Community is central in Decentralization #IndieWeb
I am sitting in Mozilla #PDX awaiting the start of #IndieWeb Summit. I am so excited to gatrher with so many people who want to help drive us to a better web.
So much talk around the web focuses on fourteen different shades of decentralization with everyone more right than the other.
I often say I want a hyper local web first, and by this I mean community must stay central to all decentralization efforts.
To this end I want to root the web in schools and libraries....where #literacies always belong, and to make this happen I am seeking funding for small projects through grants
IndieWeb Grants
People ofte irk me when I hear, "IndieWeb doesn't scale"
It's not just broken metrics built on venture capital models of 10x returns. We know this leads to surveillance capitalism. It's more that it undermines that literacy is hard, and we can all learn to read, write, and participate online if we just had frictionless tools.
Piagets, Vygotsky, Activity Theory they all note the central conflict in learning the web is different. So what do we know about teaching literacy?
A bunch, but mainly community is the curriculum. To focus on this and not code I am seeking funding. We can do this.
2019 1,400,000 #QuestionTheWeb: Critical Evaluation and Argumentative Writing. IES. Unfunded
We put this grant in with the National Writing Project. The goal was everyone to get a site and then interacting in a simulated social media envrionment with biased avatart
2019 50,000 #CheckoutMyDomain. Spencer Small Research Grant. Unfunded
I love this grant. I want it funded. Do you know people that are stupid rich? Get them to give me money. The goal is to have librarian patrons check out their domains with a library card. These would be archived locally...because libraries...and they attend training sessions to renew the domain. This project would scale because the community is in place.
2019 147,000 Shaping our Worlds and Exploring Our We(s): WebVR and Computer Science Ethics. Mozilla. Unfunded
This grant involved getting your own website and then learning a-frame for WebVR to build case studies to learn ethics in computer science.
2019 200,000 Creating Community for Open Pedagogy: Adding a Social Reader. SBIR IES. Unfunded
I wrote this grant with the Known Collective. The goal was to create a federated OER network. This is built on our model in Ghana.
2019 $200 OER Network in Accra, Ghana. Funded
For just two hundred the Global Innovation Fund has able to create an OER Network. Everyone gets a website. We have a wiki for shared knowledge, and we have a matrix chat room using riot.im.
There are numerous people waiting to copy this model across the globe. Do you wave $200 to lend to good?
2019 300,000 Recentering STEM Education in Marginalized Communities. NSF. Pending
Working on this grant, but hit the pause button until I can get better a Person of Color as a a co-PI and better representation on the Scientific Advisory Board.
Scale Communities Before Code
We can fix the web but we can't do this by only focusing on the web. We need to grow the #literacies of children and root this in places where learning always thrives: schools, libraries, and clubs.
Come hang with us. If you are interested in applying for grants where the outcome is people answering, "My url is..." please hit me up.
