Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Inclusiveness with data ---- Onboarding Africans online with a local game that saves African Language Data to support other Databases to create internet platforms that are as inclusive as possible.

statusNot funded
Inclusiveness with data ---- Onboarding Africans online with a local game that saves African Language Data to support other Databases to create internet platforms that are as inclusive as possible.
We’re gathering language data to support other databases, tech companies and WMF to create internet platforms that are as inclusive as possible. Wikimedia has the best array of free knowledge platforms, our request for partnership with WMF is to aid the call for contributions, and the use of African language data in innovation. WMF would also play a role in our allocation of these data through platforms like Wikipedia, and wiki data.
start date2022-06-20T00:00:00Z2022-06-20
end date2023-12-08T00:00:00Z2023-08-12
budget (local currency)53920000 NGN
budget (USD)94596 USD
grant typeMission-aligned organization
organization typeFor profit organisation
funding regionSSA
decision fiscal year2021-22
funding program roundRound 2
applicant(s)• Grey Matter Copy
organization (if applicable)• MyCom DAO

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Applicant information edit

A. Organization type

Mission-aligned organization

B. Organization name

MyCom DAO

E. Do you have an account on a Wikimedia project?

Yes

E1. Please provide the main Wikimedia Username (required) and Usernames of people related to this proposal.

Grey Matter Copy

G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?

Did not apply previously

H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?

No
H1. Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?
N/A
H2. Please state the size of these grants from the following options.
N/A
H3. What type of organization (s) did you receive grants from?
N/A
H4. What percentage of your program budget do other funders contribute to?
N/A

1. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

Yes

1a. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

2. Are you legally registered?

Yes

3. What type of organization are you?

For profit organisation

4. What is your organization or group's mission and how does it align with the Wikimedia movement?

We're shaping an online community out of everything Africa was, is and could be, by crowdsourcing translations from African natives to create a database tech companies and non-profits can leverage to create inclusive technology, reach out to needy communities and give aid where it is needed. Wikimedia Foundation stands as the world’s biggest pillar for free knowledge, which is why we would like to leverage the resources, platforms and support of Wikimedia Foundation to achieve our objective.

5. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)

Email - mycommunitydao@gmail.com

Twitter - @MyComDAO Website - https://mycommunitydao.wixsite.com/mycom LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/mycom-dao/

Grant proposal edit

6. Please state the title of your proposal.

Inclusiveness with data ---- Onboarding Africans online with a local game that saves African Language Data to support other Databases to create internet platforms that are as inclusive as possible.

9. Where will this proposal be implemented?

Nigeria

10. Indicate if it is a local, international, or regional proposal and if it involves several countries?

Local

10a. If you have answered international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.

10b. Are there any specific sub-regions or areas where your proposal will be implemented?

Our game app will kick off in Northern Nigeria. Over the span of 18 months, we’ll develop the platform and pull Hausa language data amass. Our target is 10 million organic phrases in the Hausa language, which we believe is a pathway to new discoveries in translation, African linguistics, data gathering and allocation. According to Wikipedia, the Hausa language is spoken by 60 million natives and 30 million second speakers across more than 8 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
It’s the first language in major trade lines around the Sahara and will help connect many business owners and others in the informal sector with the rest of the world. It also has a rich vocabulary from where other African languages are sourced from.

11. What is the challenge or problem you are addressing and why is this important?

The current pace of globalization gives no choice to small developing countries: they must integrate into world markets if they wish to develop. World markets are going online more than ever and Internet sales have played an increasingly significant role in retailing. In 2021, e-commerce accounted for an estimated 19.6 per cent of retail sales worldwide and these figures are only going to keep dialling up. Africa has many small, poor economies being the continent most prone to ethnic-based conflicts, yet African governments and languages impose the heaviest artificial barriers around their borders on top of this.

Africa is backward in data collection, allocation and other various aspects of emerging technology but again, a great shift is about to happen to present an opportunity for our native beings to own a space in the New World or Die with the Old. We’re building a social networking platform that allows both sender and receiver of messages to effectively communicate from the comfort of their indigenous/first African language. We’re crowdsourcing organic translations from everyday natives in Africa to build a database our algorithms can leverage to deliver on this type of Direct Interpretation system.

Other 3rd party tech companies and non-profit organizations can also leverage this database to create inclusive technology, reach out to needy communities and give aid where it is needed. Our project is in fruition (stage 1) where we gather language data in phrases and train algorithms on Example-based machine translation using our database. We’re applying for funding for this stage of operations, which when it's a success, will further our mission to drive inclusiveness with data.

12. What is the main objective of your proposal? Please state why you think partnering with Wikimedia Movement helps to achieve this objective?

We’re gathering language data to support other databases, tech companies and WMF to create internet platforms that are as inclusive as possible. Wikimedia has the best array of free knowledge platforms, our request for partnership with WMF is to aid the call for contributions, and the use of African language data in innovation. WMF would also play a role in our allocation of these data through platforms like Wikipedia, and wiki data.

13. Describe your main strategies to achieve this objective?

MyCom app is a game that runs a play to earn system that rewards players with MyCom tokens for inputting translations in pre-selected African languages as they appear on the screen in English and French.

MyCom app is powered by 4 cardinal systems:

Play to earn: play to earn system that rewards players with MyCom tokens for inputting translations in pre-selected African languages as they appear on the screen in English and French. Translators: Translators earn MyCom Tokens by playing the game— texting back the pre-selected African language equivalent of words that pop up on the screen in either English or french. Editors: Editors earn MyCom Tokens by affirming the value of translations recorded on the game using the grading system as a template. Grading System: The grading system determines the value of translation texts imputed and rewards contributors' MyCom tokens accordingly. Africans love incentives so we’ll encourage contributors/users to put 100% into achieving our short term goal of 10 million phrases per language with:

-- The promise of Stage 2 utility of tokens earned -- And by rewarding winners of gaming marathons

14. Are you running any in-person events or activities?

No

15. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified content knowledge gaps?

Content Gender gap, Geography, Language, Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial

16. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or thematic focus.

Education, Culture, heritage or GLAM , Human Rights, Open Technology, Diversity

17. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select all categories that apply.

Gender Identity, Geographic , Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background, Socioeconomic status, Age, Digital Access

18. Please tell us more about your target participants.

Our participants (players) are ideally Nigerian Baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. Native or casual speakers of African Languages.

Of these demographics, our focus is mostly on Millennials and Gen Z since Nigeria is popular for its enormous youth population of close to 220 million citizens. 65% of these young Nigerians are affiliated with one tribe or ethnicity and can communicate decently in the local language. That’s why we’re focusing most on Millenials and Gen Z. These Age groups are also the most opportunity savvy and always looking for new ways to break into the impact ecosystem especially online.

It is worthy of note that the next phase (stage 2) of our project is critical to the process of obtaining these language data just as Stage 1 is also the backbone of stage 2 where crowd retention is the goal. They are intertwined.

Data obtained in stage 1 helps us establish comDAOs. (non-gated ethnic group servers) The Unique selling proposition of the comDAOs is the fact that it capacitates individual to unknown-language-community communication powered by the Direct interpretation system (DIS).

DIS collects text input from the sender end on community-chat platforms, interprets, and delivers translated texts to the receiver's end on the chat platform without losing context and nuance. DIS powers seamless communication between various languages from the wealth of datasets in the database. A social network that breaks language barriers with direct interpretation.

19. Do you have plans to work with other Wikimedia communities, groups or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?

No

19a. If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.

N/A

19b. If no, please tell us the reasons why it has not been possible to make these connections.

We have not so far connected with these communities but this will be followed in the stages of review of this proposal and during implementation. Part of our application is calling on WMF and affiliated communities to support the movement to populate African language data online. African Wikimedia communities will contribute to promoting the adoption of MyCom in stage 1. We will be running online (social media etc) advertising and promotion which Wikimedia communities will be an inalienable part of.

20. Will you be working with other external non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?

Yes

20a. If yes, please describe these partnerships.

We are in talks with Build_, an international organization invested in building sustainable real-life communities to network, and create greatness through individuals coming together to make social change across the world. Build_ is represented in 6 continents.

20a. If yes, indicate sharing of resources from these partners (in kind support, grants, donations, payments).

Build_ has not made commitments to support our organization but the Founder and CEO of Build_ consented to share resources in infrastructure, and personnel when the need arises.

21. Please tell us how your organization is structured.

MyCom is a DAO. We’re working together from across Nigeria as a group of 3 founders and 5 shareholders to achieve inclusiveness. The DAO technology allows us to collectively take decisions on the company by raising proposals and voting on them. As a startup, there are currently 5 members, all vote holding members in the DAO. We are a team of like-minded mavericks with diverse inter-related skills and productive output.

A DAO is an organization, designed to be automated and decentralized. It acts as a form of fund, based on open-source code and without an orthodox management structure or a board of directors. To be fully decentralized, a DAO is unaffiliated with any particular nation-state, and it makes use of the Ethereum and other Layer 2 Blockchain networks.

Structuring as a DAO eliminates human error or manipulation of funds by placing decision-making power into the hands of an automated system and a crowdsourced process. Fueled by Ethereum through the Arbitrum Layer 2 chain, Our DAO is designed to allow investors to send money from anywhere in the world anonymously. The system then provides those owners tokens, allowing them voting rights on projects.

22. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?

Our core team is made up of 4 young people with different skills all well related to what is required to achieve the goals of our project. Grey Matter is an experienced copywriter, business developer/strategist and ad man, also a Law student at the University of Lagos. He’ll be leading this project and he is CEO MyCom. He speaks more than 3 Nigerian languages and has experience with language learning curves, Wikipedia contribution, marketing campaign strategy, branding, and the several cultures in Nigeria.
Ismail Diekola is also a writer, avid gamer, quite creative, and he also doubles  as a student of Law at the University of Lagos Nigeria and a contributor to the Unilag LSS Student’s blog. Diekola is the assistant project lead, Co-founder MyCom and bootstraps as Head of Finance and Budgeting.
Nabilat Idris is a UI/UX designer, she acts in the capacity of product designer on this project, and she is co-founder MyCom. Nabilat has worked with several international startups and carries the kind of mindset needed to create an engaging internet product (Game).

Fawaz Haroun is a mobile and Web app developer, also an experienced content & Technical writer and a Law Student at the University of Lagos. He will write software for an engaging game product as well as work with other software developers to critique, maintain, upgrade and finetune MyCom.

Asides from our core team members, we’ll be sourcing and working with professionals, freelancers and interns for writing and content creation roles, design and graphical messaging roles, Data analytics and science, Language grading system and values, and other externals that will be involved in other contract and general services.

23. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.  

Yes
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pJxqsU8QttzVwh_qinim7D6WKgXvRGmLxO1Ph74bRxA/edit?usp=sharing

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation edit

24. What do you hope to learn from this proposal?

The most important learning aspect of this first phase of MyCom is the mindset of Nigerians when it comes to defending and representing our indigenous beings. As the project proceeds we will be asking ourselves:
  • How many women can we empower for the future with this project
  • What is the acceptance rate of tech of the future in the older generations
  • Is there really a space in the future for some local indigenous dialects
  • How can we promote more adoption of technology in our communities
  • What will Africa in the IoT really look like

We are also interested to see how far a DAO of UNILAG undergraduates can take the passion to create impact. This is indeed a tasking mission from which we believe we will gain a lot of experience, and unlock potential.

As stated above, the data pool we’ll be gathering will power stage 2 (MyCom 2.0) of our enterprise. We will be working to gather language data as much as we can to support other tech companies and well-meaning organizations to unlock African markets and potential with 30,000,000 phrases (target)

Core Metrics edit

25. Enter a description of the metric and a number in the target field. If the metric does not apply to you, enter N/A for not applicable.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics Description Target
Number of participants
Number of editors
Number of organizers
Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project
Wikimedia Project Description Target
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A

25a. If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation. (optional)

- At the end of the 18 months of this project, we have set a target of 1,000 players (Contributors) per language which sums up 3,000 players
  • We project that 3,000 players will give 10,000 contributions (Phrases) each summing up 30,000,000 phrases in the three major Nigerian Languages.
  • We expect to have over 1,000 people attend our 3 events and network to build more than 5 online communities that will metamorphose to comDAOs in MyCom 2.0 (Stage 2)

26. What other information will you be collecting to learn about the impact of your work? (optional)

We are storing data in datasets to distinguish the different types of lingos, tones and contexts that are used in native languages. This will broaden the vocabulary and application of the database.

27. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?

Not sure and need support.

28. How do you hope to share these results so that others can learn from them?

Create a video of our experience, Make a short presentation of the experience, Create a training workshop to show others what we learned, Share results on social media

Financial Proposal edit

29. What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency.

53920000 NGN

30. What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?

94596 USD

31. & 32. Please provide a budget for the amount of funding requested.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10OrfbXMS8MgJzFdXwOPmHUXNDa8UuvCFqftBzOvrF_8/edit#gid=947366597

33. What do you do to make sure there is a good management of funds?

As included in our budget we'll be hiring a financial advisor who will work with our team, and our fiscal sponsor to advise on, coordinate and check the management of funds for the duration of this project. Freelancers for particular contract tasks will be contracted via {Need Contributors) feature of our DAO architecture provider, KaliDAO. This process eliminates misappropriation and serves record purposes as all of such transactions are registered on the blockchain. Designers, writers etc.

34. How will you contribute towards creating a supportive environment for participants using the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy?

To promote and build a friendly space within our player community, we are promoting healthy competition with language leaderboards and minimal communication between players for this project. There is a natural beauty of friendly air that comes with understanding and the feeling of familiarity we hope to tap into in the future with our Direct Interpretation system.

35. Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.

Other public document(s): other public documents = https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S9AxHR4jX8qaJbodAasF7KgFLuVPBB6eEgBtH579pX4/edit

other public document = https://www.figma.com/file/yDbOikbyRFIsHPImqHfUPz/MyCom

Final message edit

By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.

36. We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

Feedback edit