NFBooks: a Pan-African NFT library

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Context

In Cameroon, and in Africa in general, there is limited access to books (both physical and digital), especially literature that is centered around ancestral primordial African history. Ironically even literature that originates from the country and encompasses our local paradigm is not easily available to consume. Sadly, any reading culture that does exist is limited to school textbooks that are typically produced by our colonizing countries that have no interest in local communities discovering other perspectives of their history, traditions and cultures. Authors producing historical and cultural books face a lot of hurdles preventing them from reaching their targeted audience. Their audience, still perceive these locally authored historical texts as mythical. Interestingly, this category of literature, referred to as "classical humanities" is perceived as something that is meant for a certain class in the society--the most intelligent or wealthy.

There are multiple factors limiting the access to literature on the continent: 

• Cost of printing is high which impacts both authors' revenues and readers' buying capability
• Access is generally limited to physical books, which makes it hard to access a wide audience
• Absence of a usable digital library (fit to the African context)
• Lack of tools to ease research across multiples texts 
• Lack of incentive to read: no strategy to motivate youth to read outside of school
• Lack of reading culture

Authors and artists have a very hard time being rewarded fairly for their hard work. This is worsened by the dominance of social media where publications or extracts can be shared freely with zero compensation returning to artists.

Solution

Create an interactive reading platform that is affordable, accessible, and user-friendly. We will make reading culture more attainable for all by incorporating incentives, collaborative and creative activities, and games to motivate readers and authors alike.

The solution we plan to implement will include the following core elements/components:

NFBooks and audiobooks: Books that are coded into NFTs (digital copies that can be easily tracked on the blockchain). We will also incorporate audio versions of the books for more options on how to consume the materials, making sure we address streaming issues due to poor internet quality in some areas.

Constructive advertisements: Integrate advertisements from sponsors and donors to help lower the costs to users. These advertisements can be from community members, reputable local businesses, and other authors, to name a few, and will be integrated within the NFBook platform. We intend to leverage the Brave browser advertisement model for advertisements. Users will be able to fine tune the amount and type of advertisement they are willing to ingest and will be compensated for what they consume. 

(If you are unfamiliar with the Brave browser, this article can provide some context: https://brave.com/compare/chrome/earning/)

Donations/Sponsorships: In order to provide sustainable financial incentives to readers in addition to the advertizing model mentioned above, we will encourage financial contributions that can go into a pool for a specific book or genre that will be used to distribute prize money for the various activities.

Incentives to readers: Incorporating different strategies to encourage reading will be at the core of our platform. Mermoz, author and library co-owner of the Panafrican UFULU library in Dschang, has run several trials on the ground incentivizing readers. Out of his own pocket, he started a program with high school and university students a few years ago to encourage them to explore books other than their school textbooks. Students would come into the library and commit to reading a book individually and/or as a group. He required them to take notes in a framework he defined, and after turning in the notes and taking a mini comprehension test they received a small monetary prize. This turned out to be a huge success however it was not sustainable due to limited funding available. 

On the platform we intend build on top of the success of the work done on the ground to extend this experiment through the following activities:

• Book clubs / book rooms
• chat groups to plan, schedule and set intent and goals for reading
• space to take notes while reading and discuss them with peers
• portion of advertizement revenue will be reinvested in clubs that meet their intent
• sponsorship and donations will contribute an additional bounty available for some books or genres
• Gaming
• reading comprehension and other follow-up activities
• group or individual games offering incentives for correct answers
• School Challenges
• Challenge schools to adopt programs encouraging reading culture of local texts
• Prizes for school that encourage reading culture

Recurring conferences: The Panafrican Ufulu library has now run 2 conferences over the last few years. It is a sharing and creative space from both parties. The general format has been:

• Short presentations from the authors of the selected books
• A space for advertisers to get feedback from their products / services
• A creative space for readers through activities such as  read to art

We will continue these conferences in partnership with the library leveraging our platform as a way to increase engagement and keep the momentum going between events.

Read to art: This activity is about encouraging creativity in response to reading. Participants are encouraged to create something inspired by what they have read. This could be a painting, poem, music …etc that relates to a specific text can then be published on an NFT marketplace. We have another proposal where we are suggesting a specific plan for such a marketplace Katiopa NFArt / NFCraft Marketplace. Another example could be recreating a book cover for a book that could reflect a different interpretation of the reading. This could be done as an NFT, or converted into an NFT as a way to generate more revenue avenues for both readers and authors. 

During their conferences, the Panafrican Ufulu library has done a great job at giving readers the space to express their artistic creativity in relation to specific readings. The artwork is exposed to newcomers and serves not only for educational purposes, but also can be sold and generate revenue shared between the artists and the library. Students are showing more and more interest in this activity. 

=> Find more details and examples of this activity here

Governance: provide a tool or framework for all stakeholders (authors, readers, advertisers …etc) to make decisions on pricing strategies and schemes that are mutually beneficial. A voting mechanism will be conceived and implemented for this. 

Reputation: All stakeholders, especially authors, translators, enterprises and publishers will undergo a series of different validations by community members in order to access the platform and offer their services. We intend to model our reputation system upon locally constructed trust systems already in place in local DeFi groups. To take a specific example, local community savings groups that do Tontine or Djangui have their own way of proving the reputation of new members. Members hoping to join these groups may be required to present endorsement from older respected members of the community.

Search engine: to help with research and book visibility using the symbolic African paradigm. Research today is only done in the western paradigm that tends to see everything as separate, never focusing on the whole. In the ancestral African context everything is connected and all fields of knowledge are just different angles of approach to the same thing. We need to create a more inclusive and holistic search engine into our platform that takes these nuances into consideration. To provide an example to clarify: many tribes in Cameroon the word for “water” is the same as “music”. Therefore if someone is doing research on music, we need the search engine to also suggest results referring to the water. Such a search engine will prove valuable in decoding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as they are based on the same holistic approach. Each glyph is indeed a key holding different symbolic meanings in different fields. These glyphs can be codified as Nfts linked or grouped together through their shared symbolic values. Once a key value is searched, glyphs are accessed and put in resonance with one another to find coherent patterns.

Symbolic AI Engine: This module is to complement the search engine. Symbolism is deeply ingrained in African learning and teaching patterns. "Symbolic Artificial Intelligence as opposed to Machine learning uses human-readable symbols that represent real-world entities or concepts as well as logic (the mathematically provable logical methods) in order to create ‘rules’ for the concrete manipulation of those symbols, leading to a rule-based system". This approach to artificial intelligence perfectly suits the African paradigm.

DID module: to handle ownership and access within the platform and its resources. For such a platform it is important to incorporate decentralized identities.  

System as perceived by different stakeholders:

The system aims to address specific issues that can be elaborated by focusing on what it will bring to each class of stakeholders.

On the reader perspective: 

• He will own the NFBook in the real meaning of the word as opposed to what we observe with platforms such as Amazon kindle, audible and apple books where central authorities can shut your account down at any time. 
• Affordable prices due to higher demand and advertisement
• Incentives through advertisement content
• Incentives through reading games and read to art
• User can resell NFT
• Potential for bonus features such as unique author autograph and/or secret message for each copy
• Personal interview bonuses with authors committed within NFBooks as a way to help boost researchers' work
• Easy access to a wide range of books in multiple languages including local languages (written and audio)
• A possibility to search with a revived lost paradigm

On the author/artist perspective:

• The author/artist will own and control all transactions related to their work: they will have full ownership.
• The compensation will be immediate and the author/artist will gain a portion of sales in secondary markets as well
• The artist can widen his outreach, community and fan base 
• The artists will be able to easily bring additional value to their fans (Integrated interviews, autographs, and messages …etc)
• The value of the work can increase over time
• Copyright security

On the advertiser perspective:

• A huge customer base
• A chance to advertise products and services
• A chance to build a strong reputation

On the publisher perspective:

• A chance to build a strong reputation
• Opportunities for more partnerships with authors

On the translator perspective:

• A chance to build a strong reputation 
• Opportunities for more partnerships with authors

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

At the core, the main deliverable of this project is an NFBook marketplace fit for the African context. The potential for adoption is real.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

The biggest challenge is how to create a reading culture where it is almost nonexistent. We will address this challenge in several ways. We will be changing the culture around how reading materials are accessed both from the authors perspective (encouraging authors to create more content, and bringing them a peace of mind regarding the ownership and access of their intellectual property) and on the consumer side (encouraging readers to consume more materials, and to interact with it through incentive based games and collaboration schemes).

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

This proposal is unique in its genre in the local context of Cameroon and has so many variables that need to be taken into consideration for its planning. We have identified phases, activities, tasks and modules that will serve to construct the big puzzle.

Research completion - 6 months

We will start by completing the research we have been running on the ground for the last few years regarding the state of writing, editing and publishing ancestral African books in the local context of Cameroon and Africa in general. A critical piece of the research that needs to be completed is the management of contracts that potential authors on our platform currently have with their editors and publishers. Although some authors in this genre have obtained funding support from the community allowing them to reclaim full rights on their productions, most of them still struggle to get out of exploitative contracts they have signed in the past. Specifically this phase will include the following activities:

1. Complete research related to the editing and publishing, selling of books: contracts, royalties …etc 
2. The state of NFT Books and its implications with the current regulatory framework in Cameroon and in Africa in general
3. Research more potential authors producing material geared toward ancestral and historical knowledge, and potential advertisers, sponsors, editors and publishers supporting our mission ..etc

Securing partnerships - 3 months

In the past few years, we have made some key contacts with high profile authors as we were still taunting this idea and most of them were surprisingly receptive to our idea. At the time, we had no means to undertake such a project. We will be returning to them and securing partnerships for potential collaboration. Our conversation will mostly be centered around royalties, pricing strategies and also introducing Blockchain technologies, NFTs and the opportunities that they can unlock for both authors and readers. We will also be booking their time for several working sessions to design and architect the overall platform. This is crucial for green project with so many variables. We have developed ties with some of the most brilliant minds that have produced each several books over the past decades and hope to formally secure partnerships with many more: As of now, we are in contact with:

• Jean Philippe Omutunde: Afrocentric author, Expert in Classic African Humanities
• Mbombog Bassong: Geologist, Egyptologist, Meteorician, Planetologist and writer
• Dibombari Mbock: Author, writer and expert in history and local African languages

The next piece in this phase will be securing a partnership with our first batch of advertisers, editors and publishers. For this purpose, we will be reaching out to advertiser agents and enterprises willing to support our mission, which means potential new customers for their services and products. We have identified the following organisation already working and in good term with several authors in this genre:

• Menaibuc Editions
• AnyJart: History Institute
• Maat Kem Editions

The activities we will conduct during this phase are as follows:

1. Multiple trips to consult with prominent authors and subject matter experts. 
2. Round table discussions on the state of books editing, publishing industry 
3. The opportunities offered by DLTs and Cardano specifically: Our solution
4. Elaborate collaboration frameworks and secure verbal contracts to architect the platform

Lastly, we will be approaching high profile people in the community that are willing or have shown interest in sponsoring any book within our genre that they have read or heard of in the past and want to promote / encourage its reading. This phase will end with securing the partnerships mentioned above that will serve as base for the design and architecture phase of the project.

Platform: Design & Architecture - 9 months

This phase is about dividing our problem space into sub-problem that will lead to several bounded contexts, each of them focusing on one responsibility of the system, then determining how they integrate and communicate together. This is more of a logical and functional division of the problem space which will bring about the solution to the problem as well. During this phase, we will work with all stakeholders (readers, potential sponsors, potential advertising companies, authors …etc) to sketch out logical units, each of them focusing on solving one issue at a time from the big puzzle. Specifically, we will run several gathering sessions through which we will require all participants to write potential events of their interest that might arise from them interacting with the system. These events they capture will then be used by the architect to refine the design of the architecture of the whole system. Some example events in the interest of the reader could be: When a Book Club is created, When a new member joins the club, When a Book is added to the Club, When a reading Schedule is suggested …

We could have gone our way and suggest a complete architecture, but our experience on the field has taught us that it's always better to get all stakeholders involved as much as possible. This is even truer in this context.

In a specific way, we have identify the following essential components of the system:

IAM module (Identities and Accesses Management ). This module will be about controlling the access to the platform resources. It will allow for 

• Users to create their profiles
• Create groups such as Book Clubs, 
• Create roles
• Assign / unassigned users to / from groups
• Make group play roles
• …etc

Inventory module: This module will capture information about the stock of books we have available on the platform. Overall it is the module that will answer questions such as how many copies of a given NFBook do we currently have available. Potential use cases for this module are:

• Create a new book 
• Update a book
• Disable a book
• Count copies of a given book
• Is a given book in stock?

Search Engine: As its name indicates, this module will be designed mostly for researchers seeking information for their research papers / work. We plan to use symbolic AI concepts to offer innovative search algorithms that perform search in a holistic way as described in above sections.  

Catalog module: Displaying information about the books. Covers, title, cost …etc. This module is more about adding extra information on books in a nice and attractive format. It will work with the price module and many others to gather information of interest to display. 

• Add a new book
• Displaying price, promotions
• Displaying number of available copies
• …etc

Pricing module: This module's main function will be to define pricing strategies. It will work with other modules (Governance, Advertisement, reading Credit, and Author royalties management)

Reading Credit: Works with pricing, reading profile, sponsorship and advertising modules to determine what credit can be allocated to a user or group of users  

Reading Profile and Library: History and state of reading, User own library. Which books were bought by this user, Which book is this specific user reading, what page did he stop on? What did he bookmark? Next reading book? What is the user reading credit?

Recommendation module: Suggesting to users their next books to read. Works with the Reading Profile and History with an AI component to suggest best fit reading

Translation module: This module main function will be to manage translations and text to speech adds on to existing books. It is very important in the sense that most people in Cameroon actually only speak local languages and we intend to accompany each NFBook a multitude of audios content in several languages.

Book Club management module: Creating clubs, inviting members to join, selecting books to read and defining a schedule and a reading plan.

Advertisement management module: How , when and where they appear during reading. How much is distributed the user consuming it.

Sponsorship management: Adding, removing a sponsor to books.

Royalties management module: This module first of all captures authors information and works hand and hand with Inventory, pricing and sales, advertisement to determine what portion of the benefit goes to the authors. 

Orders module: Users can place orders, They can pre-order books that are still in the making, they can return / cancel a book they ordered as long as they have not been fully processed. This module works hand and ha with Payment and Reader profile

Sales modules: Captures all book sales in the system. 

Payment module: Users can manage their different payment method, KodiaCoin, Ada, Mobile-money, Visa, …

Conference management module: Create conferences, tagging books to a conference. Manage invites for authors and booking for virtual sits at the conference.

Treasury module: This is where donation / sponsorship and advertising money goes. It then works with reading credit, pricing and payment to determine what goes to who

Governance & Reputation module. This subsystem will serve the purpose of decision ranging from price strategies to sponsorship disbursement. It will allow community members to submit proposals for upgrades that will then be voted on by other members. 

All of the above module are a starting point for the design of the overall platform and will either be confirmed or extended after we bring in all the stakeholders together in the events capture session.

These specific actions will be performed:

1. Live workshop session to capture more information on the problem space
2. Live workshop session to identify sub-problem spaces using Domain Driven Design as tool
3. Live workshop session to deduce bounded contexts
4. Live workshop session to integrate bounded context to solve the big puzzle 
5. Elaborate a high level architecture showing how different components connect and interact. 

Technical considerations (Blockchain Integration)

We anticipate a few modules candidate for blockchain consideration: 

The IAM module will build on top of Atala Prism which will allow us to provide identifiers that can ultimately be interoperable. 

The governance and reputation module which are perfect candidates for blockchain as the type of data we will be producing here needs some consistency, security. Votes performed are also part of this subsystem.

The Inventory module which holds and tracks NFBooks will naturally be developed on the blockchain incorporating a multiple smart contract that will elaborate policies in different situations: Authors royalties, Advertisement money redistribution, …etc. 

The payment module which will incorporate several payment methods, KodiaCoin being one of them.

Specification documents and White paper - 2 months

This is a phase where we structure all the information gathered in previous phases in a specification document that will then be used to elaborate our white paper. The main deliverable here are

1. Specification doc including a high level of all the components and how they connect together
2. White paper. 

Platform Implementation - 18 months

DITC (Disruptive IT Cameroon) is a Wada Hub specializing in IT & Agriculture. DITC is in charge of implementing Wada’s Haskell and Plutus Education Initiative which was launched on June 1st starting with 5 interns: DITC uses a project based learning style and intends to use this project as a candidate for it.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Total Budget $52k

Research completion $3k

• Subject matter experts fees
• Trips and accommodation

Consultation & Contraction $6k

• Advertiser Subject matter experts fees
• Authors Subject matter experts fees
• Editor Subject matter experts fees
• Publisher Subject matter experts fees
• Translators Subject matter expert fees
• Sponsors Subject matter expert fees

Design & Architecture $9k

• DLT research upgrade
• Platform architecture design
• Search engine design and modeling

Implementation $24

• Subsystem implementation
• Subsystems integration
• Web and mobile clients

Digital Books design $3k

Deployment $3k

Marketing $4

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Nkalla: Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (Haskell), Mathematics teacher (Education Systems Engineering), Multilingual (French, Italian, English, Mbo)

Nkalla: Lead software architect of the platform.

Manfo: Cameroon Team Co-Lead, Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (F#, Haskell, Elm), Multilingual (French, English, Italian, Ngiembo)

Manfo: Lead software developer.

Kamwa: Senior Software developer in Closure 7 + years experience, Project manager, Multilingual (French, English, Medumba)

Kamwa: Software developer.

Mermoz: Researcher in African Crypto communication, writer, farmer, poet and engineer. 

Mermoz: Domain expert, also in charge of reaching out to potential authors, advertisers, sponsors, and securing contracts.

Lohic: Artificial Intelligence Expert, Researcher

Lohic in in charge of helping architect the search engine incorporating symbolic AI

Megan: Wada Cameroon Hub Co-Lead, Central Africa Coordination Lead, Wada core team member (Education and Event Lead), Maths & Physics teacher, bilingual (French & English) 

Megan will take care of the administrative tasks including coordinating events and meetings

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Probably not

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Our project extends to 4 main phases with deliverables that are easily measurable:

• Research completion
• Number documentation produced on the state of editing and publishing, selling of books: contracts, royalties …etc 
• Number of pre-collaboration contracts secured with potential authors producing material geared toward ancestral and historical knowledge, and potential advertisers, sponsors, editors and publishers supporting our mission.
• Number of trips and encounters with subject matter experts
• Secure partnerships
• Number of contracts with editing houses aligned with our mission
• Number of officially secured contracts with authors and other stakeholders
• Design & Architecture & implementation
• Number of bounded context (subsystems) identified
• Their integration
• Adoption
• Transaction volume on the platform
• Number of first time readers on the platform

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

Success for this project is multidimensional:

• Access to books: More readers anywhere, cheaper book, fun activities around reading
• More ownership and profit: For authors of an almost neglected genre
• A growing reading culture among local communities
• Lower cost for users of the platform
• A growing number of researcher using our engine to perform their tasks

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is a new proposal, however it is related to the work we started with Preserving Culture in Fund 6.