Indian Ocean program - an extended DAO outreach initiative

OceanDAO Round 10
#1

Name of the Proposal:

Indian Ocean program

Project Description:

The extended outreach program initiates to set up an Indian outreach ‘port’ amidst the lush Web2 developer community inviting new inn-mates and young outreach ambassadors to on-board the Data Ocean.

Objective:

There is an emergent interest in building products on Web3 protocols amongst the young Indian developer community thanks to the successful protocol companies that have emerged in the past few years. India also boast the 2nd highest crypto adoption rate after Vietnam [As per Chainalysis report].

However, the adoption is mostly limited to the major crypto-currencies listed on Indian exchanges, and a vast majority of the developers, especially in the core computer science community have a larger focus towards the AI and Data Science industry. Thus it requires a strong targeted focus to bring in a targeted demography to the Ocean community. The main objective here is to entice existing software developers on the wonders of web 3, upon initial market reconnaissance we identified that students who are already established in traditional approaches with agile methodology find it hard to unlearn sepcific concepts that put them in a tough spot to identify and relate to web3.

The focus of the Indian outreach port aims to leverage the strong developer community in data science and AI towards Web3 protocols through the Ocean DAO initiatives to foster stronger encouragement for developers to get exposed to innovative data-ocean solutions.

Grant deliverables:

  • Extending the Ocean DAO mission, vision and initiatives to attract a lot of developers to the ecosystem
  • Encouraging a train of young ocean ambassadors to the pool with a strong mindset to build data-ocean protocols through the extended Ocean academy suited for Indian audience.
  • Creating an ecosystem that leverages both technical and outreach wing of the Ocean DAO.
  • Conduct a series of Ocean workshops, social events and hackathons to attract the young minds of the Indian development community
  • Engage the Ocean marketplace stakeholders through the outreach program, giving them access to directly work with Indian developers during the events.

Grant Category:

Community outreach

Fundamental metrics:

  • Overall awareness of the Ocean protocol in the Indian Web3 community; qualitatively assessed by social outreach through media handles
  • Number of developers engaged to the Ocean ecosystem through the events
  • Stakeholders engaged within the Ocean market community

ROI metrics:

Bang:

  • Extension of the Ocean DAO outreach ship with targeted focus towards the Indian developer community. An Indian Ocean academy to guide the graduate developers to guide them through Web3 literacy
  • Engaging Ocean protocol market players through the outreach program

Objectives:

  • Target outreach at least across 5 major universities and colleges with as many Ocean ambassadors and young leaders
  • Conduct a total of 5 Hackathons - inclusive of a final Grand Ocean challenge, in Bangalore (Offline/Online to be decided based on situation)
  • Engaging with at-least 3 Ocean market stakeholders during the outreach program (who are welcome to reach out to the proposal lead drprakash@ieee.org)

Buck:

  • Building the extended Indian Ocean academy with additional materials that are suited for Indian audience
  • The workshops and hackathons are expected to hold 70% of the allotted budget. The ratio would be flexible, although the majority of the budget with the conducting of events since they are a powerful instrument to attract attention of Indian developers.

Expected Value:

  • Reaching out to at-least 10 colleges over the next 3 months to improve the Web3 literacy amongst developers
  • Using the help of DeFi talents DAO to conduct a total 5 hackathons, alongside Ocean protocol workshops that precede the main event.
  • Expecting feedback from the Ocean protocol stakeholders. Our team will individually engage with as many stakeholders as possible to bring value addition to their problem statements.

Chance of success: 80%

ROI: If the expected value are reasonably met with a success rate of 80%, the ROI can be considered >1.0

Final Product:

Successful launch of the Indian Ocean outreach program and subsequent engagement activity over the next 3 months.

Funding requested: 9,500 USD

Proposal wallet address: 0x254Ba7254366CA7afE007897358Ee0b45CA933E2

Previously received an OceanDAO grant: No

Team website: https://drprk.notion.site/DeFi-Talent-DAO-India-2883f5a8b02c4d76b65fb03826efe87d

Twitter handle: Not applicable as of now

Discord handle: Prk2help #1527 (Team lead)

Primary lead contact Email ID: drprakash@ieee.org

Country of Residence: India

Part 2:

Core Team:

  1. Dr. Prakash Kamaraj
  • Currently a member of the Ocean Ambassador community; outreach ship
  • Technology background in Health data-science and AI products in the MedTech industry
  • Co-founding member of Deep Medicine Labs, a HealthTech solutions in the AI space
  • Advisor and Tech product Consultant to multiple MedTech companies

Relevant Credentials:

https://devfolio.co/submissions/health-passport-solana-dapp-d2e8

  • Organized and participated in several techno-social events in India across different cities in the past decade
  1. Sangeet Muralidhar

Head of Technology at Konma community

Credentials:

  • Cybersecurity specialist
  • Blockchain and Crypto developer

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sangeet-muralidhar/

  1. Yaheya Farooqui

Young developer outreach of DeFi Talents DAO of India

VIT University graduate

GitHub: https://github.com/2804yaheyaf

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaheya-farooqui-90778816a/

Background/experience: ML/AI Enthusiast

Advisors:

  • Vinay devabhaktuni, Founder of Konma Community

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinay-devabhaktuni-b642bb90/

Lead and help in bringing developer outreach courtesy his close liason with Emurgo academy (Cardano foundation).

We have access to some amazing materials and institutions that provide state of the art courses on web3 developments (Emurgo India, for example). We plan to target recent graduates from partnered colleges and universities and have access to lower cost learning materials for general learning of Web3 protocols.

  • Siddharth Menon, Co-Founder and COO of WazirX, [ now acquired by Binance]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthmenon/

Advisor from the marketing outreach perspective for the Indian developer community

Part 3 - Proposal detail

Project deliverables:

  • Launch of social media handles for Indian Ocean DAO

  • Extended fork of the outreach initiative by Indian ocean team with a strong focus at a diverse demographic community of Indian developers, ideators and entrepreneurs

  • Aiming to reach 1000 active and engaging followers across all social media platforms and Instant messaging groups

Ocean Workshops:

  • Neat visuals and creative that is suited for Indian builder audience
  • Spread awareness of Ocean protocol and its potential for Web2 developers
  • Students looking to improve their profiles by encouraging them to work on strong Data-token projects

Ocean Protocol Hackathons:

  • Curation of problem statements from data-token marketplayers and helping to solve them by presenting them across first of its kind hackathons across Indian apex centers
  • Potential partnerships with protocols that encourage the merge of Data science and Blockchain

Ocean protocol Stakeholder relationship:

  • Interaction with ocean marketplace stakeholders to understand the upcoming requirements and needs that could use an extra pair of hands as a result of developer influx from the Indian ocean ecosystem
  • Option to hold data-token bounties and prize amounts for winning members from the zonal hackathons

Community engagement plan:

  • The core objective of the outreach program is to reach out to the DeFi talents as well as the data science community
  • Community engagement plan for 10-12 weeks to kick-start the initial launch activity along with spreading awareness of Ocean protocol
  • Decentralize the outreach efforts with zonal community leaders across different regions across India

Project Roadmap:

Prior work:

  • Initial team formed courtesy the DeFi talents DAO initiative that was targeted across various Entrepreneurship cells in Southern India.
  • 15 member strong team with strong technical and community outreach
  • Target date: Launch of Indian Ocean academy engagement channels within a weeks time of approval of grant

Timeline:

  • First 4-6 weeks - Marketing the social media page, creating Web3 awareness in India, publishing articles and blogs about it

  • Organizing zonal events raising awareness about blockchain development and Web3 in general

  • Organizing week-long workshops national level hackathons to give an opportuning to the budding developers of the country to contribute to the cause

  • Conduct a total of 4 hackathons across different centers prior to the grand challenge hackathon with finalists format.

  • Incentivizing the students for their contribution and make a nationwide community to take on more challenging problems. Rewards comprise of Ocean tokens, and custom NFTs

  • Publishing of key articles and blogs over a period of 4-6 weeks

  • Conducting of 2-day workshops preceding the hackathons across different Indian ocean zones across different centers

Setup the roadmap for future technical and outreach grants for Indian ocean outreach

  • After successful phase1, further roadmap for more Zonal events, workshops and involvement of Ocean protocol stakeholders

  • Decentralize the ocean outreach program across multiple young ambassadors to get strong bang for buck in terms of outreach ROI

  • Looking to strengthen the Ocean protocol ecosystem with more innovative projects

  • Partnership with other DAOs in the Indian ecosystem

Additional information:

• Collaborators, developers, supporters of the Indian ecosystem are open to contribute and support our project. Please reach out to us if you are willing to help us in our endeavors.

Edit1:

TLDR version;

  • A total of 9500 USD earmarked for conducting 5 workshops and 5 events in India, which is inclusive of a grand challenge

  • Social media outreach of close to 1000 active members in the initial phase.

  • A total of 100 developers to be on-boarded after the conclusion of 5 events.

  • A total of 30 young Ambassadors will be trained to ensure we achieve our goals. The ambassadors will go be trained with the helpful material from the Ocean academy along with the DAO oriented efforts to help us capture the attention of the Indian audience of emerging Web3 developers.

  • Involvement and support from Ocean protocol stakeholders will help us further enhance our goals, thereby adding greater ROI and value to the Ocean ecosystem.

DATAPOGY - Ready access to “Diagnostic Quality Medical Data” when and where they are needed
#2

Whale, hello there!

This makes sense, I agree with you that India holds a huge potential.

Before you get our vote though, could you please make your deliverables measurable?

We see you’re planning to attend 5 events, how many developers are you planning to onboard?
How many workshops are you planning to launch?
How many young ambassadors are you planning to train?

Looking forward to your reply!

1 Like
#3

Hello @realdatawhale !

Pleased to hear your feedback, Thanks for the comment and I will be happy to walk you through.

  • With the current earmarked funds, we would be aiming for balancing quality and quantity of developers who can be onboarded during the events and workshop. The number we are aiming to sustain during each event would be at-least 20 active developers, amounting to a total of 100 developers by the end of 5 events.

  • The above numbers can be further enhanced when we partner with other organizations who are willing to co-sponsor or support us in anyway possible. Partnership with interested Ocean market players will further help us garner more attention and interest from the developer community.

  • There will be a total of 5 workshops, happening at-least a week before as a preamble to the upcoming calendar events. We would plan to do the same with the involvement of the Ocean community.

  • To achieve our goals of onboarding a handful of developers, we would be training close to 30 young ambassadors who can save a lot of manhours and recruitment efforts to achieve our goals.

1 Like
#4

Impressive goals! Good luck.

1 Like
#5

Hey Team,

We just submitted our vote for this proposal and good luck.

If you have time, go ahead and review our Proposal on the Port. Let us know whether you have any comments.

Cheers,
Data Whale

1 Like
#6

Thank you all for voting for us :crossed_fingers: It’s a great privelege to expand the outreach towards the Indian Community and we have great plans to make this happen with the strong involvement of Ocean stakeholders through our social media and Techno-social events.

We can’t wait to launch our channels soon and announce our roadmap :skier:

#7

Medium site to follow us.

#8

Grants deliverables checklist

The Official Gitbook page of our Project Management tracker until January

A Summary of our Outreach initiatives over the past few months.

Our Community tracker displays the outreach activities that we have achieved over the past few months. Through our strategic outreach across multiple colleges, collaborators & partners we were able to have significant outreach on the values of Ocean.

Workshops established: 5 as promised

Physical events:

After a series of community meet & greets we had our first official meetup in Chennai, in collaboration with Konma Community.

Due to ongoing Covid situation, we had pivoted to a series of promising community calls and podcasts to increase our community bandwidth.

Community calls:

Collaborators:

  • Indian Telegram community - Cryptospartans
  • Wolf DAO - Community stemmed from Crypto-Saturday India
  • Phoenix Guild - Community call and Workshop Number 4

Quests : We had a series of quests and participating bounties for members who were part of the AMAs, community calls, Blogpost writers and a lot more who participated during the community calls.

Podcasts:

Collaborators:

  • Richard Blythman of Algovera.ai
  • Akshay of Cleandocs initiative
  • Scott Milat from Ocean Missions

Social media achievements:

Community of Builders and local Ambassadors: Telegram community of 47+ members

Twitter community: https://twitter.com/OceanProtocolIN with 1100+ followers

Peak highlights:

Impressions in each month:

October: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
November: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
December: Imgur: The magic of the Internet

January: Imgur: The magic of the Internet

Discord community: 39 Members and counting

Medium Activity: Ocean Protocol - Indian Outreach – Medium

Having a total of 353 page views in 3 months.

The social media activity during the month of January was in lead up to the final Hackathon that is due to happen this month

A Grant hackathon with Prize pool worth 4000$ in Ocean for the participants with a variety of accesible quests ranging from Writer, Media, Designer bounties, Ambassador challenges & Developer quests.

We are also happy to have the involvement of Ocean Missions & Algovera.ai who were part of our Hackathon partners from the Ocean Community.

More updates to the Hackathon shall be updated in the upcoming days.

Indian Ocean Outreach Program - R14 Proposal
#9

Indian Ocean Outreach Report for the previous Epoch:

https://medium.com/@indianoceandao/indian-ocean-outreach-report-ed485b5bdd20

Deliverables Achieved:

https://indian-ocean.gitbook.io/indian-ocean-outreach-program/indian-ocean-hackathon

  • Community engagements completed with key metrics achieved across all social media channels

Referring to the TLDR version in the Original proposal:

  • 1000+ followers across all social media
  • Active builder and Ambassador community engaged on Discord & Telegram (100+)
  • Engaged with Ocean DAO stakeholders and Indian Partners as stated during our Hackathon launch
Indian Ocean Outreach Program - R14 Proposal
#10

Hello @idiom-bytes, although the R-14 proposal is yet to come in from Indian Outreach program, would like to bring to your notice that we have marked the deliverables as complete, from our R-10 proposal.

Cheers!

1 Like
#11

Hi @drprk, I have updated Airtable and this proposal is now in a Complete State.

Thank you for your update and all the best in R14!

1 Like
#12

Hi @drprk ,

Thank you for submitting an update for your previous proposal!

Your Grant Deliverables have been reviewed and look to be in good condition. I believe that based on your descriptions and response to @realdatawhale, you have made your targets measurable and seem to have delivered on them.

It also seems like you also collaborated with other teams like Algovera and The Phoenix Guild to capture some opportunities, and had an Ocean partner contribute to the Hackathon prize pool, which looks like a great outcome!

I do want to resonate @realdatawhale (in general, to anyone who may read this) that measurable goals are really great! It’s easy for me to see that you completed your target workshops, events, hackathon, and hit your target social media growth. Also, that you were able to onboard a team onto a Core-Tech earmark, that’s awesome.

Having said that, I am curious to know how many developers you were able to connect with, and if you were able to connect with universities (these are really valuable outcomes, awesome!!).

Finally, I have also looked at your Project Standing, it looks to be in good condition and ready to apply for another grant. I would like to thank you for your positive contributions to the Ocean Ecosystem and I look forward to reviewing future proposals from your project.

All the best!
-Idiom

1 Like
#13

Hello @idiom-bytes,

I’m very glad to have your measured feedback and very happy to have a 2nd feedback on my very first proposal on Ocean DAO [ I tend to write lengthy proposals and it’s nice to know a 2nd measured response for the time it takes to read lengthy proposals :smile: ]

I agree, the Measured response helped me restructure my goals so that it is a lot easier to self-audit otherwise things can get a little blurry to assess.

The feedback certainly helped me get going during the DD period!

I’m glad that you brought that up since it was very crucial initial phase for us during our heavy cannon-ball approach where we decided to have a heavy approach towards universities who were willing to give us a listen.

We started off with the reasonable tier of universities that had a lot of focus towards Data-science and AI viz.

  • VIT - Vellore & VIT Chennai [ Two of the first colleges we had engaged with ]

We had some great interactions and we were also able to conduct the first workshop with them with some active participants who wanted to continue with us.

  • NIT (national institute of technology) & a couple of colleges in Pune [ one where our very own Akshay had graduated from]

We had some good leads

  • Regional leads | IEEE Chapter colleges

This was one other approach that I had taken in my own local Bangalore chapter given that the lead is one of my working colleagues. However they are still in the pipeline, as you can see the extensive congestion that we had been facing up in terms of following up with them.

image
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I believe they can still be in good standing as we warm up to the second wave approach where we have a lot more clarity on engaging with them.

To summarize, I believe that the overall number of potential developers engaged did touch close to a 100, however the ratio of conversion was pretty lower than expected, something like 2:100 during the first month of our epoch. To make it worse we had December’s weird academic calendar (as exampled above as well) that made it harder for us to keep in tandem with them. However we expect the leads to return pretty soon so we can continue from a leverage of trust.

We still do have a few young ambassadors who have been engaging with them constantly to mark out some events for Feb/March.

Totally Agree, when a few tactics didn’t work out effectively in the first half of the Epoch, we did strategize in terms of targeting measured goals where we were able to towards a series of deliverables in a lot of accessible communities through our Web3 circle. One of the most telling lead from our second wind approach was that one of our Official Ocean ambassadors whom we had join in the Ocean ecosystem [ who goes by Divyapreetha #2701 ] was also from VIT-Chennai with the background of being a research scholar. The datapoint suggested that the average age group that we should be targeting henceforth would be towards people who were 23+ atleast so that the follow-ups don’t get blurred by the unpredictable and intensive academic calendar even though we have some good outliers between 18-23 and below 18 group as well (in a lot of DAOs that we had come across)

In summary we had to reduce the cannon ball approach towards bullet sized approaches towards some of the colleges while concentrating on wider community calls that have better conversion ratio.

Having said that we would still having faith in the university model where we would re-use and re-purpose the workshop videos that we had invested a lot of time in, as in the following playlist

We would also be leaning from a few tactics from the remaining Working groups & ecosystem players as mentioned above to support us in anyway possible. Hopefully a lot more in that direction.

1 Like
#14

btw @idiom-bytes just wanted to report back on the happy progress we have now been having in college interactions successfully (after a string of emails & Student-faculty interactions), since you showed great interest in our aim to have consistent college interactions.

We also minted a bunch of certificates to all those who participated in the workshop.

https://opensea.io/collection/untitled-collection-162745520

We are hoping this is just the beginning of trends to come :crossed_fingers:

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