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Funding Documentary Storytelling & Open Educational Resources Through NFT Collectibles – An Experiment

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With the growing hype, and success and Cinderella stories around NFTs for creatives in 2021, I decided it was time this Autumn to investigate NFTs for myself. Why? As funding for creatives is broken, especially around educational projects and projects for social good.

Cinderella Glass Slipper care of Pixy.org

You can read more about my initial research into NFTs by clicking on the article I wrote earlier this Autumn, below.

NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) – A Sustainable Funding Solution for Open Education and Open Culture?

In it I cover:

  • What NFTs are?
  • The history of NFTs.
  • NFT success stories.
  • My NFT concerns.
  • The evolving possibilities for NFTs.
  • Opportunities for creating NFTs for open education and open culture projects.
  • NFT ideas for my own projects.

The Problem

Image care of Markus Spiske via UnSplash

As we’ve learned over the years, it doesn’t matter how good or innovative your idea is, or if you and it have won awards, you will likely be turned down for funding many, many, many times, if you are a creator. Along with that, you will also be told numerous ridiculous and at times insulting reasons why you and / or your project are not good enough.  Things like:

  • The mention of ‘educational’ is a deal breaker, as what kids going to want to learn.
  • Kids in North America won’t be interested in stories with kids with different accents in different parts of the world. (Yes, a broadcaster actually told me this in a pitch meeting. She was a mom, therefore I was told she knew.)
  • You are too old as a woman to be the host.
  • You are too ‘vanilla’ to be the host. (Belief it or not, this was actually in a jury members notes from a CMF pitch.)
  • That our ideas only had value if we had someone famous attached.

We talked about these problems and more this week on The Creative Farm with Ralph Talmont:

Tune in to our Discussion on Art & Commerce

This means that you as a creative need to be resilient, determined, and to learn to differentiate between the beneficial feedback, and that that represents one person’s opinion or shines a spotlight on a problem within the system.  But at some point you must also question your path. Are you approaching this in a manner that works for you?  With a bit of nudging from our friend Steve Dotto, who has had his own experiences with applying to traditional broadcast funding, and as a result successfully found an alternate path to educational media creation, we began to question our path.

The Solution

Rather than continuing to smack into the same wall of rejection over and over again, my creative partner Lori Yearwood had the brilliant idea of learning from creatives that were funding their projects in alternative ways, ways that gave them more freedom to craft projects that have heart, do social good, and in which the creators could speak loudly and proudly of the educational value.

This lead us to create the Sustainable Funding Series, in which we’ve been interviewing creators on how they are piecing the funding together for their storytelling, social good, educational, and technology projects. From this we have learned many different alternative approaches to funding projects, that others can learn about in our open access Sustainable Funding Series Course.

Sustainable Funding Course for Creatives, Educators and Technologists

Included in this work, we’ve spent the past year experimenting with the Web Monetization Standard, which while still early days, does earn enough to pay for our site costs. We share what we’ve learned from those experiments and our Web Monetization community research in our open access Web Monetization Course.

Web Monetization Course

A New Funding Opportunity with NFT Collectibles

Given our investigations into alternate forms of funding, the hype around NFTs had us curious.  Is this a fad?  Is this just for artists or the internet famous?  Or is this an opportunity for other creatives and educators to set up new funding models around their projects?

From my early research, I discovered that the idea of NFT Collectibles are being used to unlock other opportunities. In the case of Gary Vee, purchasing a VeeFriend unlocks exclusive access to future events, that would be classified as informal education.  Stoner Cats meanwhile gives purchasers exclusive access to their web series, once they’ve raised enough funds through NFT sales to film it. And with names like Jane Fonda, Seth MacFarlane, Chris Rock, Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunia and Vitalik Buterin involved, they’ve done that and more.  The trading of collectibles around these projects has been in obscenely large amounts of money (VeeFriends: *31,400 Ethereum = *$135,997,796 USD / Stoner Cats: *7,100 Ethereum = *$30,751,094 USD), which demonstrates an opportunity, especially when you see that VeeFriends are not professional pieces of art.  Having said that, these two projects also deal with the internet famous, begging the question if this is not just their fan base following them?

*It should be noted here that the publicly shared volume traded on someones OpenSea account does not equate to what the creator of that collection is pulling in, but rather the total amount earned by everyone who has owned and traded any of the NFTs within the collection. One creator explains this further below.

To answer that, I went in search of some NFT Collectible projects for social good and found the Anatomical Hearts Project and Emotion Monsters. The Anatomical Hearts Project is a collection of anatomically drawn hearts created by Melissa Freund, as a way of dealing with her daughter’s congenital heart disease and the three open heart surgeries that she’s already had in her young life. She first released these hearts in the Spring of 2021 as a colouring book and then as NFTs in September 2021. At the time of writing this, 3 months later, *30.6 Ethereum from the Anatomical Heart NFT Collectibles has been traded, which is currently valued at *$132,533 USD. Melissa is not someone who is famous, nor did she have anyone famous attached to the project.

Melissa also graciously explained to me what the volume traded means, in terms of her collection, and what the translated earning are to her.

I want to mention that the 30 ETH you reference for me is traded. So I actually made 100 x .05 ETH = 5 ETH (minus 2.5% for OS fees and minus 2.5% of my own fees… don’t worry I add those back in a moment) on my heart project. So I made 4.75 ETH on the initial sale. Then the 30 ETH is what has actually traded hands. So I receive a percentage of that not the whole thing. So that is about 0.75 (at 2.5%). So total I’ve made about 5.5 ETH on my hearts.

Melissa Freund

Similarly medical student Carmen Aguirre (also known as VJ Neurite), who started the Emotion Monsters NFT, is not famous. Rather, after being disturbed by her colleagues reactions to kids dealing with mental health issues in the hospital, she started creating the Emotion Monsters NFT Collectibles to break stigmas around mental health and raise money for a children’s book on mental health. So far her Emotion Monsters have traded *4.9 Etherium to date, which is approximately *$21,223 USD.

This made me think that perhaps NFT Collectibles are a viable funding solution for one of our educational projects? While there are a lot of NFTs out there, and we don’t have fame behind us, we do have heart and are about creating projects for social good, and as Anatomical Hearts and Emotion Monsters have taught us, there are people looking to purchase NFTs that are intended for good.

Our Experiment – Naturally Ours NFT Collectibles

Loving a good experiment, I decided to see if I could apply what I’ve been learning about NFTs to create some NFT Collectibles of our own, and raise enough money to shoot subsequent seasons of Naturally Ours.

The Project

For a bit of backstory, Naturally Ours is our internationally award winning nature series all about parks and natural spaces and the people they inspire.

Our team loves shooting this series, as the stories people share with us are rich in hope, cultural understanding, and awareness and connection to our natural world. While we might think we have an idea of what the people we interview are going to share with us, we are constantly blown away by the greater depth and layers of understanding that they end up sharing with us. For me, this also allows me to return to my nerdy, tree hugging biologist days.

We shot Season 1 of the Series on Salt Spring Island. In addition our film festival screenings, and featured launch on Vidme (which alas exists no longer), the series can also be found freely accessible on:

And then the documentary, can be found behind paywalls on:

The Art

While I recognise that people with limited art skills are selling NFTs, I wanted ours to represent the mix of quirkiness, quality, thought, hope and empathy that the series has done, and I expected my stick figures would not convey all of that, so after reaching out and considering the artwork of a few people that we suspected might be a good fit for the project, I commissioned Bjorn Yearwood, a recent university graduate turned art therapy student, to create some NFT collectibles for us.

Why Bjorn? As he gets us and our storytelling, is using art to do good in the world and help others, and as he is an incredibly empathetic young fellow, which fits with how we operate within this series. You can see a few of the Naturally Ours NFT Collectibles he created for us below.

The team and I are pleased with what Bjorn has created, as they are fun, intelligent, connect with the essence of Season 1 of Naturally Ours, and include images from each of the episodes.

NFT Marketplace

There are a number of NFT Marketplaces out there, including OpenSea, Rarible, Mintable, and others.

To decide where to place our Naturally Ours NFT Collectibles, I researched through the platforms, looking for similar projects to ours, with the hope being that that platform would be more likely to have collectors that would be interested in our collectibles. I was tempted to go with Mintable, as Mark Cuban is on there, and was hoping he might then be supportive of a fellow Fireside Chat Podcaster. However, OpenSea had the closest examples to what we are trying to do, with Stoner Cats, Anatomical Hearts, and Emotion Monsters all on OpenSea, so that is where we’ve opened a Naturally Ours NFT Collection and entered the marketplace.

Since OpenSea is on the Ethereum Blockchain, OpenSea requires that you have an Ethereum wallet with Ethereum in it before you set up an account. OpenSea has a list of compatible wallets, here: What crypto wallets can I use with OpenSea? Already owning a digital wallet, this was quick for me (and only momentarily terrifying) in transferring Ethereum into my new wallet. Be aware though, that if you do not have a digital wallet, such a transfer from a bank can take a few days.

In setting up our first collection on OpenSea, we also set out our sales intent, that:

  • 10% of NFT sales will be donated to a nature charity in the areas that we film,
  • 10% to go to our NFT artist Bjorn Yearwood in royalties (with the hopes that if we are successful that this will help further support him through his art therapy program), and
  • the remainder to go to the production of future seasons of Naturally Ours and an accompanying website with park and educational guides

Giving the artist a percent royalties on top of a paid contract is not the norm, but I believe a wise move, as it invests our artist in the success of the project, and ultimately if we end up seeing decent success with this, I want our artist to as well.

Discord

Community and access to a behind the scenes creative space for chatting throughout the day is a key characteristic of the NFT Community, especially in the collectible space. The two platforms they use for this is Discord and Telegram. You don’t need both, but you do need one, and I have in fact been told that some buyers won’t purchase an NFT from you, if they don’t like your community space.

I chose to set up our community on Discord, and have been designing it to appeal to the characteristics and interests of our varied community members, whether part of the NFT Community or not. This has included channels to:

  • get behind the scenes glimpses into the series development and production
  • be able to participate in development discussions
  • share their nature rambles
  • share their nature pictures
  • chat about other nature series they enjoy
  • indulge in mindful moments
  • talk about their favourite parks

In addition, we have created a space in the discord for NFT enthusiasts to chat about that world, and for teachers to discuss and share nature education resources.

The advantage to what I have designed of this space so far, is that while it is at present a bit of an echo chamber, it is a space I like and thus like posting to, which is important while the community is still building there.

If anyone has any suggestions or tips for me in helping me to both grow and add to this space, and foster the community there, please let me know.

Minting

Minting our Naturally Ours NFTs has turned out to be a surprisingly easy process. The most time consuming part of which has been crafting a write up behind each of our NFTs. We also shared what the NFT includes here, and looked to Emotion Monsters to help craft the wording behind the creation of derivatives attached to our NFTs. Currently we have phrased that as:

By owning this collectible Naturally Ours NFT, not only do you support the filming of future seasons of Naturally Ours, have access to all the past and future Naturally Ours documentaries and episodes, but you will get a sneak peek into our process with a behind the scenes discord and will be able to create derivative NFTs from this original artwork.

Only the holder of this NFT may make derivative artwork from it, and if sold those rights are transferred to the buyer. We highly encourage that 10% of any derivative art sales be donated to a nature or indigenous charity of your choosing. These derivative rights are for use in the NFT community and do not include commercial rights to make and sell any type of merchandise, as only Ahimsa Media and Bjorn Yearwood retain these rights. Permission from Ahimsa Media is required for the sale of derivative prints.

This leads to one of the questions we have: are we offering enough unlockable value as a part of our NFT, or should we be adding more?

You’ll note here, that we do not reference exclusive viewing rights of our web series and documentaries to our NFT holders, as the whole point of our web series is to share it widely and freely to provoke thought and positive change in this world. Making this exclusive to just those that can afford an NFT negates that. The same goes for the open educational resources too, which as the name implies would be openly accessible and remixable.

Having said that, our NFT Collectible Holders will have access to a private NFT holders only website with the full length documentaries that are normally behind paywalls, and we also plan on sharing other extras here, like additional extras for teachers to make their lesson planning around the open educational resources we’ve shared even easier and parks guide extras, like write ups of our favourite hikes and tips where to see wildlife. And we’ve allowed for NFT holders to create derivatives of our NFTs.

Have I articulated the value well enough? I know I haven’t really mentioned the teaching and parks guide perks. How would you phrase this to better articulate the value?

Does this need more? I know some filmmakers have talked about adding accessible libraries of images and video for NFT holders. While this would require some extra work, I can add libraries of images and videos from shoots for our NFT holders to access and use. I’d just want to keep these to my images and videos, to keep this separate from those that Kelly, our cinematographer, is shooting for the series. Is this something I should be adding as a part of our NFT unlockables or is this too much?

The other big question that came up in minting is how many copies of each NFT Collectible should we be minting. To keep costs of the NFT Collectibles reasonable and still raise enough money for filming, we need to be minting multiple copies, and the more copies we can make, the lower the price that we can sell the NFT Collectible for. But is there a point that the number of copies of the NFT Collectible is devaluing it? Would love peoples thoughts and opinions here. So far I’ve been experimenting with minting 50, 75, and 100 different copies of our NFT Collectibles. Too early though to see if this is impacting buyer behaviour with our NFT Collectibles.

A tip here, for new minters on OpenSea: to mint multiple copies of an NFT, scroll down to copies, and select the Polygon Network, as the Ethereum Network will only allow you to mint one copy at a time at the time of my writing this. Also, this allowed me to mint all of our NFT Collectibles without being charged any of the feared gas prices to date.

Preparation for Minting

You will see from our minting sample above that one of the questions asked in the process is about both an external link and unlockable content. While minting does allow you to edit and add that content later, I would not want to add anything to the marketplace that did not demonstrate the value that we promise, as first impressions are everything when it comes to people making an investment. Whether they decide to buy now or return later, we want to leave them with a good impression so that they do return for a second or third look, and so they tell their friends about it.

What this meant, is that in order to mint, we need to create both a public website for Naturally Ours, and a private website that is unlockable to our Naturally Ours NFT Collectible holders. While the various pages on these two websites still need completing, our audience is welcomed to a clear and inviting homepage to both sites, which gives visitors a vision of what’s to come.

While here, only the main website is accessible to visitors, if there are things that you would add to it, please let me know.

The Drop

‘The Drop’ in NFT terms is when one releases NFTs for sale on the marketplace. The typical way of doing this with NFT Collectibles is to ‘drop’ a number of new collectibles at once, and build anticipation towards that drop on your social media feeds and in your Telegram or Discord Community.

Drops require thought and strategy, in deciding how best to garner attention to them. Often you might give your Telegram or Discord Community advanced access to a drop or an early bird discount.

With not really having an NFT driven Discord Community yet, I am doing our drops a little differently, in a way that makes sense for us, in already having one season of Naturally Ours shot. The way I am doing this is to release a new video (teaser or full episode) on Cinnamon Video each day and then release one new Naturally Ours NFT Collectible that day, corresponding to that episode. This is allowing me to:

  • begin to build a slow buzz around the series and our NFTs
  • lead with story first, so that I don’t feel like I am becoming an NFT advertisement
  • show off the value of the series that people would be supporting in purchasing our NFTs

Once I have dropped the first 7 images, tied to the sharing of videos on Cinnamon, I will take a couple of Bjorn’s early less refined images, and do a free NFT giveaway to people who join the Discord community and either share what we are up to on Twitter or Instagram.

Next, I will do another slow tease out of images, tied to either the release of a new Parks Guide or Open Educational Resource, on the Naturally Ours website. These drops are intended to create deadlines for me in building more content to the Naturally Ours website, in addition to continuing the slow and steady build to our NFTs and Naturally Ours.

If you have any feedback on this Drop Strategy or other ideas that we might try, I’d love to hear them, as this is an experiment in progress.

With the drop, also comes the pricing of the NFT Collectible, which I am still debating on. After looking at what Stoner Cats, Anatomical Hearts, Emotion Monsters, and other nature based projects are priced at, crunching the numbers on how much we’d need to earn to shoot a second Season of Naturally Ours, I decided to price our NFTs at 0.03 Etherium until the New Year. This is less than Anatomical Hearts and Emotion Monsters, while still acknowledging the value of what we are creating. I may, after the release of the first seven NFTs, experiment with some lower priced NFTs between 0.02 – 0.0275 Ethereum, with some of Bjorn’s early less refined images to see if that makes a difference in sales. Depending on how sales go, I may increase the price on the NFT Collectibles in the New Year, closer to what Anatomical Hearts and Emotion Monsters are going for at between 0.035 – 0.05 Etherium.

If you have any thoughts or advice related to the pricing of our NFT Collectibles, we’d greatly appreciate it.

Feedback from Melissa Freund on My Early Creator Questions

Feeling the need for some guidance on the questions swirling in my head at these initial stages of the experiment, I reached out to Anatomical Hearts NFT Collectibles creator Melissa Freund for a bit of guidance from her story and experience. Here is what she generously shared with me:

  • How did you first garner attention to Anatomical Hearts?

I first garnered attention from a @Garyvee Twitter post. He asked for artists that hadn’t had their first sale yet to share their story/collection on his Twitter post and then he was going to buy one. He didn’t pick my collection as one to buy but it had a lot of ‘likes’. From that post I had probably sold around 10 of my nfts. Then on September 16 @bullgirlfriends tweeted (like a 5 part tweet) about my story and project and I sold out the rest of my 100 piece project in about an hour. It was pretty crazy.

  • How did you first garner attention to your Discord?

My discord was dead for forever. That took a long time to get even a little traction. In mid/late September I had someone ask if my project was dead. It was insulting because I was doing so much on the back-end but just didn’t have a lot of traction on twitter/discord yet. I will say I had my husband, Shane (@dadcipher) and another gamer friend signed up as mods right away. They were already on discord so they were happy to chat away and say hi to people as they came in.

  • How long was it before you sold your first NFT, and then until you began building momentum behind that?

I listed August 31 and sold my first NFT on September 4. Those two interactions I mentioned above introduced me to a lot of people that began to start to believe in me and really liked my work. Also, Twitter spaces and chatting with people in other discords is a good way to meet new people.

  • What was your initial price / NFT?

All my art has sold for 0.05 ETH each. That is about $200 USD, which sound like a lot but is a really good entry point in NFTs. I would even say, I price my art a little low. I’m new and priced it lower for two reasons: 1) I wanted tHE people who bought my art to be able to make gains on it. 2) It felt accessible, and I wanted people who really felt meaning in my art to be able to collect it.

  • How many copies of each NFT do you make available?

Each piece I only sell a quantity of 1. I repeat some of the styles but each of the coloring I change manually so I still consider all my artwork 1/1. I hope that makes sense. In the future I’m going to play around with different price point and quantities.

Lessons / Discoveries to Date

So far in this experiment, I have been met with the following discoveries:

  • Hope and Empowerment – Unlike writing a grant proposal, creating these NFT Collectibles feels like it is something I have some control in catalysing our success. As a result, rather than this process exhausting me, it has been exhilarating and is somewhat addictive.
  • Patience – While I’d love to see instant success, I need to keep reminding myself that I am playing the long game, and do not want to come across as spam, as so many in this space are doing.
  • It’s About Community – As is often the case in early adopter tech ecosystems, it’s about community. You need to foster, grow and engage community – both around your project and with the broader NFT community.
  • It’s Easier than It Seems – The process of setting up your digital wallet, minting, and adding your NFTs to the marketplace is much easier than it seems from the outside, and quite a straightforward and streamlined process.
  • To Do Things Properly is Time Consuming – This is not a get rich quick, field of dreams. To do this properly, you need to be invested with your time, creativity, and attention.
  • Beware of the Snake Oil Salespeople – With every success and Cinderella story, come those looking to make a quick buck and sell people on dreams of fame and fortune. As my instagram NFT shares will show in the comments, the NFT community is currently rife with them.

Future Potential / Possibilities

At this point in my experiment, with only two NFTs dropped and no sales as of yet, it is still too early for me to predict the future potential and possibilities for our project, but I am excited at the prospects. My current goals with this:

  • Make my first NFT Sale, so that I can then pitch my ideas to the NFT Marketplaces that Ripple is investing in building.
  • Raise enough to shoot another season of Naturally Ours, or at least offset the cost for another partner on the project.
  • Raise enough for freedom of where and when we shoot future seasons of Naturally Ours.
  • Raise enough to pay myself and team members to support me in the marketing of Naturally Ours and in the development of open educational resources around the series.

With the above, it would also be outstanding to be able to give some decent sized donations to charities on behalf of the series and to see royalties coming in for Bjorn.

Having said that, even without any of that, this process has already been a great success for me, as we now have some wonderful images that are a part of Naturally Ours as I further build the website, the parks guides, and the open educational resources. And it has created deadlines for me in finally building the Naturally Ours website and finally releasing Naturally Ours on Cinnamon Video. All of this breathes new life into the project and gives me new talking points when I follow up with potential partners for the project.

This has also got me excited to attempt this funding model for raising money for both our Chronic Pain Chronicles Series and accompanying open educational resources, and for our Augmented Reality Natural and Cultural History Storytelling App. Who knows, maybe we even come up with an NFT campaign for building more open educational courses around contemporary media on the StoryToGo Classroom site and for supporting our podcasts? So many possibilities, and as this is something that Bjorn and I are both having fun experimenting with, it is just time and a bit of catalysing funds that is limiting us. Which again reminds me to pace myself and focus on this experiment first, before diving into the next one.

Your Thoughts / Experience

I’d love to hear about your experience.

Have you created or contemplated creating any NFTs? If so, what around? Have you yourself bought an NFT? What inspired you to make the purchase? How do you see creating and utilising NFTs in your industry?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

A Few of the Rabbit Holes I Wandered Down in my NFT Research

Aguirre, C. (2021, September 5). Emotion Monsters. VJ Neurite. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.vjneurite.com/crypto-art/emotion-monsters

Ahimsa Media Inc., & Hargreave, E. (2021, November 24). Naturally Ours. Naturally Ours. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://roamancing.com/naturallyours/

Burke, K. (2021). The Metaverse Podcast. PodBean. Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://outlierventures.podbean.com/

Freund, M. (2021). The Anatomical Project. The Anatomical Project. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://theanatomicalproject.com/

Hargreave, E. (2021, October 13). Would Love Your Advice on Navigating the World of NFTs [Forem Post]. Web Monetization Community. https://community.webmonetization.org/ericahargreave/where-on-navigating-the-world-of-nfts-4b9c

Hargreave, E. (2021b, October 14). Exploring NFTs on the Sustainable Funding Series | by Erica Hargreave. Fireside Chat.  https://firesidechat.com/ericahargreave/01FJ00CYXG1E86WEY707NSYRFJ

Hargreave, E. (2021c, October 18). NFTs – A Sustainable Funding Solution for OpenEd? | by Erica Hargreave. Fireside Chat. https://firesidechat.com/ericahargreave/01FJAC39R96M8XQ91Z52TF4EEB

Hargreave, E. (2021, October 22). NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) – A Sustainable Funding Solution for Open Education and Open Culture? StoryToGo. https://storytogo.ca/2021/10/nft-non-fungible-tokens-a-sustainable-funding-solution-for-open-education-and-open-culture/

Hargreave, E. (2021c, November 24). Naturally Ours NFT Experiment : Part 1 – the Concept & Discord. Web Monetization Community. https://community.webmonetization.org/ericahargreave/naturally-ours-nft-experiment-part-1-the-concept-discord-1fh5

Hargreave, E. (2021d, November 24). Naturally Ours NFT Open Education Experiment : Part 1 – the Concept & Discord. OE Global Connect. https://connect.oeglobal.org/t/naturally-ours-nft-open-education-experiment-part-1-the-concept-discord/3320/2

Henbu. (2021, March 24). NFTs for a Photographer/Filmmaker? How to ACTUALLY make NFTs that SELL! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akzPKeh3j9c

Jackson, R. (2021, August 25). NFTs Are Here To Stay, Dominate And. . . Crunchbase News. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://news.crunchbase.com/news/nft-outlook-2021/

NIFTY WORLD. (2021, August 28). How to build a strong NFT Community | NFT Tips and Tricks [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lhNxhtxFDw

NFTCON October 12–14th – NFT Conference. (2021). NFTcon. Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://www.nftcon.co/agenda

NFTs – What You Need to Know. (2021, July 28). Real Vision. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://www.realvision.com/nfts-what-you-need-to-know

Open Sea. (n.d.). Open Sea. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://opensea.io/

Prism Productive. (2021, September 11). How To Mint NFT On Opensea For Free – No Gas Fees [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzr1BKrmm4o

Radhy. (2021, October 16). Web Monetization + NFT = . . . ? [Forem Post]. Web Monetization Community. https://community.webmonetization.org/radhyr/web-monetization-nft-5hbg

Roamancing. (2021, November 24). Roamancing on Cinnamon. Cinnamon Video. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://cinnamon.video/Roamancing

Stoner Cats. (2021). Stoner Cats. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.stonercats.com/

Thomas, P. (2021, August 20). NFTs in education — fashion, fad or truly non-fungible? Medium. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://medium.com/haileyburyx/nfts-in-education-fashion-fad-or-truly-non-fungible-252a662d4bce

Vaynerchuk, G. (2021, May 13). What is NFT? Non-fungible Token Guide. GaryVaynerchuk.Com. Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/what-is-nft-non-fungible-token-guide/

Young, J. R. (2021a, August 18). Could NFTs Play a Role in Education? EdSurge. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-08-10-could-nfts-play-a-role-in-education

Young, J. R. (2021a, September 15). Glitches, ‘Gas Fees’ and Lessons We Learned Selling an NFT. EdSurge. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-09-14-glitches-gas-fees-and-lessons-we-learned-selling-an-nft

Young, J. R. (2021, October 12). We Wondered If NFTs Could Change Education, So We Decided to Sell This Article on the Blockchain. EdSurge. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-08-09-we-wondered-if-nfts-could-change-education-so-we-decided-to-sell-this-article-on-the-blockchain

NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) – A Sustainable Funding Solution for Open Education and Open Culture?

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Could NFTs (non-fungible tokens) poise a potential sustainable funding solution for open education and open culture?

An ode to Beeple’s NFT image collage, entitled ‘Everyday’, that sold for $69,346,250 US in a Christie’s auction in March 2021. Image care of Marco Verch via Flickr.
Click here to listen to a live audience Podcast Recording of this Article, followed by a Discussion.

This article was updated on October 22, 2021, thanks to some insights and explanations of Janos Farkas of CLink Media on the Web Monetization Community Forem.

Immersion in the Blockchain and Web 3.0

Over the past year as I’ve immersed myself in the Web Monetization Standard, I have become more and more excited about the potential that decentralization protocols, the blockchains, and cryptocurrencies hold in transforming the creator’s economy and building more equity for underserved groups across the digital verse. I am so very thankful to Grant for the Web and Interledger for starting me on this journey (along with a little nudge from David Porter).

With this and with the rise in popularity of NFTs within the artistic community, I have naturally become curious about exploring NFTs in greater depth to discover if they present a potential solution for the educational and storytelling projects that my team and I have been developing. While Web Monetization presents a solution for the royalties and sustainable management of our projects, could NFTs hold a solution for sustainably funding our projects, along with other open education and freely distributed cultural storytelling projects?

The Web Monetization Standard for those unfamiliar with it, is a JavaScript browser API that allows for the creation of a payment stream from a website visitor to a website. The way this currently works is that when someone with a Web Monetization subscription (currently Coil) visits a digital asset that is Web Monetized (like this digital magazine), then micropayments flow from the subscription to the digital asset in real time, based on the amount of time spent on the site.

To learn more about Web Monetization, visit our:

Understanding NFT

In gaining understanding of NFT and the potential that non-fungible tokens present, let’s first breakdown the word Non-Fungible Tokens.

Image care of Mario Taddei via the Wikimedia Commons.

Fungible

Fungible is a term used in finance to reference something that can be exchanged for something else that is the same, like a Canadian dollar or loony for another Canadian dollar or loony.

Non-Fungible

Non-Fungible refers to something that is unique, that can’t be replaced with something else. As an example of something that is non-fungible, since it’s a rainy day which brings cozy, comfy thoughts, my childhood yellow blanket that my mom made me is unique, as no other yellow blanket is the same as it. For me, it hold greater value to all those other yellow blankets.

Non-Fungible Tokens

This definition has been updated, thanks to insights and explanations shared by Janos Farkas of CLink Media.

Non-Fungible Tokens refers to non-fungible items that are tokenized. While with the current craze in NFTs, we think about tokenized items placed on the blockchain, tokens that are non-fungible have been used in commerce for centuries. As an example there include negotiable instruments, securities, deeds of real estate, certificate of title for automobiles.

“The term NFT was popularized in our current culture by the Ethereum ERC-721 Standard and is now used by other ledgers and marketplaces. The NFT itself is unique, but NOT the asset it is linked to. This has been the crux of major confusions around NFT.”

Blockchain

The Blockchain is a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible to change, hack, or cheat. In essence it is a digital ledger of transactions that are duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain.

NFT Success Stories

NFTs first gained more mainstream attraction and attention in 2017 as CryptoKitties (created by Vancouver’s Dapper Labs), took off. For those of you unfamiliar with CryptoKitties, it is a blockchain game on the Ethereum network that allows players to purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats.

CryptoKitties’ 2017 popularity congested the Ethereum network so badly that it caused the network to reach an all-time high in the number of transactions, slowing the network down significantly. In the years since then, while NFTs had a dedicated niche following, it wasn’t until 2020 that NFTs began to grow in popularity, perhaps as artists looked for different avenues and ways to sell their art during the pandemic. While popularity began to grow in 2020, 2021 has presented an enormous boom in NFTs and is changing the financial prospects for many artists.

I mention artists, as much of the NFT boom has been around art, along with collectibles. Creatives in multiple other disciplines have also begun to experiment with creating NFTs around their creative endeavours. The money that some artists are making is enough to not only maintain their projects, but fund new projects, pay for their education, donate some of their earnings to charities and causes of interest, and change their lifestyles. Below, I share a few projects that have caught my attention in my explorations.

Anatomical Hearts Project

The image above is a screenshot from The Anatomical Project website.

Melissa Freund began to draw anatomically correct hearts as a way of coping with and processing the rare heart defect that her daughter was born with and needed open heart surgery on at 11 days old. In May 2021, Melissa took these drawings and turned them into a published colouring book. Then in September 2021, she created a 100 piece NFT collection called Anatomical Hearts on the Open Sea NFT marketplace. Within a month, she sold 65 of those hearts, began to build a community around her art on discord, and earned 25 Ethereum, which is currently valued at approximately $96,900 US.

The hearts Melissa sells are essentially ‘digital prints’. The copyright for the drawings remain with her, so that she is able to use them in her other work. She also gets royalties on any future sales of her purchased hearts within the blockchain.

Melissa has now started a second project, The Anatomical Project.

Emotion Monsters

The image above is a screenshot from the Emotion Monsters Collection on Open Sea.

Emotion Monsters is an NFT project started by medical student Carmen Aguirre (also known as VJ Neurite), after being disturbed by her colleagues reactions to kids dealing with mental health issues in the hospital. With this series, she aims to break stigmas around mental health.

In the initial round of this project, she sold out on her first 30 monsters (in July 2021), and has since added additional monsters and emotional support pets for the monsters. As of writing this, she has earned 4.85 Ethereum, which at present is approximately $18,750 US. 10% of these earnings are donated to a mental health charity and the remainder is being used to fund a kids book on mental health

Each monster comes with access to a private discord group and will allow for derivative NFTs to be made from the original art.

Carmen has subsequently launched Emotional Support Plants on Open Sea.

Ethereum Towers

The above image is a screenshot of the Ethereum Tower‘s apartment sales on Open Sea.

Ethereum Towers is a decentralized, community-first, social real-estate experiment in which space is being sold in a virtual world that will eventually exist in the metaverse. Think luxury virtual living, in the fashion of Second Life or Minecraft, as a way of bringing people from around the world virtually together in a shared virtual living space.

Launched in September 2021, at the time of writing this article, 425 Units of this virtual real estate have been sold, pulling in 88.5 Ethereum (which is currently approximately $340,000 US). This money will go into building the virtual towers in the metaverse, as well as managing the community.

Stoner Cats

The image above is a screenshot of Stoner Cats on Open Sea.

To raise money for a new animated series named Stoner Cats, Mila Kunis and Orchard Farm Productions ran an NFT Stoner Cat Collectibles sale, much in the fashion of a crowdfunding campaign with added perks for the first people to unlock particular milestones in the NFT sales. Everyone with a Stoner Cat collectible has exclusive access to all the Stoner Cat content produced.

The first round of sales was sold out to 4800 owners, raising 6800 Ethereum, which is currently approximately $26,180,00 US. To date, a 5-minute pilot for the series has been released.

My NFT Concerns

As I did a deep dive into the NFT ecosystem, there were a couple of points that raised my concerns with NFTs as well as with their practicality of use in creating free and open education and free and open culture. These concerns revolved around the notions of Ownership, Status, Copyright, and Equity. Many conversations around NFTs are focused on this notion of proof of ownership of something unique, and even go further to talk about this ownership over something acting as a point of status. All of this set my alarm bells off, as one of the strengths of the web for me is opening culture and education up to people worldwide. With a rise in popularity of NFTs would this transform the web into a series of gated communities in which only those that could afford to could enter, learn and experience? Part of what I love about Web Monetization and the people involved in creating that ecosystem is the movement towards making the web more equitable, and opening things up for underserved communities to earn. Yet when we talk Ownership and Status, this signals classism to me, which is counter to equity. This fear was further compiled by learning of an individual who gave away their choice of what to eat each day as an NFT and on a particular deep dive discovering HaremTokens. Also as a digital creator, did I want to be giving away my right to utilise my creations, when so often they build upon one another and come from a collective of ideas beyond just my own, especially in education?

To address some of these concerns, I hosted a panel of individuals experimenting with NFTs to discuss further, including Melissa Freund of the Anatomical Hearts Project, Dadcipher of Etherium Towers, and Adam Waring of gFam. You can listen to that podcast below on YouTube or the original version on Fireside Chat:

Smart Contracts

To summarise my discoveries from the discussion:

  • While NFTs do show proof of ownership over something (in this case as Janos Farkas shared with me – the ownership is of the token not the asset itself), when an NFT is created a Smart Contract is established that dictates what the ownership of that item entitles the owner to. Usually that ownership does not involve the copyright of the asset, does not limit the artist’s other uses of the asset, and is often not even the original of the asset, rather a copy – just like owning the print of an original piece of art, allowing the artist to sell multiple prints of the same piece.
  • The Smart Contract also stipulates how the buyer is permitted to utilise the item that they’ve purchased, and any other permissions that their purchase might give them.
  • In addition, Smart Contracts can also stipulate percent royalties to be shared with the artist on all future sales of the item.

Our discussion covered other topics too, including how to get started on creating and selling NFTs, which I will go into further in another article, along with walking you through creating an NFT of our own. In the meantime, EdSurge has shared their journey in doing just that, that you can listen to below.

Janos Farkas went on to share with me, “When someone is purchasing an NFT, they are purchasing the metadata file, and as a non-fungible token this is transferable as well. Some people have therefore compared NFTs with a signed copy of a work, which is somewhat inaccurate as the NFT is not a copy itself, it’s more like a signed receipt of a work, where the ownership is not of the work itself, but it’s ownership of the receipt.” “The key takeaway from that paragraph ‘the ownership is not of the work itself’, so it is NOT a song, a book, a message, or a Tweet.” He further recommends reading ‘What do NFTs represent?’ section of the article, ‘The Rise of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the Role of Copyright Law – Part I‘.

He further shares…

“This leads to the question: can an NFT represent the content/asset? For example, can it replace a certificate title of an automobile?

A certificate of title imprints the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) of the automobile. VIN is unique to the vehicle and can be verified from third party sources. In other words, VIN provides a verifiable reference. This is not the case for the majority NFTs using Ethereum ERC721 tokens. Those link the content/asset by a “breakable” URL. There are multiple reasons why that URL is breakable. The most obvious one is that the ERC721 spec allows changing the URL after the token is minted by the function (_setTokenURI(tokenId, newTokenURI). See github.com/0xcert/ethereum-erc721/… at line 110 in the ERC 721 reference implementation.

In summary NFT cannot be considered as a verifiable ‘certificate of ownership’ for a content/asset.”

The Possibilities for NFTs are Evolving Quickly

Another thing I learned this past week from tuning into NFTcon (Day 1 – Music, Art, Fashion & Culture / Day 2 – Collectibles, Gaming, Sports & Metaverse / Day 3 – Protocols & Demos) and having the discussion above, as well as conversations with other NFT creators, is that the NFT ecosystem is changing rapidly, and with that there are many misconceptions (like those I had around what ownership means and what unique means in the context of NFTs) and opportunities to shape how NFTs evolve. In terms of NFT evolution, there are already conversations around NFT rentals or examples of NFTs as tickets to an event. In some cases, owning an NFT is like owning a key that unlocks different experiences. There are huge opportunities in contributing to this evolution by experimenting with the creation of your own NFTs, especially in spaces beyond art and collectibles.

Opportunities for Creating NFTs for Open Education & Open Culture Projects

I struggled initially in pondering whether with the notion of ownership, if it would be possible to create NFTs around Open Education and Open Culture Projects, and then as I continued popping down various NFT rabbit holes and exploring what others were up to, the ideas rapidly began to hit me.

Here are my initial thoughts on how NFTs could be utilised around open education and open or free culture projects to begin to create sustainable funding models for those project:

  • Completion Certificates for Open Courses, that are available at a fee, provided the learner also completes the required assignments. This NFT Completion Certificate could also include feedback from the Instructor on the assignments and a one-on-one coaching session.
  • Fundraising Collectibles that unlock special privileges, like access to the behind-the-scenes community or voting rights in future resource development.
  • Creation of NFTs around Secondary Resources built as a part of the open education project.
  • Creation of NFTs around Learnings that you have had as a result open education project.

While the above is just a start, my hope is that you, dear reader, will add to these ideas, growing the possibilities.

In terms of how I am envisioning utilising NFTs to help our team to continue to grow our open educational and freely accessible storytelling projects, here are a few of my current ideas:

StoryToGo Classroom

What? Online Course Site

NFTs?

  • Completion Certificates for Open Courses, provided the learner also completes the required assignments. This NFT Completion Certificate will also include feedback from the Instructor on the assignments and a one-on-one coaching session.

Chronic Pain Chronicles

What? Web Series, Documentary, and Open Educational Resources on Chronic Pain and Chronic Pain Management

NFTs?

  • Chronic Pain Chronicles Character Collectibles with the purchasers of the characters having full and advanced access to the web series, documentary, and educational resources, in addition to access to the behind-the-scenes discord community where they can have direct access to our team and contribute to development discussions. Proceeds from the characters will go to the development and production of the series, documentary, and educational resources, with a percent going to chronic pain research and programs, and in royalties to the artist.
  • Chronic Pain Chronicles Digital Art Gallery of art created by individuals with chronic pain, with the majority of the sales going to the artist, and a smaller percent of sales going to the series and to chronic pain research and programs.

Naturally Ours

What? Web Series, Documentaries, and Online Parks and Education Guides

NFTs?

  • Flora and Fauna Character Collectibles with the purchasers of the characters having full and advanced access to the web series, documentary, and parks and education guides, in addition to access to the behind-the-scenes discord community where they can have direct access to our team and contribute to development discussions. Proceeds from the characters will go to the development and production of the series, documentary, and parks and education guides, with a percent going to a conservation charity, and in royalties to the artist. Character dumps will be tailored to the flora and fauna native to upcoming Seasons of the Series.
  • Digital Prints of Stock Photos and Videos from filming.
  • Travel and Hiking eBook Guides
  • Teaching eBook Guides

Story Steppers AR Natural and Cultural Storytelling App

What? AR Natural and Culture History Experiences and Online Educational Resources

NFTs?

  • Ghostly Figures Character Collectibles tied to upcoming experiences with the purchasers of the characters having access to hidden AR experiences that are unlocked by their character, in addition to access to the behind-the-scenes discord community where they can have direct access to our team and contribute to development discussions. Proceeds from the characters will go to the development and production of the AR experiences and online educational resources, with a percent going to a charity tied to the experience being built, and in royalties to the artist.
  • Digital Prints of Stock Photos and Videos from filming.
  • Travel and Hiking eBook Guides
  • Teaching eBook Guides

Roamancing Travel Magazine

What? Digital Travel and Culture Magazine and Storyworld

NFTs?

  • Digital Prints of Stock Photos and Videos from our travels.
  • Travel eBook Guides

Your Thoughts?

Now it is your turn. Have you been experimenting with NFTs? If so, what has your experience been? Do you have ideas for utilising NFTs on a project of your own? Do you have other insights on how NFTs can be utilised in sustainably funding open education and freely accessible cultural projects?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

A Few of the Rabbit Holes I Wandered Down in my NFT Research

Aguirre, C. (2021, September 5). Emotion Monsters. VJ Neurite. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.vjneurite.com/crypto-art/emotion-monsters

Burke, K. (2021). The Metaverse Podcast. PodBean. Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://outlierventures.podbean.com/

CryptoKitties. (2019, November 19). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoKitties

Easy Peasy Finance. (2021, June 8). Finance 101: What are NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens? Easy Peasy Finance for Kids and Beginners [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szxilXB1POI

Freund, M. (2021). The Anatomical Project. The Anatomical Project. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://theanatomicalproject.com/

Hargreave, E. (2021, October 13). Would Love Your Advice on Navigating the World of NFTs [Forem Post]. Web Monetization Community. https://community.webmonetization.org/ericahargreave/where-on-navigating-the-world-of-nfts-4b9c

Hargreave, E. (2021b, October 14). Exploring NFTs on the Sustainable Funding Series | by Erica Hargreave. Fireside Chat. Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://firesidechat.com/ericahargreave/01FJ00CYXG1E86WEY707NSYRFJ

Hargreave, E. (2021c, October 18). NFTs – A Sustainable Funding Solution for OpenEd? | by Erica Hargreave. Fireside Chat. Retrieved October 18, 2021, from https://firesidechat.com/ericahargreave/01FJAC39R96M8XQ91Z52TF4EEB

Jackson, R. (2021, August 25). NFTs Are Here To Stay, Dominate And. . . Crunchbase News. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://news.crunchbase.com/news/nft-outlook-2021/

Kastrenakes, J. (2021, March 11). Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million. The Verge. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million

NFTCON October 12–14th – NFT Conference. (2021). NFTcon. Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://www.nftcon.co/agenda

NFTs – What You Need to Know. (2021, July 28). Real Vision. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://www.realvision.com/nfts-what-you-need-to-know

Open Sea. (n.d.). Open Sea. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://opensea.io/

Radhy. (2021, October 16). Web Monetization + NFT = . . . ? [Forem Post]. Web Monetization Community. https://community.webmonetization.org/radhyr/web-monetization-nft-5hbg

Stoner Cats. (2021). Stoner Cats. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.stonercats.com/

Studyum Foundation [STUDYUM]. (2021, July 2). Applying Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in education [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQKgOyKfI0

Tan, E. (2021, October 8). NFT Rentals: Why VCs Are Backing a Puzzling New Project. CoinDesk. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/10/08/nft-rentals-why-vcs-are-backing-a-puzzling-new-project/

Thomas, P. (2021, August 20). NFTs in education — fashion, fad or truly non-fungible? Medium. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://medium.com/haileyburyx/nfts-in-education-fashion-fad-or-truly-non-fungible-252a662d4bce

Vaynerchuk, G. (2021, May 13). What is NFT? Non-fungible Token Guide. GaryVaynerchuk.Com. Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/what-is-nft-non-fungible-token-guide/

Young, J. R. (2021a, August 18). Could NFTs Play a Role in Education? EdSurge. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-08-10-could-nfts-play-a-role-in-education

Young, J. R. (2021a, September 15). Glitches, ‘Gas Fees’ and Lessons We Learned Selling an NFT. EdSurge. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-09-14-glitches-gas-fees-and-lessons-we-learned-selling-an-nft

Young, J. R. (2021, October 12). We Wondered If NFTs Could Change Education, So We Decided to Sell This Article on the Blockchain. EdSurge. Retrieved October 16, 2021, from https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-08-09-we-wondered-if-nfts-could-change-education-so-we-decided-to-sell-this-article-on-the-blockchain

gFam Web Monetized Photo Networking Platform – a Sustainable Funding Case Study

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With the growing ecosystem of creatives, educators and technologists building sustainability into their projects in part with the Web Monetization Standard, we have begun a series within our Sustainable Funding Series for Creatives, Educators, and Technologists exploring projects that are utilizing the Web Monetization Standard as a part of their plan. In this first interview in the series, we speak with Adam, the founder of gFam – a Web Monetized Photo Networking Platform.

Founder: Adam

Country: Australia

Interview Date: March 5, 2021

Link to the Project: https://gfam.live

Funding Method: Ingenuity, Blood-Sweat-and-Tears, Grant, Web Monetization Standard 

Interview with gFam Founder, Adam

The Project : gFam Photo Networking Platform

Recognizing that there is a problem with equity in revenue models on the web, in that tech giants are receiving the majority of revenues from the time spent on content creators’ work, through advertising dollars, while the content creators themselves see little to none of these revenues, Adam set out to change this. His Goal? To help his friends that he saw had large networks of fans, but were struggling financially. From this desire to help content creators, Adam founded gFam – the global family app, which is a Web Monetized Photo Networking Platform.

Like with Instagram, gFam is a social media platform designed for the sharing of images with the ability to add text descriptions to accompany the images. The BIG difference for creators on gFam is that creators can begin earning revenue from their images starting with the first image that they share on the first day that they join the platform. Creators can earn in two different ways. Firstly gFam is Web Monetized, meaning that creators can earn using Coil by adding a payment pointer to their digital wallet. Secondly, creators can earn tips in XRP by setting up a XUMM account, linked to their gFam account. Tipping has also allowed for creators to gate specific content of theirs if they wish, only allowing access to it at a cost. If all this sounds like a foreign language to you, not to worry I elaborate on what these things are and how they work, below.

Other features of gFam include a home profile with your bio and photo stream. A lovely advantage to gFam‘s profiles over Instagram profiles, is that they allow you to add other social networking sites, as well as more than one website link. gFam’s linking abilities within post descriptions is also an advantage that gFam has over Instagram, as links that are shared in gFam post descriptions are clickable. Finally as with other social networking sites, you can follow people of interest and comment on their posts. You cannot like their posts, however. Instead the heart button is reserved for tipping. A few features that are currently missing on gFam, that I hope to see in the future, are notifications within the platform (I don’t need to be buzzed elsewhere) that let you know when someone has commented on a post of yours or replied to a comment of yours, and the ability to switch your scrolling of other people’s images between a home feed of people you are following and a global feed with everyone’s posts. I’d also like to see the image thumbnails larger, so as to better attract the eye.

What is the Web Monetization Standard?

Technically, the Web Monetization Standard is a newly proposed browser API standard that allows for the generation of a payment stream from the user directly to the website being viewed.

Basically, the Web Monetization Standard is a newer, more equitable way for creators to earn micropayments from the time that people spend on their content in the digital space.

How Does Web Monetization Work?

At present the only Web Monetization Provider utilizing the Web Monetization Standard is Coil. This means to receive micropayments via the Web Monetization Standard for time spent on your content, you need to sign up for a Coil Creator Account and set up a payment pointer with a digital wallet. I explain how to do that in this post on the Coil Web Monetization Plugin for WordPress – Set Up and Troubleshooting Issues. You might also want to consider signing up for a $5 US / month subscription with Coil to give back to the Web Monetization Community, as it is through those $5 US / month subscriptions that creators get paid. Whenever someone with a subscription spends time on your content each month, micropayments flow from the subscription to the content creator. This happens thanks to Interledger.

What is the Role of Blockchain Technology and XRP in Making Micropayments with XUMM?

As Adam explains in the video above, the advantage in the micropayments being distributed as tips via XUMM is that they utilize blockchain technology, meaning that these transactions are decentralized, fast, and don’t cost anything, so no money is lost to transaction fees. Due to there being a number of servers in the blockchain, this makes it difficult for hackers to intercept payments. Essential the framework of the blockchain prevents people from copying and pasting digital files.

XRP, which is a cryptocurrency, is used with XUMM, as it is super quick (because the blockchain is smaller and has less servers that have to agree on the transaction) and has no fees (as the servers are hosted by volunteers).

Meet Adam : the Founder of gFam

As Adam, the Founder of gFam, says he’s just a guy – a guy that saw a problem and wants to create a solution to help others, a guy who is creative and determined, a guy that sees the importance of education in growing the Web Monetization Community, and a guy that has done a lot to create a warm and supportive atmosphere in the Web Monetization space. Aside from that, Adam has been building gFam and been one of the chief cheerleaders in the Web Monetization Community, while working a day job in IT Security, being Dad to a flock of sheep, and carrying on with his passions, like Aussie Ninja Warrior.

While Adam is the Founder and Main Human at gFam, he is not the engineer of the platform, rather he has a team of technologists that he is working with on that, while he focuses on building and engaging the community.

Road to Funding Sustainably

When Adam first set out to create gFam, he was envisioning a funding model tied to banner ads, in which the content creator received 80% of the revenue from the ads and gFam received 20% of the revenue. His direction with this changed when he discovered Web Monetization as it better fits his goals, and means the platform does not become overwrought with annoying ads. With the goal of turning gFam into a Web Monetized Photo Networking Platform, Adam applied to Grant for the Web for start-up funding for the platform. He was successful in this bid, giving him the initial funds he needed to hire a team to build the platform, as well as to build and engage the community on gFam. He has openly shared his first year journey, including earnings via the Web Monetization Community Forum.

In talking to Adam about sustainability in March 2021, he at the time thought that he did not need to worry about sustainability due to the grant. Upon pushing him on this, he did concede that he would need ongoing sustainable earnings for the platform to cover server costs and ongoing work of the tech team. His thoughts were that the money earned from Web Monetization and tips would cover these costs. gFam’s Web Monetization earnings come from people scrolling through the home feed, and from time spent on creators’ content that have not enabled their own Web Monetization on their feed, and their tips come from people who tip Adam’s own posts. With the current grant having just ended, the reality has recently hit gFam that at least for the time being, other sustainable funding measures are needed to cover ongoing platform costs, beyond Web Monetization and tips. I further elaborate on this under ‘Current Challenges’ below.

Current Challenges

gFam’s biggest challenge to date have revolved around a number of challenges that the Web Monetization Community has been facing as a whole. These include:

  • The fear that this is too good to be true, along with the notion that this therefore must be a scam.
  • Distrust in cryptocurrency, even though you can get the digital wallet to transfer your earning into whichever currency you choose.
  • Fear over opening a digital wallet.
  • Feeling overwhelmed by the newer technology required to earn on gFam.

All of the above have made community building on gFam a challenge. Adam is a lovely, supportive fellow that once you get to know, you trust, but most people shy away from fear before they get to know him, and you can’t really community build around trust building from one guy, who also has many other jobs.

gFam’s other challenge at the moment is sustainable funding. With the Grant for the Web just being completed, they no longer have their main source of funding. As a result, gFam has decided to place the community on pause while they are sourcing out new funds.

This worries me for them, as:

  • Communities are hard to build, and in building on a platform, they are ultimately investing their time and creativity into the platform. My fear here is putting the community on pause, stands to lose their trust, as well as their habit of visiting and utilizing the platform regularly.
  • I worry that this could potentially send the wrong message to potential funders.

gFam’s reasoning in hitting pause was the server and tip costs, fear that people would stop using the platform if they were not receiving as many tips from the platform, and having the space to build in some new elements and strategize over their next steps. There was also fear over Twitter’s addition of a tip jar being competition.

Personally, I think if people leave if they are not receiving tips from you, then thats not your true community. And I think gFam is different enough from Twitter, that Twitter’s tip jar should not pose a threat.

My hope is that my fears here are unwarranted, as I want to see gFam a success. One big positive in this regard is that the Web Monetization Community is actively invested in Adam, and Adam is actively invested in the Web Monetization Community. Given this and given that we are still in the early days of fostering this community, my hope is that the community will return and gFam will continue to grow as soon as they click unpause.

Future Building

Adam’s June 2021 post, A Whole Year for gFam, speaks to what he, his team, and the gFam Community have accomplished in the past year, as well as to the current work being done while the platform is on pause to community members. This has included “creating blog posts directly on gFam.live, making gFam posts editable and deletable, cleaning up code, documenting absolutely everything, moving older images off an old cloud, creating tags so posts can be nicely shared on other social media and adding more Profile page options.

Another idea of Adam’s for the future with gFam is to work with brands on micro-motivator projects with creators, where for example a brand like Nike, gives everyone a tip who has their clothing within their content. In this model, the idea is 10,000 people could get $1 each, rather 1 influencer getting $10,000.

Looking forward to seeing both these future goals and the platform evolve, as knowing Adam, they both will.

Have a question for Adam? Ask it in the comments below, and we shall see if we can get you an answer.

An enormous thank you to Grant for the Web for funding this case study, to BCIT and Grant for the Web for funding the broader Sustainable Funding Series, to the AMTEC Trust Award and CNIE for funding my professional development work around this work, and to David Porter for acting as an advisor to me in this work.

Elementari – a Sustainable Funding Case Study

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In March of 2019 we were fortunate enough to interview Nicole Kang, one of the founders of Elementari for our Sustainable Funding Series for Media, Educators, Technologists, and Creators. Elementari is a platform for creating interactive stories, targeted to schools, teachers, and kids. Below, we share that interview, insights into the Sustainable Funding Model that Elementari is building towards, as well as other conversations that Nicole and I had around diversity and inclusion in storytelling, open education, marketing, and Elementari itself. This was just the beginning of a journey that myself and our team at StoryToGo are taking with Elementari and Nicole Kang, as we have begun to use Elementari ourselves, creating our own interactive stories, and have taught kids and adults alike how to bring their stories to life with Elementari.

Elementari has a huge component that is based around computational thinking and trying to introduce coding concepts in a way that is not code to students who might not want to learn how to code.

~ Nicole Kang, Cofounder of Elementari

Creators: Nicole Kang & David Li

Country: France

Interview Date: March 24th, 2019

Link to the Project: https://www.elementari.io/

Funding Method: Blood-Sweat-&-Tears, Freemium Model, Workshops & Speaking Engagements

Interview with Elementari’s Nicole Kang

The Project : What Is Elementari?

Elementari is an online platform for building interactive stories, designed based on a culture of remixing. Users are able to add their own imagery and sound, but the platform is ultimately designed to remix the professional illustrations and sounds of artists. These artists are automatically credited when an Elementari user publishes a story using the artist’s work.

While Elementari can be used by adults, and holds a lot of potential for creators such as ourselves, the platform was ultimately designed for Kindergarten to Grade 12 schools, teachers, and youth, as a tool to facilitate reading, writing, coding, game design, and building an understanding of crediting artists and of remix culture. In the interview teaser below (starting at time marker 01:59), Nicole talks about her sensibilities behind Elementari …

The Creators : Who Are Behind Elementari?

Elementari was co-founded by Nicole Kang and David Li.

Nicole Kang is a bit of a world traveller, born in the US and now living in France. She studied Management Science at MIT, but most of her work experience has been in education, particularly around scientific inquiry and STEM. Included in this was working in the Educational Arcade at MIT. Nicole’s interest education took her to Taiwan to pursue a Masters, where she ran into issues in conducting experiments in scientific inquiry, as she doesn’t write in Chinese. This created a shift to ESL and ultimately to developing the concept for Elementari, sparked on by a course in digital ebooks. Nicole recognized the need for Elementari in the course as they were using InDesign which at that time she found unnecessarily complicated, frustrating, and impossible to share. All things that Nicole believes are counterintuitive to what education should. Rather she believes education should be open to everyone, allowing everyone to be able to learn, catalyzing her to leave her Masters to begin to build Elementari. In building Elementari, Nicole primarily focuses on the packaging, the marketing and the backend website development.

  • Nicole Kang

Meanwhile, David Li has focused on building the authoring tool. David’s background before starting Elementari with Nicole was in engineering, management, and linguistics.

I believe education should be open to everyone, allowing everyone to be able to learn.

~ Nicole Kang, Cofounder of Elementari

Road to Funding Sustainably

Early Days, Solving the Initial Challenges

Two of Nicole and David’s early realizations in developing Elementari and a sustainable funding model behind it were:

  • that they needed to have something built to show, in order to attract funding to the project; and
  • that they needed assets in the forms of illustrations and sounds for Elementari users to build their stories with.

After some initial unsuccessful pitching of Elementari in Taiwan and France, Nicole and David realized from comments like, “What’s the point of creating stories? Who reads stories? Who wants to write stories?” and “If you only need $100,000, then since you went to MIT, why don’t you just ask your friends and family to pitch in and pay for it?”, that they were going to need to build and demonstrate what Elementari was capable of, before continuing to invest their time in marketing the platforms to potential funders. Despite never having undertaken a digital development prior to Elementari, David and Nicole were determined that they could solve the first problem by teaching themselves and building Elementari on their own to present to potential investors. Impressively, they have done just that.

Not being artists, the need for assets needed a different approach to solve. For this, they recognized that many illustrators were sharing their assets on social media for likes, but that was the limit to the engagement they were creating around their illustrations. So they decided to invite artists to share their images on Elementari for users to build stories with. This enabled the artist to build upon their portfolio for marketing purposes, by giving them stats as to how Elementari’s user base are utilizing their images, and which images are the most popular. This has worked for them, attracting in artists like Len Smith, who illustrated Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Richard Walsh, who illustrated the Math Blaster Reading Series. Surprisingly Elementari’s team discovered that it wasn’t the young art students who were interesting in contributing images, but rather the older professional artists. They think this is because the professional artists like the idea of kids being able to use their artwork to create stories, they enjoy this different avenue to promote themselves, and as they see the future potential in profit sharing with the platform.

Funding Structure for Elementari Users

Currently Elementari is free for everyone to use to create stories with a limited library of images and sounds. A paid Premium version of Elementari gives users access to the entire library of images and sounds.

Similarly there is a free teacher tier for educators that allows for one class of up to 35 students, and then Premium versions for more capabilities, unlimited classes, more students, and for schools and school districts. You can see an example of Elementari’s plans for January 2021 below.

It is the Premium Educational Plans that the Elementari team sees as their sustainable funding model for the future.

We don’t want to put a barrier in the way for anyone to create. We want the disadvantaged kids to still be able to make their dino stories into reality. That’s one of our main goals.

~ Nicole Kang, Elementari Co-Founder

All the educational support materials that are being built to teach lessons with Elementari are public, and teachers are encouraged to adapt and remix to suit their individual classroom needs. Those can be found by clicking here.

Other Funding Streams

Other ways that Nicole and David are helping to fund the early days of Elementari, include:

  • writing workshops, and
  • pitching the Premium Model.

As part of pitching the Premium Model, they have been taking on educational partners to run case studies and develop curriculum. During the case study and curriculum development, the partner gets free use of Elementari, and then after the case study and curriculum development, the partner has the option to sign up for Elementari at a reduced rate provided they wish to continue using Elementari.

Future Building

In the future, some of Elementari’s goals include:

  • profit sharing with their artists (aiming for up to 70%),
  • working with the schools to create examples of what a good classroom library would look like to help convince the school gatekeepers that Elementari is a good investment for their school,
  • the option of non-remixable stories for sensitive content and for professional writers,
  • ability for readers to choose their own characters for a story.

Ultimately, creating a bottom up, product creation approach to marketing is what Nicole believes will work for Elementari. Basically working with educators and kids to demonstrate what is possible, in order to get Principles, School Districts, and Parents to buy in. It is with that in mind that Elementari has approached the COVID-19 pandemic, giving teachers and parents access to a free classroom account on a trial basis, offering a free virtual coding club, hosting free webinars for educators, and offering virtual field trips for Hour of Code.

Other strategies that help to market Elementari are:

  • that the stories are embeddable on other sites, and
  • an Elementari Ambassador Program with percentage sharing on sales.

Final Thoughts on Being an EdTech Entrepreneur

Some final reflections and advice from Nicole on being an EdTech Entrepreneur …

Have a question for Nicole? Ask it in the comments below, and we shall see if we can get you an answer.

A enormous thank you to BCIT for sponsoring this case study, to Grant for the Web for funding the broader Sustainable Funding Series, to the AMTEC Trust Award and CNIE for funding my professional development work around this work, and to David Porter for acting as an advisor to me in this work.

River Revery – a Sustainable Funding Case Study

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River Revery is a community-based, collaborative project of two London, Ontario  writers, artist/educator, poet Penn Kemp and media artist and educator, Mary McDonald. River Revery addresses the artists’ concerns with the health of the habitat surrounding the Thames / Deshkan Ziibi River. In addressing local environmental concerns in an artistic and poetic way, and through inviting community participation, they aim to engage with global, universal concerns for the environment.

Story Wall River Revery

River Revery’s Transmedia storytelling initiative, #RiverReveryLdn invites Londoners to join in “knowticing” intricate details of beauty in London’s natural world surrounding our beloved Thames/Antler/Deshkan Ziibi River. These small moments of beauty help to remind us to celebrate and care for the beautiful and fragile environment within which our community is held.

Creators

Mary McDonald, MultiMedia Artist, marymcdonald.ca

Penn Kemp, Poet, http://pennkemp.weebly.com/

Country

Canada

Link to project

RiverRevery.ca

The Creators

Poet Penn Kemp, and editor of Pendas Productions

Pendas Productions is a micro publishing company publishing artbooks of poetry and drama, often in combination with CDs. Since 1977, Pendas has produced 30 poetry artbook/CD and DVD combinations often in collaboration with musicians and artists with editor Penn Kemp. We have featured more than 20 Souwesto authors and produced several anthologies.

Penn writes: “Poetry is an essential expression of the human spirit: collaborating with Mary extends poetry’s possibilities and audience to the wider community. I believe that poetry is a path to environmental activism and change”.

Media artist Mary McDonald

I am passionate about community participation in arts and the ways in which new media and accessible creative technologies can make that happen. I create interactive Augmented Reality installation and transmedia storytelling using accessible digital mobile technology to show, share, invite and empower others to bring and contribute their artistic responses to “Become Part of the Story.”

I have been very active in the London arts community for a number of years, through a number of artistic disciplines. Through these projects and through my development as a multimedia artist, my passion for bringing community together through the arts, creating opportunities for contributions of the community to the arts and inviting their interaction and engagement has become increasingly important to me and a foundation of my work.

I plan to leverage River Revery as a way to connect our community, our artists into a creative collective. Bringing our attention and our intention to our natural environment is of paramount importance to me. What we care about is what we will care for. Using artistic responses, new medias and accessible, mobile creative technologies, enables people to bring their attention to the beauty around them, to “knowtice” it with intention, which creates in turn, collective environmental action.

Through interactive guided Augmented Reality poetry/art walks and participatory exhibitions, walking workshops and in-place workshops focussing on how to create transdisciplinary art with accessible, mobile digital creative technologies the community of London will be invited and empowered to become part of the story of River Revery, uniting community and artists into a creative, collective, generative response to the environment which envelops London.

Screenshot of RiverRevery.ca website

The Project

River Revery is a collaboration of  London, Ontario artists — poet and activist Penn Kemp, and multimedia artist, Mary McDonald. River Revery received a City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program grant (CAIP grant) from the city of London through the London Arts Council. This collaboration was designed for building community engagement around the appreciation and protection of the Thames/Antler River that runs through London and involves community arts participation through transmedia storytelling. 

Wishing Well AR Artwork
AR artwork for Wishing Well

The project includes an Augmented Reality moveable art exhibit which is a series of artworks with embedded QR codes, printed and mounted on aluminum plates. These hang on free standing metal easels, which allows the freedom to have the exhibit to occur in any location, including in natural locations outside such as along the river, at the Forks, and in conservation areas. The visual art is linked through QR codes (a very simple but accessible and effective method of AR) to Mary’s multimedia sound and visual interpretations of Penn’s poems. The project also includes a website on which the Community Story Wall features community participation in arts, the text of the poems and the sound and poetry film interpretations as well as hosting the OER components and community workshop materials. 

The main goals of the project are to leverage River Revery as a way to connect the community, our artists, our schools to celebrate and “knowtice” the beauty around London, our River…to “knowtice” is to acknowledge the value, appreciate and care for the natural ecosystem London sits within.

As well, the artist aims to break down the barriers between artist and “audience” to become a collective community, all active participants, caring, creating, sharing and learning with accessible creative technologies, art, and transmedia storytelling. connected and acting through art, and transmedia storytelling.

Story Wall at RiverRevery.ca
Instructions can be found linked on the Story Wall at RiverRevery.ca

Road to Sustainable Funding: 

Free/OER Elements:

The text and the poetry films are freely available on the website. Print versions of the entire poetry book which includes some photographs and QR codes to the online AR films and sound explorations are available for purchase. Also available to purchase are prints of photographs and a DVD of the poetry films. 

OER downloadable and remix visuals including film segments will be available on the community workshop resources page on the website. Also included here will be plans and curricula for community workshops for participatory and engaging art projects utilizing mobile, accessible creative technologies. 

Developing a Multiyear Plan:

River Revery  — Become Part of the Story

River Revery at London, Ontario 2018 Wordsfest.
Premiere exhibit of River Revery, Centre at the Forks, Museum London for Wordsfest 2018.
  • 2018 Creation of River Revery
  • 2019 Community Engagement
    • walks and workshops
    • possible partners: Thames Talbot Land Trust, UTRCA, Fanshawe, Antler River Rally, Western Serves student volunteers, London Public Library, Centre at the Forks 
  • 2020 Bring in other artists for collaborative, curated events and explore other partnerships
    • “Bring the Outside In” (working title) large, curated transdisicplinary event(s) bringing together community, artists, environmentalists

Developing River Revery’s Broad Community Engagement, a Multi-year Plan:

  • 2018 Creation of River Revery —
    • 4 AR visual artworks have been printed and mounted on aluminum plates which can hang from free standing metal easels such that the exhibit can be placed anywhere — including outside along the river, in the park at the forks of the river in the centre of downtown…
    • These artworks are linked to 4 poetry films which are sound and visual interpretations of Penn’s poems which I have created with accessible mobile technology
    • 4 artworks remain to be printed and mounted, (cost exceeded well beyond capacity)  linked to 1 more poetryfilm and 3 sound and music interpretations
    • Community Story Wall and transmedia storytelling #RiverReveryLdn is live and there has been some initial engagement with the project through the initial exhibition of the work as well as volunteer Western University students who raised awareness by distributing invitation cards and engaging with the public.
    • All of the elements are free to access. They are not openly licensed as the poet is a strong believer in Access Copyright. In Canada, the majority of the literary community are advocates of Access Copyright.
    • OER: The workshop materials I create, located on the Resources page, with the Community Story Wall, are OER and will include workshop plans along with art only — downloadables — images, video, nature and music sound clips to jumpstart or remix projects
  • 2019 Broad Community Engagement — walks and workshops
    • There is a possibility of partnering this year with the Thames Talbot Land Trust, to provide guided AR poetry walks in conjunction with their “Mood Walks,” a partnership they have with the local chapter of the Canadian Mental Health Association, as well as other walks and events they program such as their volunteer BBQ — possibly funded through a second Community Arts Investment Program grant
    • Explore and implement “Advertising through Arts Partnerships” initiatives — local businesses pay to “host” the AR Artwork for River Revery with the promotion of this multiple location “River Exhibit” done through the London Arts Council, the City of London, Tourism London etc which often offer free promotion of cultural and artistic events
    • Possible other partners include the local Conservation Authority, Fanshawe/Komoka Provincial Parks, Antler River Rally group, Western Serves student volunteers
    • The London Public Library has expressed interest in a proposal for a series of community workshops in partnership with their new emerging media lab — focussing on community participation in art with accessible mobile creative technologies 
    • The London Public Library has also expressed interest in hosting an exhibit and interaction with the AR participatory installation, Still/ed Here which includes the poetry film and AR installation, On the Margin of History
    • Possible additional workshop partner: Museum London’s Centre at the Forks emerging media labs
  • 2020 — Beyond River Revery to expand out into larger events that Mary would curate
    • “Outside In/Inside Out” (working title) large, curated transdisicplinary event(s) bringing together community, artists, environmentalists
    • I have discussed the possibility of launching these in connection with London Arts Council’s new social enterprise — Culture City X Tours — some funding through the London Arts Council
    • Lead AR poetry walks and walking workshops for the Thames Talbot Land Trust Passport to Nature program, which is funded through their corporate, community and private sponsors
  • Additional funding partnerships to pursue: City of London, tourism London, local businesses and foundations, private donations, patronage, “adoption”/sponsorship of events/artworks 
  • Explore and implement ecosystem that connects local businesses with artworks to benefit from “Advertising through Arts Partnerships” in which a reverse advertising model is implemented — the local business pays the artist to host/rent the artwork (AR artwork in the case of River Revery) and this hosting, perhaps as part of a temporary, or on-going exhibition of single or multiple locations is promoted as an arts and cultural event, perhaps in conjunction with a regional arts venture, by the artist and the arts organizations they partner with — thus leveraging the arts and culture networks developed in a city/region for the benefit of both local businesses and artists (producing thriving cities)
  • I am also exploring other ways to connect local businesses in support of the arts — either through in kind donations, supporting live or online events, sponsoring the mounting of artwork …other ways to include local businesses within the funding “ecosystem” beyond simple advertising or patronage. *Building the value and vested interest into the partnership so that it becomes a reciprocal, multiplying  partnership
  • Other possible sources of revenue include sales of poetry books for Penn and printed photos and artwork, DVDs of the poetry films for Mary.
  • Additional opportunities to investigate include sales of other printed items with digital art/photo art/ AR art through online companies like Redbubble and links on the site to purchase prints, the book of poetry, photography and QR codes, and even possibly other things like clothing/home decor w the visual art and/or the QR code triggers to the AR.

Lessons learned, tips for success:

  • Key takeaway: the larger the project became, the more people it could impact and involve not only increased the value of the project to the community but opened up new opportunities and avenues for funding to pursue
  • It’s very difficult to be creating the art at the same time as you are trying to promote and arrange events and collaborations. Ideally these time periods are separated and/or some of the legwork or preparation for crowdfunding, developing sponsorship and partnership relationships ahead of creating time.
  • Looking at all the elements with a “whole value” mindset is essential — aspects of the work may be fuelled solely by passion and driven by determination and my own money and time — however, the exchange value of this work or these aspects of a project may prove just as, or more valuable in terms of future connections in the long run — keep my eyes on the big picture
  • Continue to look at each project as a stepping stone to the next “level”, the next vantage point from which it is possible to see or launch your next project
  • Expanding the project also allowed me to expand into other ways of funding — moving towards a more sustainable funding model
  • However, as I move forward with more and more projects, I am developing my “pie in the sky” approach — one that allows for continual spiralling iterations of a project that at the same time allows for funding “slices” to be added in to the pie as it grows
  • Think Creatively — financial support opportunities are directly linked to the numbers of people impacted and reached which often has at least an incidental corresponding relationship with the cultural value of a work — as the community reached, impacted, connected with, around a project grows, so too doors to potential funding opportunities open.

Open Stax – a Sustainable Funding Case Study

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Open Stax has been producing OER textbooks since 2012 when they published their first 5 titles. They have 32 titles today, with 6 more coming within the next few months. 2.7 million students in the States use their content per term, and their textbooks are in 58% of degree granting academic institutions in the States. 

Creators:

Interview with Daniel Williamson, Managing Director

Country:

Houston Texas, US.

Interview Date: 

March 22, 2019

Link to Project: 

https://openstax.org

Funding Methods:

Non-profit

Ecosystem model involving for-profit partners who sell value added services who then give back a “mission support fee” along with sales of print versions of the textbooks.

Open Stax is a part of Rice University and is supported by foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the Hewlett Foundation along with others.

Textbook content is written by paid educators and experts.

The Project:

Open Stax provides free web-based, post-secondary level OER textbooks. 

As cost is one of the number one drivers for the use of Open Educational Resources, so if we can target those high enrolment, high expense courses, we tend to have really high traction.

Daniel Williamson

Open Stax textbooks have been localized for use throughout the US, in Canada, and in Poland.

Broadly, because these are OERs, we see this content used everywhere.

Daniel Williamson

UNICEF told Daniel about Learning Equality’s use of their content. Learning Equality is a group that works in crisis and conflict zones, they have been loading all our content onto their portable internet for use by post-secondary learners in these situations. 

https://learningequality.org/about/

The Creators: 

I spoke with Daniel Williamson, Managing Director for Open Stax who described to me the mission and goal of Open Stax, their business model and their insights for sustainability of OER as well as their hopes and goals for the future.

The Road to Sustainable Funding

The business model for Open Stax was designed from the very beginning for Sustainability. Open Stax has built an ecosystem style model.

In this ecosystem, Open Stax produces the core content. For profit partnering companies offer for cost, value added technology services such as virtual simulations, and clicker apps with are integrated with the content of our textbooks. These partnering companies then pay Open Stax a portion of the fee that has been charged to the student which then goes back into Open Stax to support their sustainability, and to keep the content up to date. This ecosystem model brings the benefit of co-marketing to their partners as well as giving them access to high quality educational content.

Open Stax looks at and targets the highest value to decide which textbooks to produce, although their goal is to have a much more comprehensive library. They look at the size of the market and the number of students who would be impacted and at the cost of the resource for students and balance these. As the point of Open Stax is access for students, and to make education more affordable, the partnering companies are mandated to keep their fees to the students low.

As well, print versions of the textbooks are produced for sale at a low cost by Open Stax and that revenue is fed back into the system to develop further textbooks and to keep the content fresh and current. “As there are so many students using the content, we are able to bring the unit costs down.”  

Daniel describes his key thoughts on sustainability:

You need to build in sustainability from the beginning as it’s really difficult to retrofit these things. Most of the OER players are reliant upon grant funding — but you can’t wait until the grant runs out to figure out a sustainable way forward.

There are two aspects to sustainability — fiscal and the people. The money makes it possible but it’s the people who are actually going to take and give this content a life of its own. So we really need to feed both of these.”

Daniel Williamson

Sustainability is somewhat controversial — Stick to your guns. There will be people who might not like what you’re doing and that’s ok. It’s good to challenge each other. As long as you are really connected to that mission which we here at Open Stax believe our mission is to improve access and improve learning for all..that you’re going to be guided by those mission principles which will lead you in the right direction. 

Daniel Williamson

Into the Future

Daniel believes that by ensuring that the Open Stax content is high quality while keeping the content generic, this allows Open Stax textbooks to serve as the foundation for localization. 

If we can reduce the barriers to entry for people to OERs, then we’ll see more and more people participate.

Daniel Williamson

When talking about sustainability, Daniel mused that there’s a lot of interesting models emerging, and that we’ll see which models survive.

The thing that I dream of is the day we’re not just sustainable, we’re in perpetual growth.

Daniel Williamson

In thinking about what that perpetual growth model might look like, Open Stax is calculating how many titles they need to have produced and generating revenue, to allow them stability and sustainability enough to invest in continuously growing their library and to react to changes in the market.

Now what we’re thinking is about how can we both spur greater ownership and creativity where people take and think what ca we do next…I think there’s a lot of ways that can lead to expansion…

Daniel Williamson

Key Opportunities:

I think OER really unlocks the ownership piece. It allows content to become this foundational knowledge that is infrastructure which brings us to this opportunity which now we can build upon. We can start having a research infrastructure that allows us to start diving deeper into how humans learn, and how can we help them learn most efficiently and effectively instead.

Daniel Williamson

A lot of tremendous opportunity there to move beyond just consumption of content to really thinking about it as research infrastructure for understanding how we move the state of the art in terms of education forward.

Daniel Williamson