[2021 Theme Proposal] IPFS Africa Community

[Sonia John]

Note, this is part of the 2021 IPFS project planning process - feel free to add other potential 2021 themes for the IPFS project by opening a new issue or discuss this proposed theme in the comments, especially other example workstreams that could fit under this theme for 2021. Please also review others’ proposed themes and leave feedback here!

Theme description

The objective of IPFS Africa Community as a theme is to increase adoption of IPFS by focusing on development of africa-centric solutions on the network. We will highlight and focus on application areas we’ve identified with higher adoption potential i.e using IPFS to build solutions around public/community data, democracy, internet freedom and mobile-specific solutions.

These application areas reflect some of the biggest challenges linked to internet freedom for users in certain countries. In Uganda, for instance, the implementation of OTT (Over The Top) Tax for use of social media platforms presents an opportunity to rally and IPFS Uganda Community that can be inspired to build an IPFS Based solution to lower cost of file-sharing for internet users. This will also inspire development of mobile-specific solutions since its widely known that smartphone penetration stands at 95% on the continent.

We have similar adoption opportunities in various countries i.e Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Kenya where we are already introducing more developers to IPFS as a viable alternative to traditional web services.

Hypothesis

During an in-depth review of my favorite IPFS Case Studies so far, I’ve found different types of solutions designed and built on IPFS that are uniquely addressing issues such as data privacy and autonomy, consensus systems, data immutability, distributed storage, decentralized identity, data marketplaces and more. For all of these core software goals, the IPFS network has demonstrated an overall low gap in readiness and with the right training and support community members can be encouraged to start experimenting with IPFS to build similar solutions. Training and support can be in the form of various community activities including protoschool workshops, hack nights and more.

Vision statement & why focus this year

With this approach to our objective of increasing IPFS adoption on the continent, we anticipate to build an active community of users, developers and founders who will also actively collaborate within the wider IPFS Community. In numbers, success for this theme means growing the number of applications on the network by 20%, growing the number of end-users by 5%, and growing the number of nodes by 30%.

This will also increase community visibility and as we continue to reach out to web2 communities we will encourage them to make the switch to web3 bringing the wave closer & the web one step closer to decentralization in storage, security, files-sharing, node-distribution and privacy.

Example workstreams

Our workstream will focus on community activities that provide training and support for community members for example:

• Evaluate the IPFS network by exploring how IPFS addresses censorship, disaster resilience, offline data accessibility, cost-efficiency in high bandwidth areas and more. This series of workshops titled ‘Explore IPFS’ can happen bi-weekly for 8-12 weeks.

• Organize technical sessions where community members will work with IPFS Implementations, tools and applications. These can be meetups (physical or virtual) for sessions including:

    - Installing, upgrading and downgrading IPFS Installations. 
  
    - Host simple static websites using IPFS
  
    - In-depth review of Go and JS Implementations of IPFS
  
    - IPFS case studies review sessions and more
  

• Support project building by identifying local partners to work with and lead project building activities.

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