Monero Garden

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

Based on my experience, I think this first stage will take roughly 3 months. I plan to allocate 4 hrs per day to this project. At an hourly rate of 40 USD, that's 4 hrs x 60 working days = 9600 USD.

I'd also need help with the technical aspects of setting up the server and different access. For what I could gather, it would take a 20 hours of work, which at the same rate of 40 USD/h amounts to 800 USD.

At the current XMR price of 145 USD/XMR, it would be 71 XMR.

I plan to pay domain, hosting, and other small expenses out of that budget. If the traffic were so big it demanded a considerable investment, I'd consider either open a new request for funds, or looking into other possible solutions that wouldn't cause any extra cost for the community.

Relevant information about me

I've worked as creative director, illustrator, copywriter, and animator for the past 15 years. You can take a look at some of my commercial work at Sloop Studio.

In the Monero world, I've been in the community since 2017, since then I've worked alongside with @m2049r and @Baltsar in Monerujo, doing content, communications, support, and UX. One example would be the articles explaining features or concepts behind Monero.

I've worked alongside @serhack in both Mastering Monero and serhack.me, doing all the illustrations.

Worked with @rehrar on designs for Cypher Market and Cypher Stack. Also materials for @msvblab's Monero Devices. As well as designs for several Monero-related projects and individuals.

Hosted the short lived El Monero podcast together with @rottenwheel, and gave out a few public talks and interviews introducing Monero to the Spanish-speaking public.

On a related note, I've made the illustrations for the newest Tails redesign and I keep working closely on their support materials.

That's pretty much all I can think of right now, be sure to ask away!

anhdres is one of the hardest working and talented artist in the Monero community. I think this is a great idea and it has my full support.

I think that this is a great idea!! We need easy-to-understand material and Andrés is a very talented person. I support it.

It is a fantastic idea! anhdres is a very active member in the monero community and is very good in graphic design. This project has all my support.

Can't think of a better person to drive this, let's get this approved and funded ASAP as there is a huge need for a resource like this!

Grateful to you for taking this on, @anhdres.

C'mon, I'd be the one grateful if I get support to work that focused on a Monero resource!

I love this idea, and support the CCS. I have known Anhdres through Monero-related collaborations since 2018, and we worked together on Mastering Monero, so I can attest to both the quality of the work and professionalism. Additionally, Anhdres has demonstrated excellent ability to illustrate Monero concepts very clearly, e.g. I believe this article is easily the most approachable explanation of Monero's accounts/wallets/etc structure: https://anhdres.medium.com/how-moneros-accounts-and-subaddresses-work-in-monerujo-4fa7df0a58e4

Thanks @anhdres, looking forward to the garden :)

Thanks Mitchell! So glad you like the article, it's one of my favorites. I hope you like the garden too!

I think it's a good proposal. I think the public image of Monero has a lot of room for improvement. The Monero garden is an opportunity for young people, boys and girls. I have no objection to it. I support the proposal.

I have worked with Andhres for many years and I can honestly admit that he's a master in digital art. Every project I committed him was successful and frankly I do not know a better illustrator in my life. Andhres knows really well Monero and its background so I'm sure that he'll the best person to develop this project and release it. Wishing him good luck!

I always say that you need to know more illustrators haha, but thanks for the support Mr. Serhack (and the luck, I'll need it)

Really like this idea and feel it should move forward to finding required.

Though, it might be a good idea (just a suggestion) to include a note/section about when payouts would be required (perhaps with monthly milestones?), and what the fallback plan would be for an abrupt XMR price change over the course of the project.

Oh, just now I notice that the milestones are not visible in the proposal, I completed them in the CCS document according to the required specs. I set up three main deliverables, all texts first, then all artwork, then the website setup and accessibility.

Regarding XMR price changes, I have no good idea. Of course the safest would be to receive it all beforehand, convert it to any stable thing (is there such a thing, nowadays?) and not risk it. I don't have a better idea, but I'm open to suggestions. I was just going to risk it because XMR has been pretty stable above $120, so I guess I'm a believer.

merged

mentioned in commit 1c6aed27

Ok, time for a progress report!

As I planned, the Monero Garden is divided in three main paths. I've been working writing and mostly editing down what I write. I've learned that it's not that complicated for me to write about Monero stuff, but very hard to keep it shorter and simpler.

I've using a single markdown file, then grew to using Obsidian to connect all the paths somehow (love the visualizations), but ended up using Notion (yeah I know, not self hosted) because of the organizational mix between kanban columns and separate "pages" works very easy. It will allow me to share it online as it gets polished to a proper form. Then I'll add the images, and then program the whole thing to be its own website, self hosted, Tor accessible, and probably post the whole thing as a Github project for anyone to contribute or pull/push/merge and all those things the cool kids do.

Text status, first path (how-to) is almost complete, 11/15 "pages" done. Second path (the why) is 6/14 done. Third path (how Monero works) is 8/20 and counting. They all grew double the size I was calculating (8 pages aprox per section) and this third one will definitely grow even more, as I put more and more concepts in.

It may not look like much, but sincerely took me too long to understand how to write this, how to organize it, etc. As soon as I have a first complete version done, I'll publish and open it to feedback, I'm afraid that if I do it at this stage, changes will make me divide attention too much and take forever.

when ccs?

Good news! tl;dr: I have a first complete version of the texts done and live at monero.garden

Many things changed from the latest update, like a year ago. I had to update many of the pages that I had already written, merged some, split some apart, etc. I think it makes more sense now. Scope of course grew from the original spec: 17 pages on the first branch, 47 on the second, and 11 on the third.

I think this current version is perfectly functional, and I'm of course ready to make edits based on feedback which I'm sure will start coming as people read it!

With the assistance of Pluja from kycnot.me we managed to set it up on Github so anybody can suggest edits, post issues, etc. We're using Quartz to bring my Obsidian files into a static website that doesn't use anything funky nor tracks anyone of course. We'll keep tinkering with the UI based on feedback and usability tests.

With both text and website delivered, I hope I can get 45 XMR out of the total 71 XMR (roughly 2/3rds) released. The remaining payment to be received once I add the illustrations to it.

It's been too long (and not going to lie, a bit painful at times), but I'm happy to see this project finally out there and I hope I can keep growing it and polishing it so it becomes a great resource for the community. I hope you like it.

@anhdres I need a current address from you for payment. You can DM me on IRC and post some characters here, or post the whole thing here if you don't mind it being public.

@plowsofff here's a dedicated subaddress to be used for CCS payments:

8912dQueuKRUd4CUsevH1ta6WFPnRuEKMGGqk3f7wiAKE6YDiWDYi6Sjm3QrPJPGvZJctuapudYcCMwSzAUzKVYiSSDmxph

Thank you.

As per !537 you are invited to share progress / updates on your proposal at the bi-weekly meetings which can be found in the monero-meta repository under issues.

The garden repo is active.