Datastake - Crowdsourcing Facts | Datastake roadmap and first outreach | Round 18

OceanDAO Round 18
#1

Project Name

Datastake - Crowdsourcing Facts

Project Category

Unleash Data

Proposal Earmark

New Entrants

Proposal Description

Datastake’s beta users are:

  • Civil society organisations / NGOs based in DR Congo, Madagascar, Zimbabwe. They are compiling granular data on Datastake as part of projects funded by USAID, ILO/UNICEF and a gold trader, respectively
  • Mining cooperatives and mineral exporters in DR Congo, Burkina Faso. They are compiling granular data on Datastake as part of meeting supply chain due diligence / compliance expectations from global buyers

Although most people wouldn’t care, the data they hold is incredibly valuable. Our users are an incredible alternative to costly international audits, farcical certification programs and global experts whose findings tend to be outdated upon report publication.

Paying them for their work has been a headache. Banco Sabadell, Moneycorp and WISE all suspended us for buying information from, and making payments to local, human rights organisations.

We have consistently told our users that going through the effort of making their data “granular” would have multiple benefits:

  • They can already witness direct utility. Two local NGOs have attracted new funding through professional reporting.
  • A local bank is about to select mining cooperatives to test financial services based on how much information they’ll provide on the platform
  • One of our users even won an innovation award

Now we want to show them (and to our/their traditional clients), that crypto can facilitate payments, attract attention and new forms of interest for their localised insight.

Of course, they could receive donations (we have started engaging with existing platforms like Giveth). But of course the big goal is data trading.

For that we need both a roadmap and outreach plan.

Grant Deliverables

  • Outreach and technical integration roadmap and timeline for enabling Datastake users to earn from their data, including through secure use of Ocean Protocol tooling.
  • Creation of a dedicated Roadmap section on the Datastake website and translation of the whole website to French (most of our current data holding users are based in francophone Africa.
  • Engage our community through educational content about Ocean Protocol, the wider web3 ecosystem, and how we plan to leverage it.
  • Discord server settings and community growth.

Project Description

Datastake is an incentivised information platform designed to improve access to information in weak-governance countries (particularly rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa) through its crowdsourcing from locally-based organisations.

With support from donors (USAID, EU, ILO) we have built SaaS applications for businesses and NGOs to organise and monetise their local knowledge (data supply), international charities to monitor their impact through community feedback, and global investors to manage risk in underserved communities. We already have users in villages unknown to Google Maps, with available data on the local price of resources, ethnicity of working children, corruption incidents and cooperative beneficiary ownership.

Data ontology has been the main focus of our work: we develop extensive, granular repositories for each information subject (locations, organisations, events) and rules for versioning and linking between subjects. The result is that whether you are a local NGO funded by ILO to monitor child labour at mining sites, a gold buyer managing risk along your supply chain, or a bank assessing potential clients, you generate comparable datapoints. Therefore, risk data on a given mine site or KYC information on a given supply chain actor, can be consolidated from multiple, independent sources.

Thus, Datastake is bound to become a data marketplace connecting local witnesses and an international demand for insight into some of the World’s most stigmatised regions. It will enable local holders to extend the value chain of their data. In our quest to decolonise African narratives, we view decentralisation as a scalability model to improve the confidence of buyers over data provenance and authenticity – whereby reliability is a function of the number and reputation of sources.

Although we launched last year (fully funded by primary data clients) and have active users (one of which, from DR Congo, was recently granted an innovation prize from the International Labour Organisation for using Datastake), we barely just started to communicate and build a website around our products.

Inspired by Ocean Protocol since day 1 (four years ago), we are now looking to join the ecosystem, initiate our web3 transition and communicate accordingly to our stakeholders. Our target for 2022 is to make headlines over how crypto is funding transparency in previously invisible communities and along opaque supply chains.

Final Product

Distributed facts. Datastake will become a data marketplace empowering on-site witnesses to build their own narrative and by-pass stigmatising global medias. On the demand side, this will unlock engagement opportunities in resource-rich countries where data is typically unreliable and insufficient to measure risk and impact.

Value Add Criteria

We are confident that Datastake will grow without decentralisation, for the bar (current data quality in SS Africa) is so low. But Datastake was formed to decolonise African narratives, so we can't operate as a centralised application for much longer. We feel that our work is a powerful use case for decentralised data marketplaces.


We also feel that the social impact case (reward transparent behaviours) is also well suited to Ocean's ethos.


Where AI scrapes existing knowledge, we build tools to incentivise generation of new information. The resulting data is of very high analytical value.

Core Team

Benjamin Clair

Pasho Toska

Geri Tugu

Advisors

Hélène Helbig de Balzac

Amir Mabhout

Karim Halabi

Funding Requested
3000

Minimum Funding Requested
100

Wallet Address
0xd95B2a88360f142Dc64F5E8Cf6a2c89e3D4b8707

#2

Hello (Water) World. Here’s our first shot. I welcome any question or request for clarification.

#3

Hi,

Thank you for applying for R18!

Your proposal has been registered into the system and everything looks great!

Your existing beta users should provide an interesting use case for driving data on Ocean Marketplace. Based on your current deliverables, this round’s topic may be better fit under outreach, however.

We have attempted to make your first grant easy to earn (you are registered in the New Entrant Earmark) I would also recommend one (or all) of the following to increase support:

  1. Saying hi to the community in #ocean-dao and sharing your proposal.
  2. Saying hi to members of the #project-guiding WG and sharing your proposal.
  3. Meet with the Guides assigned to you by the #project-guiding WG.
  4. Attend a Town Hall or Project-Guiding WG meeting to talk about your project and proposal.

All the best!

-Christian Casazza

1 Like
#4

Thanks Christian. Other than being late to the PGWG, all :white_check_mark:

#5
  • We’ve now set up a Discord server for our users. It is slowly turning into a forum for Congolese NGOs to discuss challenges, projects and opportunities. We hope to build the community further.
  • We were just shortlisted for ‘Game Changing’ Innovation of the Year at the Global Good Awards. Ceremony to be held in October and a solid Ocean roadmap would help our chances
  • Through to second phase of the EU’s EIC Accelerator Program, so that will keep us busy for the coming days

We hope to see more projects work on assisting users with processes to clean up and organise their own data, to reclaim some of the value created and appropriated by web2 platforms. Good thing about the areas we focus on is that even web2 has not fully matured there.