Ocean South Africa

OceanDAO Round 14
#1

Part 1 - Proposal Submission

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Name of Project:

Ocean South Africa

Proposal in one sentence:

Community of Data Scientists, Software Engineers, and Enthusiasts with a shared mission to raise awareness, and build on top of Ocean Protocol to scale the Web3 Data-Economy to South Africa.

Description of the project and what problem is it solving:

Because of our unique history, South Africa has the highest income inequality in the world. Simply, the rich are too rich, and the poor are too poor. We have an unemployment rate of more than 30%, and an even worse youth unemployment rate of more than 50%. By contributing and building on top of Ocean Protocol, we believe young talent, startups, and SME’s can discover new income and revenue streams to chart a new path for themselves.

Grant Deliverables:

Objective 1: Community on-boarding

  • Run a social media campaign to attract developers and other talent to join and contribute to Ocean Protocol. The goal is to make as much active Ocean Ambassadors out of community members as possible.
  • Run a concurrent campaign to attract startups and SMEs who are willing to explore various opportunities presented by Ocean Protocol.
  • On-board members onto the Ocean Academy.

Objective 2: Community Education

    • Host weekly calls to educate the community in addition to Ocean Academy resources.
    • Build an information repository of all important educational material, media and documentation for on-going reference.
    • Fork GitHub repository with all necessary (ocean.py, ocean.js, etc.) development tools to support exploration and buidl.
    • Host at least 3 Sprints (within 2 months) to facilitate Ideation.

Objective 3: Awareness

*- Continue utilising our Medium, Twitter, and Facebook channels to raise awareness.
*- Three articles have already been published (https://oceanprotocolza.medium.com)

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*- South Africa has 11 official languages. Translating in all of them would be a nightmare. We will use Afrikaans to translate at least 2 critical informative OP articles.
*- Blockchain-related meetups have already commenced, so we will be utilising these to our advantage.

Which category best describes your project?

    • [X] Outreach / community / spread awareness

What is the final product?

1.) For the initial round, the final product is an active community of developers and enthusiasts, that continues to educate and raise awareness, through hosting meetups, community calls and social media campaigns.

2.) The ultimate goal is to have a community that is technically oriented enough to start building our own solutions that have product-market fit on top of Ocean Protocol.

**Which one or more of the criteria will your project focus on? Why do you believe your team will do well on those criteria? **

1. Usage of Ocean:

After this phase has concluded, we would have added new members, and active Ocean Ambassadors who are ecosystem participants. This can subsequently lead to an increase in # of Active Users.
We are poised to achieve this because of our advantage of operating in arguably Africa’s most innovative region - Cape Town (dubbed Silicon Cape). And crypto adoption and development is relatively higher.

2. Community Active-ness:

Since we are a community comprised mostly of technical people, we are actively using Ocean SDK’s and gaining experience and orientation. This can ultimately lead to new projects and contributions to initiatives like Ocean Missions.

3.Adding value to the overall community:

As we continue driving our message and mission; more talent, and enthusiasts will notice. This will be a self-fulfilling prophecy as it would keep feeding into the chances of success of the first criterion, which is Usage of Ocean. When we do our job right, the loop restarts.

Funding Requested:

3000

Proposal Wallet Address:

0x174d8dC690D9ECE897498d545ff3BE528e01a3Ab

Have you previously received an OceanDAO Grant? N

Team Website:

Twitter Handle:

@oceanprotocolZA

Project Lead email: bhalisasodo@gmail.com

Country of Residence: Republic of South Africa

Part 2 - Team

2.1 Core Team

Bhalisa Sodo

2.2 Advisors

Robin Lehmann

** Dr. Prakash Kamaraj**

  • Relevant Credentials:
  • Background/Experience:
    • Co-founding member of Deep Medicine Labs, a HealthTech solutions in the AI space
    • Led a project submission at Solana India hackathon
    • Ocean Ambassador community; outreach ship
    • Project Lead at Ocean Protocol India

Part 3 - Proposal Details

3.1 Details

South Africa as an innovation hub has tremendous potential to see our mission though because of our ever-growing innovation ecosystems in Western Cape and Gauteng. We are home to a one of its kind Data Science institutions, Explore Data Science Academy, which produces world-class Data Scientists annually. We intend on the optimal utilisation of these unique networks and ecosystems to further the project’s mandate - which is to incentivise especially young talent to participate in the OP ecosystem.

3.2 “Outreach / community”:

At least 4 blog posts will be published on our Medium

2 community calls will be recorded & published on our YouTube channel

3.3 Community engagement:

The rubber has already touched the concrete through our 2 main engagement outlets; Twitter and Medium. The grant will helps grow our followers and our reach consequentially.

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What is the team’s future plans and intentions?

Our ultimate future plan is to build and ship products and services on top of Ocean Protocol. This entails a concerted research and technical effort. When we fulfill the above-mentioned deliverables - the next steps will be communicated with the OceanDAO ecosystem.

#2

Hey @Bhalisa, thanks for sharing your proposal and welcome to the Ocean ecosystem.

I just took a quick review of your proposal and it all looks really good. Given we are currently talking about starting a data mission together with Ocean Missions I will opt out of being your ‘official’ PGWG guide here and invite one of the other PGWG members to provide a more formal review. But for what it’s worth, you get my vote :slight_smile:

1 Like
#3

I appreciate the feedback @Scotty. Thanks for the support thus far, and showing me around. Looking forward to contributing to Ocean Missions :ocean: :rocket:

#4

Hello Bhalisa,

As a member of the Project-Guiding Working group as well as being an advisor to the project, I offer a public review of your proposal highlighting the essentials of your proposal.

First of, as promised here is an independent guide for writing a good community proposal as part of our Indian Ocean Outreach program that covers the tenets of Project Guidance as well.

Alongside welcoming you to the Ocean community, I’d also proceed to give you a proposal review for the same.

Going by the qualitative value adds that you have described in your proposal, it is impressive to see how well you have covered on the value adds for the project, starting from covering the values that it would add towards your community. It is also noteworthy that you have been active in the Ocean community and related projects within the Ecosystem.

Having realistic goals described in your proposals indicates good viability of the project. I’d also recommend adding a TLDR; version of the deliverables that you have mentioned so that it gives a neat clarity to all the readers of the proposal. Summarizing a lot of value deliverables that you have outlined also helps you understand the delivery-checklist that you’d need to address when you intend to return as a recurring proposal for the Ocean South Africa community.

The additional suggestion that I’d have (a nice-to-have) for driving the success of your project would be to form a squad with your community in the upcoming weeks. You have the freedom to do this at the most convenient time and it will certainly help scale the long-term visions that you have mentioned toward the end of your proposal.

You have my support towards your program. I’d also welcome @idiom-bytes to offer his neutral opinion on the project in terms of well it aligns with the Ocean DAO mission and values.

In the meantime I’d also recommend going through the Community proposal guide to derive further value in terms of driving the proposals for future rounds as well.

Best,

Prakash

1 Like
#5

I welcome the feedback Prakash. Thank you for the vote of confidence. I’ve been working really hard on this, and I’m positive that when I couple the efforts with your recommendations we will be better positioned. I will act on every recommendation. Thank you again doc!

2 Likes
#6

Hi @Bhalisa, I have now registered your proposal for R14 and it has been accepted.

All the best!

1 Like
#7

Thank you for the heads up!