The overall aim is to create content in regional languages that covers the vast majority of the population in India and make that content easily accessible.
Motivation:
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India is young in its demography where the youth are familiar with new technologies and internet penetration has grown in the country over the past few years. However, awareness about Cardano appears to be weak. There needs to be efforts for ease of access to content and publicity. The resources to learn about Cardano are not in a format that suits native speakers.
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The 2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index by Chainanalysis places India in second place for crypto adoption. However, the trading and investment activity is skewed towards Bitcoin and certain meme coins. We believe that the retail investors are primarily driven by awareness about just Bitcoin and in other cases by hype than fundamentals. The general population is yet to discover Cardano and its merits as a 3rd generation blockchain.
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India has a large pool of skilled professionals with the IT sector employing close to 5 million people. However there has not been much adoption of Cardano among the developer community with a lack of multilingual resources.
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Members of our team were fortunate to be mentored by experts from the global Cardano community and we would like to propage that among regional communities in India through our content in regional languages.
A quick perspective about languages in India:
At the time of Independence, India was formed as a union of states comprising different states and Union territories with distinct culture, language and lifestyle. To this day the diversity of languages has remained intact while culture & lifestyle has melded. That is primarily due to how different the languages are from each other. As a result language is an important attribute of the population that influences one's choice of profession, residence as well as education.
The distribution of speaker strength (as % of total population) for the top 10 languages (out of 22 specified in the constitution) is as follows.
Hindi : 43.63%
Bengali : 8.03%
Marathi : 6.86%
Telugu : 6.70%
Tamil : 5.70%
Gujarati : 4.58%
Urdu : 4.19%
Kannada : 3.61%
Odia : 3.10%
Malayalam : 2.88%
This data is sourced from the latest Census data (2011) published by the central government, which can be found here: https://censusindia.gov.in/2011Census/Language-2011/Statement-4.pdf
The census that was planned for 2021 has been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However it can be safely assumed the figures above have not significantly changed since 2011. Even though ~12% of the population is estimated to speak English, it's unlikely that the whole 12% have sufficient fluency to learn Cardano in English.
Our solution in detail
We will build an environment where people can learn about Cardano for its merit both academically and philosophically. This requires activities in three tracks:
Track 1 : Content creation
Track 2 : Accessibility and communication channel
Track 3 : Promotion and outreach
Regional languages covered and reasons for the choice:
We will cover 5 regional languages, namely Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.
We provide reasons for this choice, which we feel is important to know if you are reading this and you are not from India.
1. Hindi is spoken in the north of India and covers more than 40% of the total population. Hindi is well understood in the northern states even if the native language of the state is not Hindi and say for example Bengali.
2. The languages of the south are very different from Hindi and at the same time different from each other both in terms of script and grammar. As a result, it's important to cover those southern languages.
3. Covering all the languages or even the top 10 listed above, will stretch our efforts to ensure depth and quality of content and will inflate the budget requirements.
As a result, we will cover the aforesaid 5 languages spoken by 62.52% of the total population. In addition, Hindi is understood in most of the northern part of the country including states where Bengali (8.03 %), Marathi (6.86 %), Gujarati (4.58%), Urdu (4.19%) and Odia (3.1%) are spoken. As a result, with Hindi and the southern languages, the effective coverage will be greater, which in the best case scenario being ~90% of the total population.
Details of activities under each track
Track 1. Content creation:
1.1 Translate articles and documentation into regional languages.
The target audience here includes those with technology/programming background as well those outside the technology domain.
What is in scope for translation?
The content has to be diverse enough in terms of topics and difficulty to provide apt choice for each section of the audience.
We will start with the famous Why Cardano essay. https://why.cardano.org/en/introduction/motivation/
This is ideal for the start as it illustrates the philosophy of Cardano. A good part of the Cardano community is engaged in the ecosystem since they believe that it can change the world for the better. Further, on the technology side this masterpiece has stayed relevant. For example the foundations of the latest developments in Cardano related to sidechains and scaling can be traced back to the settlement layer sections in the essay. Given we are into the Basho phase, governance is the next key aspect and it's essential for new community members to understand Cardano holistically to participate in governance. Overall, the essay indeed articulates what makes Cardano a genuine blockchain compared to many others out there and these reasons make it important to start with.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of categories that will be subsequently covered in content creation:
Set 1:
- The ‘Why Cardano’ essay.
- Fundamentals of blockchain - Basics of cryptography, Consensus protocols, Decentralisaton, Staking and delegating, wallets and addresses, transactions and immutability.
- A who's who for the Cardano ecosystem. You can imagine this to be a directory to identify the must know entities, components and people in the Cardano ecosystem. Entities will cover popular projects and teams working in Cardano today like IOG,Cardano Foundation,Catalyst, Atala Prism and others like DEXes, DEFI platforms, resources like github repo, developer portal etc. People will cover official reps of IOG, Cardano Foundation and Catalyst. This information will be presented like a directory pointing to official websites/resources rather than duplicating the source. A certain advantage to this approach we see here is to provide guidance on how to navigate Cardano as well as have sufficient information to not fall into scams for audience new to Cardano.
Set 2:
- Blogs and articles published by IOG. The content that will be covered first will be related to e-UTXO model, Proof of Stake etc. Here we will be cherry picking content published by IOG with weightage to its significance.
- Important announcements from IOG that our team will select based on our knowledge about Cardano and community feedback.
- Write up about Plutus and Prism Pioneer programmes and how to participate in those.
- Notable examples of real world projects being built in Cardano. This is essential to inform people that Cardano can create an impact in everyone's life. Notable examples of Cardano partnering with governments like in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa will be covered as it shows reliability of Cardano.
Set 3:
This set is focussed on the technically aligned audience.
- Description of technical components - node, cli, wallet, address derivation, graphql, chain-index, ouroboros protocol etc.
- Setting up node and using the cardano-cli
- Minting native tokens and NFT using cli
- Using the serialization library (cardano-serialization-lib)
Wherever relevant, the content created will be marked with level of technicality or intended audience. For example, when we talk about the e-UTXO model, a developer needs to be provided in depth technical details whereas someone exploring Cardano blockchain for augmenting their business process or looking to invest in ADA may need to understand just the advantages of e-UTXO model. And so for such topics we will create a simple as well as an in depth version. We will start with topics like e-UTXO model, Proof of Stake. This lays the path for learners to understand the academic merits of Cardano and what makes it a truly decentralized, 3rd generation blockchain.
What is out of scope for content creation?
The academic whitepapers from IOG. We would not translate the research whitepapers at this stage since we think that the benefits of translating them specifically are less. It can indeed be taken up in future if needed.
We call out that through our content we will not be explicitly asking people to buy ADA. The goal is to generate awareness about Cardano for its genuine merits as a 3rd generation blockchain and we have to avoid being mistaken as a marketing scheme. However, we believe that raising awareness in itself will act bullishly for Cardano given the number of crypto users in India today.
1.2 Create audio & visual content in regional languages.
We will make videos in regional languages for relevant subjects from the translated content, latest announcements from IOG and latest events in the Cardano ecosystem. These are intended to be short videos to be uploaded on platforms like Youtube in the 5 languages we cover. The focus will be to reuse the content we prepare and convert the medium of delivery to audio/video.
Track 2 : Accessibility and communication channel
It has to be ensured that the content created is easily accessible to the public and that there is a channel for the audience and our team to interact.
For accessibility, a website will be created that will host all the translated material that is created as well as list out the audio/visual material. Internet penetration in India has grown significantly over the past few years with the rollout of 4G. People own mobile phones even in remote areas, a web based repository will reach the most number of people. The website will be developed in parallel to the content creation so that the content can be made available for consumption soon after creation.
Discord channels will be set up for each regional language for the audience to interact with each other or with the content creation/guidance team. These channels will allow them to collect continuous feedback from the community so that content can be aligned with their needs and interests.
What is in scope for the website?
- A repository of all content created.
- Users can discover translated content based on topics.
What is out of scope for the website?
- Value added features like discussion forums. We intend to leverage the communication channels for discussions at present.
- Ability for the community to create and curate content. We consider this a good feature, but due to resource constraints it is not scoped in at this time.
Track 3: Outreach and promotion
Outreach activities:
For community members who would like to implement a project with Cardano or submit a proposal in upcoming Catalyst Funds, we will share our experience and guidance. Some of our team members have been developing in Cardano and also have got multiple funded proposals as well as delivered proposals from Fund 6 and Fund 7. We can guide the regional community on how to set up Cardano nodes for testnet and mainnet, use the cardano-cli for making transactions or minting native tokens, write Plutus smart contract and test with the PAB simulator, how to interact with browser based wallets from web app using the serialization library and so forth. We will be able to act as a sounding board for ideas as well as troubleshooting challenges for the native speakers. We will also be available to facilitate events such as meetups or hackathons.
Promotion activities:
We will engage in active promotion to a reasonable extent so as to spread the word about the regional content and website. While social media channels are the default medium of promotion, it is likely that our information can get lost in the clutter on social media or that not all sections/age-groups of the society are reached. So we intend to supplement social media publicity with traditional mediums like newspapers. We will publish news in the vernacular newspapers about the website and the communication channels.
Future scope
In future, we would like to package the content we created into a ‘structured course’. For this, we will collaborate with other entities within the Cardano space like Gimbalabs which conducts structured Project Based Learning courses.
Enhancements to the website depending on user feedback and additional of value added features like regional discussion forums.
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The challenge intends to grow the community of developers and educators. Our regional content will help native speakers to learn about Cardano. The website and communication channels will act as discussion forums and inform them about pioneer programmes and how to get involved. The outreach activities will take the information to those who are not aware of Cardano. The talent is definitely there. It can be assumed that there will also be sufficient interest to get involved. What is lacking is the ease of information access and guidance for the local population. This project intends to bridge that gap.
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This challenge recognises that IT in India is well established with a large pool of talent but that the majority is yet to know about Cardano and the Catalyst funding. Given the language diversity and the statistics about the number of native speakers compared to English speakers in India, we believe that our regional language content, website and outreach activity will boost developer adoption. Cardano has a steep learning curve and it takes time to be a reasonably good Plutus developer, let alone mastering Plutus. Though there are a large number of professionals in the IT industry, almost all of them have their day jobs and are unlikely to find the time to research Cardano and learning opportunities. This solution provides a one stop place for Cardano content in regional languages for easy learning.
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The challenge accurately describes the Indian scenario like a big heavy wheel that will take a lot of energy to get turning. This project intends to add momentum for growing the community and development teams resulting in an increase in proposals in upcoming Catalyst funds.
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Health challenges like Covid can reduce availability of human resources and delay our delivery timeline.