Thank you for your comment and welcome to the community as I can see that this is your first post on this forum. So @tobey which area you feel was not well answered because most of the answers to the questions are in the proposal.
And for the sake of emphasis, and to also provide more answers to @Hey_6ixx, we purposely did not request for the ZCG grant to run the maiden edition but we made it happened, because of key support we got and collaboration, which include:
- We got free accomodation for the residents developers for 21 days via goodwill.
- We secure free feeding for the residents developers for 21 days via same goodwill.
- We also had convenient workspace for the developers with internet supply via goodwill.
- in order for our residency programme to be successful, the residency provider installed a Zebra node to their 32 gig RAM/1TB computing machine and was used for the programme.
- Most sessions of the programme were live streamed & the residency facility provided the audio-visual equipment used.
- Running the residency in the chosen venue is far more cheaper & less expensive than doing it in other location facilities because of the relationship we have with owners of the residency facility, and remember we did not request for the ZCG grant to run it, so we had to do it with the infrastructural resources we have available by virtue of the collaboration and thus made transport support to those that attended, which is cheaper and better.
- For the record, the privacy server or hard ware talked about was not funded by ZCG but was acquired irrespective of its expensive nature because of the passion one has in advancing the adoption of the Zcash Privacy Blockchain Technology.
- Please you can show to me the smaller African communities mentioned with the visible results, stating the events, duration, privacy project contributed or executed, and the budget.
- It is key to note that most of the Zcash activities executed by different teams on the Zcash blockchain for the advancement of privacy technology, are always budgeted for, and compensation are paid as well to the team and those involved. Thus, it is only fair enough, that we do appreciate these facilitators for their contribution and time on each module.
Were there challenges in the maiden edition? Yes, there were challenges encountered and that is the reason for the improved approach in the second edition. For example
- While we had a residency Zebra node for the programme, we wanted each resident developer to run their personal node for an improved privacy, but some of their system crashed in the course of the installation, which was a set back to us. Thus, we deemed it necessary to resolve this challenge before the next edition & we were able to configure and install the Zebra node and the Zakura node separately into portable devices. We tested them and they worked, and we intend to give each of the resident developers one portable Zcash node as part of the residency swag to work with and take home, at the end of the programme, for further privacy project development on the Zcash blockchain. Each one of this portable Zcash node device cost 200 USD and 20 of them is 4000 USD.
- As we are aware, every venue used for an event, be it meetup or developers residency, is always paid for. And this we got for 300 USD for the whole accomodation and workspaces per day, which is then calculate for each day multiply by 21 days, as stated in the budget to get the actual figure. Also, similar calculation is applied in other budgeted areas of the proposal.
- We had each course module delivered for free in the maiden edition but this time around, we would like to compensate each module facilitator for their contribution and time as budgeted in the proposal.
- Participants were onboarded to the Zcash global community and we also introduced them to ZecHub, NozyWallet, & Gleyo-App, where they contributed and won some task bounties from ZecHub and they also volunteered to contribute to the NozyWallet.
- We introduced bounty pool to encourage the residents developers to contribute their best to the residency programme and to the Zcash Blockchain ecosystem projects at large. This is because bounty rewards help motivate developers to contribute their significant best to projects development.
- Finally, we packaged this proposal as a single month milestone because all activities will happen within and less than one month, in which all daily activity tasks will be documented and posted online for verification before final payment is made, but from the current feedback, the milestone section will be worked on, so as to split it into smaller units of deliverables. Thank you