Grant Proposal for Zk Av Club Community Support 2025

[ryan.taylor]

Building a Global Community

The topic of Zk Av Club Foundry Session 02 is—on a larger scale—the overarching theme of the entire series. We are builders. The people working on Zcash, across various organizations and adjacent communities, are building what we believe will create a better future. We are constructing the future we want to exist—not just for ourselves, but beyond our individual lifespans. We’re building different things, and we’re not all building together. Each of us is working on what we know best to creat…

[ryan.taylor]

Evolution in real time. Don't just watch

Zk Av Club is constantly evolving, and Foundry is becoming a driving force behind that evolution. Last month kicked off with a successful reprise of Foundry #2 on Free2z, also streamed live to the Zcash Global Discord. The session featured our team in conversation about the pillars of global community building—and the potential pitfalls to watch out for. One of the clearest barriers to entry we’ve identified is communication: not just the tools, but the language itself. Since Zk Av…

[ryan.taylor]

Helping Communities Document Themselves: Zk Av Club Foundry 6-Month Update

With Zero-knowledge Audiovisual Club (Zk Av Club), we’re taking a grassroots approach to media-making—one that depends on cooperation, hyper-flexibility, and deep connection to the communities we’re part of. To build a living, historical audiovisual archive with them, for them, and by them, we need to stay in tune with their needs (a moving target) and the emergent tools that can truly help. We’re about empowerment—through knowledge, skills, and experience. Always with a focus on privacy, free …

[ryan.taylor]

Go slow, get organized, come hang out – Zk Av Club Foundry Update

Timelines get announced. Circled in pen. Hung on the horizon like a structure—something to move toward, something you can lean on. But not. The work spreads—sideways, upward, spilling past its edges. Every “just one more thing” sticks like wet paper until the original shape disappears. A swollen, muttering mass sits where the clean idea used to be. The mark on the calendar just stares back. When the moment arrives, the room thins. Light bends strange. A stillness—like the pause before a storm…

[ryan.taylor]

[Request for Guidance] Can Zk Av Club Foundry team be paid from the grant's community prize pool?

Hi Zcashers! We’re rolling out community-led workshops for the Zk Av Club Foundry @ZCG grant and want to sanity-check compensation rules with you all, the Zcash community. From the accepted proposal: Services (community prize pool): $8,000 in ZEC — for community contributions replacing “cloud” services and incentivizing engagement. Compensation: $40,000 — for the core team’s curriculum design and production work, paid per module. It also notes that advisors may produce supporting conte…

[ryan.taylor]

We are the media. We are not content | Zk Av Club Foundry Update

Begin at the pulse, not the camera. Hands warm. Breath in the room. Eyes level. A community is a body—breathing, tiring, healing. It has scar tissue and new skin, calluses from work, bruises from last time. Point a lens at a wound and call it a story, and you’ve harvested it. Sit with it, feed it, learn its rhythm; then the camera can follow without taking. Self‑care isn’t luxury. It’s scaffolding and tendon—what keeps the weight from tearing through the frame. Hydrated schedules, boundaries …

[ryan.taylor]

Zk Av Club Foundry #8:

Privacy-first calls & workshops with open-source + P2P tech

We’re comparing Jitsi, VDO Ninja, BigBlueButton, and MiroTalk — then help decide what works best for you.

19 September 2025 • 17:00 UTC

RSVP: https://luma.com/phj0ztmh

Watch LIVE and join the discussion in chat:

Privacy‑First P2P: Open‑Source Tools for Calls & Workshops - Zk Av Club Foundry #8

Full show agenda and audience guide: CryptPad

[ryan.taylor]

Don’t miss this Zk Av Club Foundry Workshop by @gordonesTV! En español

Edit your first video with KDEnlive!

Edit your first video with KDEnlive | Zk Av Club Foundry Workshop

[ryan.taylor]

Zk Av Club Foundry — September 2025 Update

TL;DR: In September we advanced privacy‑first community events, ran a Spanish Kdenlive primer and an English Speech‑to‑Text workshop, and shipped clear, reusable workflows for recording, captions, and publishing.

Highlights

• Salon #8 on privacy‑first calls and workshops (P2P → self‑hosted), with a clear path from small P2P rooms to self‑hosted setups.
• Two hands‑on workshops: Spanish (Kdenlive basics) and English (Speech‑to‑Text with Whisper).

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Foundry Salon #8 — “Privacy-First P2P: Open-Source Tools for Calls & Workshops”

Privacy‑First P2P: Open‑Source Tools for Calls & Workshops - Zk Av Club Foundry #8

Key takeaways

• Start with peer‑to‑peer for small groups (VDO.Ninja, MiroTalk P2P).

• Scale via an SFU when needed (Jitsi on meet.jit.si or self‑hosted) and provision TURN.

• Recording/streaming: Jibri for server‑side, or OBS → RTMP from the presenter; always announce recordings.

• For teaching features, consider BigBlueButton (whiteboard, classroom tools).

• Accessibility: provide captions/transcripts so sessions are searchable and easy to revisit.

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Foundry Workshop (Español)

Host: @gordonesTV

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/iQmI3cRj6Do

Focus: Kdenlive primer—set up, edit, export.

• Kdenlive basics: open‑source, cross‑platform; MP4 support; when 1080p is enough vs. 4K.

• Project setup: pick profiles (1080p YouTube, vertical); match frame rate (25–30 fps).

• Timeline & edits: import media, organize tracks, cut/move clips.

• Export: MP4 with a sensible bitrate for the web.

Foundry Workshop (English)

Host: @ryan.taylor

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/LccHT7tXiu4

Focus: End‑to‑end Speech‑to‑Text tools.

• Cloud vs. local: local Whisper = privacy and predictable cost.

• Models & performance: choose size for accuracy vs. speed; GPU acceleration helps.

• Workflow: Whisper CLI → VTT/SRT/TXT/JSON; edit SRT carefully to keep timestamps.

• Publish & QA: upload captions to YouTube or import into an NLE (Premiere/Resolve/Kdenlive); quick pass for names/punctuation.

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Community impact (September)

• Clear path for private events: start P2P, scale to Jitsi when needed; use consent scripts and keep recording off by default.

• Smoother live ops: shared run‑of‑show checklists, audio/lighting tips, and backup room links.

• Editing onramp (Spanish): Kdenlive profiles, tidy timelines, and sensible MP4 exports lowered the barrier for first‑time editors.

• Accessible archives: Whisper‑based captions (VTT/SRT) published to YouTube or into NLEs made sessions searchable and reusable.

• Consistent outputs: shared presets and caption QA steps reduced time‑to‑publish and improved quality across the community.

zkav.club — don’t just watch.

All links (one place):

• Salon #8: https://youtu.be/Ig8RQMpMQjw

• Workshop (ES) by @gordonesTV: https://youtu.be/iQmI3cRj6Do

• Workshop (EN) by @ryan.taylor: https://youtu.be/LccHT7tXiu4

[ryan.taylor]

The end of September marks the end of the third quarter. I’d like to request payment from @ZCG for Milestone #2 and thank them again for supporting the development of Zk Av Club Foundry Salon and Workshops.

Following up with the community on this: [Request for Guidance] Can Zk Av Club Foundry team be paid from the grant's community prize pool?

We’ve decided that Zk Av Club Foundry team members who are paid from the grant cannot receive compensation from the community prize pool.

While we’re on the topic, I would like to ask for the remaining community prize pool funds (2000 USD) that would be included in the final milestone, at the end of the year, in order to have enough time for paying it out to community participants.

[ryan.taylor]

Fall Update: Zk Av Club Foundry

Here’s what we’ve been up to this fall with Zk Av Club Foundry — Salon and Workshops

Salon

At the end of October, we hosted Foundry Salon as an X Space that was also streamed to YouTube by @robmarn. It’s a 100-minute deep dive into our Recording Station at Dark Prague:

ZK AV Dark Prague Recording Station: Recap (Livestream)

This ended up being our quietest Foundry Salon session of the year in terms of live community interaction. That said, it’s now a solid long-form resource for anyone curious about how we’re thinking about production tooling and on-location infrastructure for Zk Av Club.

Workshops

Since September, the Foundry team has been focused on designing and deploying the Workshops part of our program. Our co-captains @AuraBritoSM and @gordonesTV have been leading comms with community hosts, and workshops are now going live!

Introduction To Livestream Production by Ogaga Onose @ogasky (EN)

Workshop De Open Toonz by Maria Milano (ES)

Edición para todos: Shotcut by Carla Zerpa (ES)

Everything we do with Zk Av Club is an experiment and we’re learning a lot as we build the Workshops program with this mindset. Expect to see some dramatic evolution here in the 2026 version of Zk Av Club Workshops.

Extra! Extra!

We’ve received positive feedback from Zcashers about the new skills they’ve picked up, and we’re already seeing those skills show up in their work and collaborations.

Michae2xl ᙇ

Finally, don’t miss Zcash Engineering Office Hours #1 on Tuesday! Keep an eye out for translation streams in Spanish and Portuguese

🛡️

Thanks <3

Huge thanks to @ZCG for funding Zk Av Club Foundry — Salon and Workshops — for 2025. Building this community-based educational series has been a lot of fun.

[gordonesTV]

It has been a year full of learning, trials, and adjustments.

We have seen the power of community education, as well as the power of collecting testimonials and interviews from events happening in the ecosystem.

The work of the Zk Av Club is bearing fruit today, creating a historical archive of what is happening in the ecosystem today.

[ryan.taylor]

Here’s the final update for Zk Av Club Foundry, along with details about everything else the club did through 2025:

Zk Av Club 2025 Wrap-up

Documenting ourselves (in public, together) 2025 was the year Zk Av Club started to become what it was always supposed to be: not a “content pipeline,” not a top‑down media brand, but a small set of tools + rituals that help communities record their own stories. [Zk Av Club Recording Station: Devconnect 2025] This post is a recap of the public activities we ran (and the receipts: links, livestreams, recordings). If you want the whole picture, check out the full timeline. What happened in 20…

Thank you @ZCG for helping to make 2025 a landmark year for Zk Av Club.

Onward, together!