck?type=design&node-id=23-14237&t=UESBwolvCcOg5b5j-0&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1
"Why crypto?" is a legitimate question to ask considering our design allows for credit card payments only. In our FAQ, we write that it is the only way to catch organizations double selling their impact. Every customer gets a ENS sub-domain upon registration, with their contributions converted into units of the hypercert & transferred to them on a public blockchain.
Start to end lo-fi figma prototype: https://www.figma.com/proto/NDqXubv1Kzi3v27U9By9fb/VoiceDeck?type=design&node-id=12-23&t=UESBwolvCcOg5b5j-0&scaling=scale-down&page-id=0%3A1
Conclusion
None of the team members knew each other prior to meeting in the FTC discord for this challenge. In a span of 2 weeks, we made remarkable progress on a real-world use case of hypercerts to fund journalists based on tangible impact from their reporting, which we tested with impact databases from 3 citizen journalism newsrooms reporting from the rural regions of India.