Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Lulu Game
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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?
- Applied previously and did not receive a grant
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?
- Our mission is to aid development in Africa through knowledge preservation, sharing and interconnectedness. Wikimedia Foundation stands as the world’s biggest pillar for free knowledge, which is why we would like to leverage the network, resources, platforms and other forms of support from Wikimedia foundation to achieve our shared 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://luluweb.netlify.app/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/mycom-dao/
Grant proposal[edit]
6. Please state the title of your proposal.
- Lulu Game
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 will launch in Nigeria. Over the span of 12 months, we will complete the development of our app through which we will collaborate with our outreach partners to pull Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba Language datasets(which may also include other local dialects). Our aim is 1.5 million organic phrases in the three major languages at the end of this 12-month period. We believe this is a pathway to new discoveries in translation, African linguistics, capturing, allocating, and implementing data. Our proposal is for 1 year after which we will evaluate our learnings /results from Nigeria, and expand to other countries/languages in Africa, hopefully aligning more with the movement and considering more ways to broaden the impact.
11. What is the challenge or problem you are addressing and why is this important?
- Globalization and technology give no choice to small developing countries: they must integrate into world markets to thrive and develop. World markets are going online more than ever, the Internet is gradually playing more and more critical roles in our everyday lives. Africa has many small, poor communities that have little or no access to internet technology services. Being the continent most prone to ethnic-based conflicts, African governments and languages impose the heaviest artificial barriers around their borders.
The Language gap is obvious when we use online translators and other African-language-based models online. This can be mitigated a great deal through data collection, allocation and other various aspects of emerging technology. We are curious about the various technology-for-development projects that could be developed with the results of this project.
Inhabiting important data derivatives on Wikidata, which is a Wikimedia Foundation project, will give datasets more exposure to individuals and organizations who intend to apply them for developmental purposes.
Lulu is solving the context gap in existing online African language-based models; in education and media through a friendly, gamified and community-designed space that also attracts other perks like in-game tokens to be earned and its utilities. To foster Africa's development through free knowledge. To connect underrepresented African language communities to the rest of the world, to develop new, free knowledge contribution models and support safe spaces.
12. What is the main objective of your proposal? Please state why you think partnering with Wikimedia Movement helps to achieve this objective?
- Our proposal is to support the growth, outreach, and operation of Lulu in alliance with Wikimedia UG Nigeria and Wikidata for 12 months. Through the platform(Lulu), we will amass 1.5 million phrases each in the three major languages in Nigeria amongst others. Lulu has potential as a Wiki-supported project because data derivatives from Lulu can reinforce work done in Wikidata and the movement has structured networks, systems for funding, and engagement that can amplify the impact of our work.
13. Describe your main strategies to achieve this objective?
- Lulu uses the same wiki technology that Wikimedia projects use to organically crowdsource data but flattens the learning curve that individuals have to go through to become eligible to contribute to free knowledge. Lulu is a game, it's fun.
By Partnering with Local Wiki Communities. Lulu will leverage the influence of Nigeria-related Wikimedia language communities both locally here and in the diaspora. Local Wikimedia Language communities and Wikimedia User Group Nigeria will support the drive for awareness and engagement with this first Lulu project.
Wikimedia User Group Nigeria will head the community outreach aspect of this proposal and act as community liaison for Lulu within the Wikimedia Communities.
Our Marketing and creative team will work closely with Wikimedia User Group Nigeria during social media campaigns and physical events.
We will be working closely with Wikidata, through a liaison. By so doing, we are making this free knowledge accessible to more individuals, organizations and institutions around the world that might want to leverage it for learning, innovation and other things that contribute to the development of Africa in general.
To achieve our objective we will be implementing, social campaigns, outreaches, Launch events, and Lulu Cowries. Lulu Cowries is an in-game ERC20 token deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain. Players/Participants/Users will play to earn and utilize the tokens on Lulu.
14. Are you running any in-person events or activities?
15. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified content knowledge gaps?
- Language, Important Topics (topics considered to be of impact or important in the specific context), Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial
16. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or thematic focus.
- Education, Culture, heritage or GLAM , Open Technology, Diversity
17. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select all categories that apply.
- Geographic , Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background, Linguistic / Language, 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 native Languages.
Of these demographics, our focus is mostly on Millennials and Gen Z since Nigeria is popular for its enormous 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 worth of note that the next phase (Lulu 2.0) of our project is after the initial 12 months of this proposal. With Lulu 2.0, crowd retention is the goal. As we expand to more countries, we will unlock new features to retain initial users/players.
This first project will bring a lot of learning and feedback which we will duly apply as we expand. Carefully balancing new fun ways of engaging with Lulu as we onboard new users, the utility of the tokens users earn will play an important role here as they pass to new and added features.
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?
- Yes
19a. If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.
- All our Wikimedia community partners and connections have been very supportive since we connected with them. AfroCROWD has provided us with some overall exposure, as during our presentation at Wikimania. The director also connected us with key people at Wikidata and has been a generally helpful ear during this process. Our presentation received approval at Wikimania and we are positive about how far our collaboration can go to bring about value.
UG Nigeria’s Naija office hour event had Senior Program officer Veronica Thamaini speak about the fund which was very helpful in shaping this proposal. We have also identified possible impactful ways of engaging with Wikidata with the help of WMDE. We believe we will discover more ways of collaboration as we continue the relationship.
19b. If no, please tell us the reasons why it has not been possible to make these connections.
- N/A
20. Will you be working with other external non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?
- Yes
20a. If yes, please describe these partnerships.
- BadHuman Designs is a creative design organization we are partnering to deliver creative, native digital art that will be used on different levels of engagement throughout the game. Some of the digital art will be part of the utilities of the Lulu cowry token. BadHuman Designs own 50% rights to art, yield from proceeds or whatever they become in future. Lulu owns 50% rights to them also.
20a. If yes, indicate sharing of resources from these partners (in kind support, grants, donations, payments).
- Our partnership with BadHuman Designs is strictly on talent, efficiency and African art promotion.
21. Please tell us how your organization is structured.
- The Lulu game is being developed and managed by MyCom DAO. 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.
MyCom DAO started as a group of individuals from across Nigeria that believe in the essence of preserving our identity as Africa through common languages. DAO technology allows us to collectively take decisions on the organization by raising proposals and voting on them. Our project, Lulu currently has 8 members, two of which are volunteers, and two partners. 5 vote holding members in the DAO.
Our members have relevant inter-related skills with two things in common, love for the development of Africa at heart and the belief that the basic infrastructure of the internet will be rebuilt on blockchains and decentralized systems.
22. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
- Our core team is made up of a diverse group of people with different skills all well related to what is required to achieve the goals of our project.
Grey Matter CEO MyCom DAO Experienced Copywriter, Brand manager, and Product manager. Grey Matter speaks more than 3 Nigerian languages and consults for multiple firms across Nigeria.
Ismail Diekola is a creative content writer and an avid gamer. He is 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 DAO and bootstraps as Head of Finance and Budgeting. Nabilat Idris is a UI/UX Designer, she acts in the capacity of Lead 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).
Abdullahi Arala is an experienced UI/UX Designer on the Design team with excellent knowledge of creating user-centric interfaces.
Uzoechi Chidozie is a UI/UX Designer who is also on the MyCom Design Team. He has outstanding experience in the crypto space and has worked on an AI Language Learning Platform.
Ogundairo Ibrahim is a Project Manager who has managed projects for various businesses. He is also a tech blog writer, and a freelance editor and he has experience as an NFT Community Mod.
Olanrewaju Mubarak is a Marketing Manager with ample experience in various campaigns. He serves as the Head of Marketing for MyCom DAO and has worked with different startups to build a successful marketing strategy.
Sofiyullah Abdullah Software Developer, Full stack Engineer.
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, WMF Community Liaison officeholders 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.
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 Lulu is the results of introducing such a new model of contributing. As the project proceeds we will be asking ourselves:
- 1. How many women can we empower for the future with this project?
- 2. What is the acceptance rate of tech of the future in the older generations?
- 3. What are the most common ways to say particular phrases in our languages?
- 4. Is there really a space in the future for some local indigenous dialects?
- 5. How can we promote more adoption of technology in our communities?
- 6. What will Africa in the 4ir really look like?
- 7. Is P2E gaming a game changer in crowdsourcing?
- 8. The impact of organic African Language datasets on Wikidata projects.
We are also interested in giving blockchain-related projects a better name. 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 (Lulu 2.0) of our work. We will be working to gather language data as much as we can with Lulu 2.0. 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 | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | At the end of the 12 months of this project, we have set a target of 1,000 players/participants/users per language which sums up to 3,000 players | 3000 |
| Number of editors | Some of the data contributed by Lulu Users are probably useful for Wikidata. We would need to work with existing Wikidata editors to determine what data exactly would make sense to upload and how it would best be modelled. | 3 |
| Number of organizers | Lulu core team members, Liaison from Wikimedia UG Nigeria, volunteers from AfroCrowd, volunteers from Wikidata, Lulu-Wikidata Liaison personnel, and Linguistics professionals. | 22 |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Wikidata | Properties to be created on Wikidata for the linking from Wikidata to Lulu to be possible | 3 |
| Wikidata | Links to at least 3,000,000 phrases in Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa from Lulu to Wikidata. This makes it possible/easier to programmatically find additional information for a given lexeme, form or sense. It also makes data exchange between the two projects easier in the future. | 3000000 |
| Wikidata | Identifier Linking in a clear and independent project. (Wikidata stores a Lulu ID in its data) | 1 |
| 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)
- N/A
26. What other information will you be collecting to learn about the impact of your work? (optional)
- We project that 3,000 players will give at least 1,000 contributions (Phrases) each summing up 3,000,000 phrases in the three major Nigerian Languages. We expect to have at least 90 people attend our 3 events and network. The Impact of our presence and engagement online, especially on social media.
27. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?
- Not sure, need help.
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, Share results on social media, Share results with our communities, Participate in one on one peer sharing session with other grantees, Develop learning material for other users, I would like to receive support from the Foundation to discover how I can share my learning, Share it on Meta-Wiki
Financial Proposal[edit]
29. What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency.
- 28875000 NGN
30. What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?
- 68750 USD
31. & 32. Please provide a budget for the amount of funding requested.
- This budget is designed to mobilize efforts, and materials, stabilize and recruit strategic personnel on the team, and complete key aspects of Lulu, outreach and campaigns. Carefully created. Largely due to the effects of worldwide inflation on the prices of almost everything. However, we have been prudent, in prioritizing value, and we believe this budget doesn’t outweigh the value of our objective.
33. What do you do to make sure there is a good management of funds?
- We have made sure to work with Wikimedia User Group Nigeria as a fiscal sponsor to ensure that our financial reporting is as transparent as possible. We have considered the use of Wikimedia UG Nigeria as a fiscal sponsor because of the proximity of the entity to us.
We are prioritizing value for expenditure, the fiscal sponsor and professional financial advisor will ensure funds are put to proper use and adequately accounted for.
34. How will you contribute towards creating a supportive environment for participants using the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy?
- Lulu has not yet been expanded to capacitate communication among players within the app, our user Experience team has designed Lulu to be a user-friendly game, and the terms of use of the application clearly state the rules against abusive behaviour and any other behaviour that may lead to the discomfort of another user.
35. Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.
- Other public document(s): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18-xGdGiaATBa19ylKLOlfGFPAIVoACfYlUJR12QdTF4/edit#slide=id.p
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17E2URrx9QOzZRL0TX63GWnvLJNOUvaet6wHdruKHQqs/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bto91-2Cdp1-oLgQ0QY8wVk1eMMTaXKTwaeyrCOJmfo/edit
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]
- Please add any feedback to the grant discussion page only. Any feedback added here will be removed.
- Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Proposals
- Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Proposals/Not funded
- Not funded Wikimedia Alliances Funds for SSA in FY 2022-23
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- Wikimedia Alliances Funds in FY 2022-23
- Not funded Wikimedia Alliances Funds for SSA in FY 2022-23 (Round 1)
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- Wikimedia Alliances Funds in FY 2022-23 (Round 1)
- Not funded Wikimedia Alliances Funds in FY 2022-23 (Round 1)