anhdres-monero-garden.md

layout: wip
title: Monero Garden
author: anhdres
date: September 30, 2022
amount: 71
milestones:
  - name: Texts and structure done
    funds: 30
    done: 31 May 2024
    status: finished
  - name: Illustrations and animations done
    funds: 30
    done:
    status: unfinished
  - name: Website up
    funds: 11
    done: 31 May 2024
    status: finished
payouts:
  - date: 18 June 2024
    amount: 41
  - date:
    amount:
  - date:
    amount:

Monero Garden

The idea

The Monero Garden would initially be a website available at monero.garden, that worked as a clean and friendly space to start someone's Monero journey. Is a resource I wished many times existed when I told someone about Monero. The naming has two reasons: it acts as a Monero kindergarten of sorts, the starting point of your education, where you learn without any dread; but also as a real garden, with paths you can graciously take and effortlessly stroll at your own pace while discovering new things on the way.

Its language, both visual and writing, should be approachable for a 11 year old and above. Trying my best to keep it clean of technical wording, yet making it engaging for an adult as well. It's a difficult balance but I think it's worth pursuit it.

I want to try a different approach to the rest of Monero content I've seen so far, kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where the questions that pop inside the reader's head guide the consumption of the material, and not presenting (if possible) information that wasn't felt the need for. The aim is relevancy, which should maximize retention and engagement.

I believe that the pre-adolescents are specially important to talk to. They are starting their financial life earlier and earlier, the boundaries of real money and virtual money are going to be as dilluted as ever, so if they find Monero soon enough, they could be a strong agent of change and help avoid the dystopian version of that merge. Believe it or not, we (I'm older than 40 now) are not the future anymore. Luckily we're still the present, so there's a lot we can do!

Layout

Overall, it's design should mimic children picture books. Their design is not accidental. They display images and succinct text on almost every page, which don't work in a redundant way, but complement each other. Clean, minimal background and bold, colorful illustrations. A consistent character design and color palette. If needed to reinforce a concept, the illustrations could be short animations.

At the start page, the visitor would be faced with three choices. In my interactions with newcomers, those three I've noticed are the main starting points of everyone's Monero path:

• How to use Monero.

• Why to use Monero.

• How Monero works.

Each choice would take the visitor to a different path, of increasing length. According to my notes, how to use it is the shortest and how it works the longest. The way I envision it, besides navigation and a general menu, each page would have four elements:

• The illustration

• The short, bold statement.

• A longer, yet brief explanation of the statement above.

• An option to expand the topic if interested, like footnotes or links to outside sources to explore.

Scope

To me, making it a website is the most effective initial form. It's big and clean, and can be accessed almost everywhere. For obvious reasons to this community, it should also be accesible via Tor and i2p. So a working, fully functional website with those three content branches is the scope of this proposal.

The nature of the idea makes it very versatile to use as basis for a book in both physical and electronic forms, a series of animated, narrated videos, or even an app. These formats are outside of the scope of this proposal but if the material is good enough to engage people I think all those mediums would have their merits.

The initial material would be in English, but obviously I see the appeal of having it translated in as many languages as possible, since it's particularly targeted towards newcomers.

Rights

I plan to release this material with either a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license that allows anyone to obviously access it for free (it's a website) but also create derivative works, translate it, or distribute it freely, as long as credit is mantained and it's not exploited commercially.

Budget