Decentralized Web Curriculum for Creators

Overview

Gray Area is seeking support from Gitcoin’s Grant Round focus on Web3 Community and Education for the development of DWeb curriculum for the Gray Area Learn online arts education platform. These new course tracks will empower creators (including visual artists, musicians, and other creative professionals) working at the intersection of art and technology with the information and frameworks needed to incorporate DWeb technology into their creative practices. This effort will support technology infrastructure development, software toolkits, community outreach, artist on-boarding, coursework production, and audience engagement to support a new generation of artists building on top of the next generation of technical and cultural infrastructure. The program will generate both synchronous and asynchronous coursework that results in revenue share for the participating artists and educators, creating new sustainable revenue streams. Tuition will be subsidized with scholarships for students with low income or underrepresented demographics in tech and the arts. We will also explore cryptocurrency integration into our learning management system to create stakeholders of the artists and student community by facilitating revenue splits and student incentives. At the end of the performance period, we will have a new integrated educational solution to encourage boundary-pushing new work built on top of DWeb. Works from the course tracks will be exhibited at Gray Area in San Francisco and online at the completion of the program, creating an opportunity for public engagement with the works to educate more broadly about the benefits of DWeb technology.

Decentralized Web Curriculum for Creators will empower the next generation of emerging creators with the knowledge and tools necessary to adopt decentralized technology into their creative practices. Artists are vital to the DWeb movement, providing both cultural context for public adoptions and important use cases for the technology, but many don’t have the background or skills to build upon the technology without support. This project aims to provide open source toolkits as starting points for DWeb creative work that will also engender best practices for the work being created. In addition to providing the tools for new works to be created, the open source educational materials will result in the creation of many new genre defining artworks that will serve as examples for other creators, as well as engaging the public and other institutions for exhibition and preservation.

Project Outcomes

Ultimately, the successful execution of this program will provide teacher training and educator opportunities to working creators, and while doing so provide DWeb empowerment to a global audience of students. Importantly, all components of this project work together to create sustainable, recurring residual revenue streams for the course creators. Currently we have piloted a profit sharing model that awards instructors 30% - 50% of the revenue for synchronous courses, while the asynchronous courses can be freely available so that vastly larger audiences can learn without real time input from the course creators. We hope that the platform we develop can serve as a model for other arts organizations to provide high quality arts and technology education, and make information on DWeb more accessible for a larger global community.

As part of this development, we wish to explore integrating cryptocurrency based payment and incentive systems to enable ease of online payments, as well as automate the revenue splits between Gray Area, content partners, and creators. This integration of cryptocurrency will also allow an incentive structure, allowing students to earn rewards for the successful participation in the learning community, as well as for completing courses. Ultimately, we wish this integrated currency system to create a regenerative, positive feedback loop between our audience, educators, and students, turning them from beneficiaries into stakeholders with a role in supporting the community. This creative, economic, and community engine will represent a complete, economically generative, creative development path.

All software and educational materials produced under this initiative will be licensed under CC0 or BSD licenses as applicable.

Project Team

• Barry Threw -- Gray Area Executive Director
• Roxi Shohadaee -- Gray Area Creative Producer
• Regina Harasanyi -- Museum of the Moving Image
• Niki Selken -- Intuit
• Sarah Friend -- Artist
• mai ishikawa sutton -- DWeb Project
• Kelani Nichole -- TRANSFER Gallery, Fora
• Sarah Grant -- Radical Networks

Beneficiaries

We have developed a unique cultural ecosystem model to engage artists at multiple entry points and at any skill level, from audience inspiration to community leadership. Our public events programming draws audiences into our year round education offerings, and then their projects can enter our incubator to refine and scale. After completing our programs, community members often return to teach, exhibit, or perform, inspiring an audience anew. Artists who enter our programs find the inspiration, resources, and community that they need to take risks in developing unique practices, and the opportunities to present their work to an engaged audience.

Gray Area attracts interdisciplinary, experimental, technically-literate, and risk taking creative practitioners whose work doesn’t find easy support within traditional arts organizations. We support a diverse community by holding space for those of different practices, backgrounds, visions, and experiences to deeply collaborate and create new forms and meanings through the arts. Because this diversity of thought and perspective is a core requirement for the type of collaboration we foster, we continually try to increase engagement with varied audiences through outreach, subsidized participation for our events and education, and increasing representation within all of our programming.

Gray Area’s audience demographics include diverse gender representation (46% female, 54% male) and age representation (10% ages 0-24, 36% ages 25-34, 31% ages 35-44, 23% ages 45+). Live events in the Grand Theater and our online programming enjoys consistent participation from LGBTQ groups, and from the San Francisco Mission District’s Latinx community, in addition to a global audience of creative technologists from more than 60 countries. In Gray Area’s Education programs, 48% of students are Female, and 42% of students are People of Color. We elevate diverse voices through thoughtful curation of paid artists and speakers, including but not limited to LGBTQ, Female, Non-binary, Black, Latinx, and Asian artists. Over 82% of artists, speakers, and performers in our online programming since March 2020 represent the above communities.

To better serve our audience we continuously evaluate program success by surveying students and attendees about their impressions. Qualitative measures include web analytics, reviews, surveys, interviews, observations, and follow-up discussions. Key staff also holds follow-up meetings internally and calls with stakeholders to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each event. Our audience survey also includes questions about demographics, to assess whether our audience represents a diversity of participants across age, gender, race, location, education, and job sectors.

About Gray Area

Gray Area is a San Francisco-based nonprofit cultural incubator.

Our mission is to cultivate, sustain, and apply antidisciplinary collaboration — integrating art, technology, science, and the humanities — towards a more equitable and regenerative future. Since our inception in 2008, Gray Area has established itself as a singular hub for critically engaging with technology and culture in the Bay Area, while also reaching a global audience. Through our platform of public events, education, and research programs we empower a diverse community of creative practitioners with the agency to create meaningful social impact through category-defying work.

Project Supporters

This project is supported by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web.

Gray Area's Education programs are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Hewlett Foundation.