Ben Halpern

for The DEV Team

Posted on May 7, 2020

Announcing the Grant For The Web Hackathon on DEV

#gftwhackathon #opensource #meta #webmonetization

We are so excited to announce the Grant For The Web x DEV Community hackathon.

Grant for the Web is a collaboration between Mozilla, Creative Commons, and Coil. They are working towards a healthier internet, using open standards to give people more independence and control over how they distribute and monetize content. It’s a future where creators and their publishers can leverage open standards and protocols like Web Monetization instead of relying on invasive ads, paywalls, and the abuse of personal data.

We are deeply aligned with Grant For The Web’s mission, and are very excited to support their open Call For Proposals. They are funding projects that contribute to an ecosystem of content, users, tools, and infrastructure over the next 5 years. The grants will range from $5,000 to $100,000 USD!

In order to help drive exploration and experimentation around Web Monetization and possible grant proposals, we’re excited to host a Community Hackathon right here on DEV. We hope that you’ll participate in the DEV contest, and then consider expanding your submission into a full-on Grant for the Web proposal via the Grant for the Web CFP.

Read on for more details about the contest, categories, prizes, and key dates.

What is Web Monetization?

For many of you, this might be your first exposure to Web Monetization. Web Monetization provides content creators with an alternative solution to get paid for the content they share on the Web. When a user visits a monetized Web page, their browser (if it supports Web Monetization) may send micropayments to it. The Web page can detect these micropayments and give the user a better experience, for example by removing advertisements or by unlocking additional content. All this is made possible thanks to a new Web API developed at W3C, the Web Monetization API. This API is intended to be implemented natively in browsers but is already available today via a Web extension for popular desktop browsers and Puma Browser on mobile.

In order to add Web Monetization to your project, you’ll need to:

Set up a “wallet” for receiving payments
Get your wallet’s “payment pointer”
Add a special tag to your page with your payment pointer

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Web Monetized Site</title>
    <meta name="monetization" content="$wallet.example.com/sloan">
  </head>
</html>

From that point on, you can use the JavaScript API to react to the small payments from users who have a Web Monetization provider, like Coil. You might choose to reward these monetized browsers by removing ads, unlocking exclusive content, or enabling special features. We’ve outlined a few example projects a little bit lower down in this announcement post.

Here are a few options for wallets that can receive payments. The first Web Monetization provider for sending payments is Coil but others will likely crop up as the ecosystem grows.

Free Coil trial for all #gftwhackathon participants

Ben Halpern for The DEV Team ・ May 15 '20

#gftwhackathon #webmonetization

Example Projects

Need some inspiration on what sorts of projects to build? There are several examples you may want to check out in the WebMonetization.org Docs. You’ll find examples related to:

There are some additional examples on Coil’s Glitch page.

Community Support

We’ve set up a GftW Hackathon Discussion / Help Thread where you can discuss ideas, find collaborators, and receive support from experts in Web Monetization. Team members from Grant for the Web and Coil will be spending time on DEV and answering questions in this thread.

We’ll also be setting up a dedicated DEV Connect group channel for more synchronous help. To join this group, just leave a comment in the discussion / help thread. This will be a great place to spend time with the team from Grant for the Web + Coil, and to engage with you fellow community participants.

Call For Proposals

In addition to the hackathon hosted right here on DEV, Grant For The Web is welcoming submissions to their call for proposals. They are looking to fund individuals, projects, and global communities that contribute to a privacy-centric, open, and accessible Web Monetization ecosystem with grants ranging from $5,000 to $100,000 USD.

The $100 Million, five-year fund will prioritize innovative ideas that incorporate or build upon the Web Monetization standard and protocols. Funds will support projects, content, experimentation, and learning around natively integrating monetization into the web using open protocols and standards.

Our hackathon categories are intentionally similar to the call for proposal tracks in order to make your life easier. We strongly encourage you to submit to both the hackathon and the call for proposals if you’d like to take your project a step further!

Important Dates 🗓

May 7: Hackathon Begins!
~~June 5~~ June 14: Hackathon Submission Due at 11:59pm PST.
~~June 10~~ June 18: Hackathon Winners Announced
~~June 12~~ June 22: Grant for the Web Call For Proposals Due

DEV Is Participating Too

During the hackathon, the DEV team will be taking on a Web Monetization project of our own. We’ll start by adding a Payment Pointer right here on the open-source platform! Once we get a deeper sense of how the technology works, and feel confident that we’ve implemented everything correctly, we’ll enable Web Monetization for everyone in the community. This means that every DEV member will be able to add a payment pointer to their profile and published posts!

We’re so excited to be supporting Grant for the Web as they push the internet towards more fair and open standards. We hope you have fun, learn some new things, and build something you’re proud of. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Happy Coding!

Top comments (99)

ali spivak • May 7 '20

Hello DEV community,

my name is Ali and I'm a member of the team here at Coil working on Web Monetization. If you have any questions about Grant for the Web, Web Monetization, or Coil please let me know.

I'm pretty new to Coil (3 whole weeks!) so I'll be likely be learning some things right along with you. That said, I'll be coordinating with plenty of folks from the Coil team to ensure we're supporting the community with technical guidance as people start on their projects.

DEV is a wonderful and supportive community, and I know I can count on your patience as much as I'm anticipating your creativity. All of us at Grant for the Web & Coil are excited to see the amazing projects you are going to create!

Rodman Swanston • May 7 '20

Are JS libraries that facilitate the use of Web Monetization part of the Foundational Technology category?

ali spivak • May 7 '20

Yes, a JS libraries would count as foundational technology.

Peter Chan • May 11 '20

Is there any special Coil's redeem code for developers that join this hackathon?

ali spivak • May 13 '20 • Edited

We will be providing codes for trial memberships to people/teams who submit a project.
Information is here: dev.to/devteam/free-coil-trial-for...

Bruno Paz • May 17 '20 • Edited

Hello Ali.
Coil seems a really nice idea and as an author on Dev.to, looking forward for deep integration between the two platforms.

Not sure if it´s the best place to ask this, but a suggestion for improving the onboarding process in Coil Platform is to improve the "Select Payout option" page.

I know very few about Bitcoins and Blockchain and on that page I am requested to select a payment method. I have no idea what xrp, Gatehub, Stronghold or Payment pointers are. Any user like me can feel a little bit "intimidated" with that page.

I would choose Gatehub, just because it supports payouts in EUR and SEPA transfers but not sure if there are better options.

It would be nice to have some kind of introductory guide on the topic and provide a link that page.

ali spivak • May 26 '20

Hi Bruno,
Thank you for the feedback! We are currently working on improvements to our documentation and guides, so, yes, this is relevant and appreciated information.

Aditya Mitra • Jun 12 '20

I have a doubt. When is the last date for the submission for this hackathon?

ali spivak • Jun 12 '20

The submission deadline has been extended to June 14.

Aditya Mitra • Jun 12 '20

But, this post says its extended to JUNE 23?

ali spivak • Jun 12 '20

Grant for the Web's Call for Proposals (CFP) has been extended until June 22, but the DEV.to hackathon ends on June 14.

Phuong Tieu • May 7 '20

Hi Ali
Are there any special Coil's redeem code for developers that join this hackathon?

ali spivak • May 13 '20 • Edited

We will be providing codes for trial memberships to people/teams who submit a project.
Information is here: dev.to/devteam/free-coil-trial-for...

VeeWeb Code • May 8 '20

I am new here. Didn't get it at all. If this is a hackathon then we suppose to build stuff right? Please enlighten me..

ali spivak • May 8 '20

Yes, we are looking for people to build projects that utilize and/or promote the Web Monetization API in the hackathon.

Broadly, projects can include things like building new plugins or interfaces, or writing documentation and templates. It also includes projects that focus on enabling the creation, distribution, and discoverability of web monetized content.

Hope this helps!

Ali Spittel • May 7 '20

I'm so excited about this collab! Immediately thought of you all when I met Coil in Amsterdam! I think adding web monetization to DEV is the perfect fit and incentive for authors!

Ben Halpern • May 7 '20

Yeah we agree. We hope this could empower folks to make the most of the traffic they're generating in one small way with a lot of transparency.

Chris Lawrence • May 7 '20

Hi Ali, funny how all the parts connected on this thread!

☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜ • May 8 '20

Yay — to random conversations.

Name cannot be blank • May 9 '20

LOL_____

Jess Lee • May 7 '20

We are so excited to be working with Grant For The Web on this Hackathon, especially just a few short days after we wrapped up the Twilio Hackathon (awarding those prizes today!!). We’re really hoping to bring these fun events to the community regularly, giving people the opportunity to build with new technologies and earn great prizes.

One of the best parts about this particular Hackathon is that the DEV team gets to build right alongside everyone as we implement our own payment pointer -- can't wait to discover our learnings together :)

☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜ • May 8 '20 • Edited

DEV's

I'm Dees. A South African, based out in London. I've spent many a year championing the open web and standards, most notably from my time at Mozilla, the makers of Firefox. I joined Mozilla Labs in 2010 at the time of Firefox 3.8! Prior to that I've had check-ins at various dot-coms. And was even part of the very early CSS movement, taking eBay from a table-based front end.

Most recently, I co-created Grant for the Web. And I'm super thrilled to see this collaboration go live. It started as an 'all the things' conversations with Ali Spittel, @aspittel at ViewSource in Amsterdam late last year — led to coffee in NYC with PB&J. Which led to impressive virtual only co-ordination as we all entered lockdown to make this a reality within a few weeks.

The Grant for the Web team and our founding collaborators Mozilla, Creative Commons and Coil are excited to see the DEV community's creativeness with the emerging Web Monetization web standard and Interledger protocol within W3C, one which at it's core brings the creator back to the forefront and fairly rewards them for their work and effort.

We can't wait to see what this amazing community comes up with.

Joe Pea • May 8 '20

Hello! I'm brand new to Web Monetization, I've heard the term floating around. Can you help paint a better picture with a bullet point list of things that people might build for this hackathon, or for the grant application?

☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜ • May 8 '20 • Edited

Check out some samples within the Web Mometization documentation

Also perhaps wander across to the Grant for the Web Community Forum. There are loads of ideas being thrown about there by many others.

And lastly to highlight @ben main post above some starter ideas and demos listed under the Example Projects header.

Happy building!

Joe Pea • May 9 '20 • Edited

Interesting! I checked out those examples, but one thing I don't see is payment amounts. The examples only show placing or removing the <meta> tag in certain ways, and showing monetization states based on events. How do payment amounts come into play?

EDIT: Ah, ok, I see the explainer shows an event.detail.amount property.

I take this to mean that a website could show a message like "pay such and such amount and receive such and such stuff", then the user can take that action, and eventually the website would see event.detail.amount.

How would something like selling individual products work? Would we need to dynamically switch out the meta tag (or go to an entirely separate page with its own meta tag) depending on which product the user will be paying for?

☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜ • May 9 '20

I'm taking the below directly from @sharafian — and it's likely best that he expand...

Web Monetization doesn't allow for the requesting of specific amounts. Discrete or 'retail' payments like that are better served by a traditional checkout flow or the Web Payments API.

Joe Pea • May 23 '20

Interesting. So how do you know if it is worth disabling ads for someone if your business relies on ads, for example? What if they donate only 1 cent. Maybe that won't outweigh the benefit of keeping the ads. There must be a way to track amounts. and therefore, a way to list those amounts somewhere on the website for users to set as their goal, which would equate to requesting specific amounts but in a different way.

☞ Desigan Chinniah ☜ • May 25 '20

There are some interesting privacy related challenges here. Unless users/members explicitly opt-in of course. @sharafian likely has thoughts and ideas here.

On the member side, @wobsoriano has been working on a separate extension (they opt-in by explicitly installing something) for members showing them their spend. It's a work-in-progress for the hackathon and he is writing about it.

Chris Lawrence • May 7 '20

Hello DEV community, my name is Chris Lawrence. I am on the Grant for the Web program team. We are excited to be partnering with Dev on this Hackathon.

Myself and others on our team are here to answer any questions you have about the program, provide feedback on ideas, or discuss the broad themes of Grant for the Web.

We are giddy with curiosity about the tinkering, prototypes, and new ideas this community is going to come up with and we hope when you’re through, you consider applying to Grant for the Web. Let's roll!

Robert • May 17 '20

Hi Chris! Sent you a message.

Ste • May 7 '20

Oh man, I've never done a hackathon before, but absolutely putting some time aside for this!

Brodan • May 7 '20

Daaaaamn this is one of the coolest APIs I've heard of. I definitely want to do something with this, there's soooo much potential. Now I just need to think of an idea!

Jess Lee • May 7 '20

🙌

Allan N Jeremy • May 8 '20

Hyped as hell too! Got an idea to bounce off. The API coupled with documentation.
Let me know if you'd be interested

ali spivak • May 8 '20

Happy to hear your ideas - you can email me directly if you like.

Allan N Jeremy • May 9 '20 • Edited

Sweet! Emailed you.

Ben Halpern • May 7 '20

As we work out the ways that web monetization will exist in our ecosystem for the benefit of individual authors and the free and open web in general, we'll definitely have an eye on contest submissions for interesting ideas and approaches we can adopt. I'm really excited to see what folks come up with.

Mazen Touati • May 8 '20

This is truly an incredible step toward the future of content monetization. Kudos to Coil for investing in this technology and being the first provider out there 🦄🦄

Regarding the Hackathon I have some question:

Is it allowed to participate with multiple projects? in multiple categories?
Could anyone clarify more this category "Creative Catalyst"?
A platform that helps creators to manage their monetization or get monetized in which category it will be part of?

ali spivak • May 8 '20

You can do more than one project but only win 1 prize.

Creative Catalyst projects, generally, would focus on ways to create, distribute, and discover web monetized content. So, for example, you could build things that enable publishing or that help users find monetized content.

A platform to help creators manage monetization or set up monetization seems like it would fit best into Foundational Technology. However, we want you to build cool projects, so don't worry too much about categorizing them, if it's a grey area we'll sort it out.