Impact Bounty Explainer Project Connect

we're a team within UNICEF who focus on essentially preparing the organization for emerging text and exploring where emerging tech can help us in our work and we have a blockchain team that's been around experimenting since 2015 I'm not going to talk about all of our blockchain explorations because we have a particular project that we want to talk to you about today excuse me so I have with me today Noah and Marcela who work on our project connect initiative and I'll let them talk to you a little bit about that and we also have a bounty that's connected with project connect so we'll get into that and happy to answer any questions you have particularly about project connect and the bounty for this weekend at East New York so yeah we'll start giving an overview of the project what is it and what we are trying to achieve through that and I've not I don't really need to explain this is led to much especially if we are talking about emerging tech blockchain etc we know that the very basic fundamental that you first need its Internet so if you don't have connectivity all this amazing tech that we are all creating it's useless you cannot make it work or you cannot have access to it and that's one of the issues that we face in many of the places where UNICEF works that this connectivity to bring many opportunities but at the same time it's increasing the gap in between the ones that have access to to these digital goods that are being created and the ones that don't have access to it and this is something that as UNICEF innovation we are trying to solve and for that one of the initiatives that we have it's around schools so UNICEF traditionally works a lot with schools and that's when we started asking the question so if you look at this map and this was 18 months ago this is Mauritania seen through the lens of a map and if we ask you the question of where are the schools and if we ask you to locate them would be very difficult to do it's a very simple questions and and you would assume that we have the answer but then the reality is that many governments don't know where their schools are or the data around the location of these schools it's not accurate many times so that's were freely connect started and this is how the Mauretania looks after the mapping the dots in this map are school locations and the triangles are cell towers and the schools are colored based on their new coverage mobile coverage the the ones in blue are the ones that have 2d the ones in orange Deewani the ones that have 3d and the ones in red are the schools with no connectivity at all I'm the red areas are not only the places where there is no connectivity it's also a proxy for vulnerabilities it means that in this areas it will be more likely for a disease to spread or it will be way harder to for learning materials to reach to supplies to the liver etc etc at the end it'll be harder for even if we want to have a vaccination campaign for example will be way harder to reach this course so it goes way beyond the learning itself but at the same time we also see it as an opportunity where new businesses can go their mobile operators can reach new new users and take companies can also get access to to new markets and that's where we are trying to come in and try to untap this opportunity that we see happening so since that time the project has advanced and today we have over half million schools mapped in different countries and we have connectivity data for more than 120 thousand of them we are also exploring new technologies to do this mapping more quickly or at scale so we are actually exploring the use of satellite imagery and machine learning to automatically map schools and then we are also looking to other technologies to to increase the efficiencies and what we are seeing now as well is that this map actually it's living into action so in Kyrgyzstan the government thanks to the mapping was able to to understand which schools were connected and which was not and thanks to the mapping they committed to Cornette the remaining 700 schools the Internet this work started in October November and since then they've already connected over 400 schools and they are hoping to finish the work in the in the coming months so this is where we are now and we are thinking on the next step of using creating a mechanism that will start delivering or negotiating with providers for connectivity and this is where we are also trying to think how they platform the current version of their platform should look like so that can fill the requirements for this connectivity so what we are seeing is that we need to have a proper system to monitor connectivity in real time because many times the providers deliver the connectivity and they report some numbers to the government but the numbers don't match with reality or they only report these numbers once a year and then you don't really know what's the quality of the service day to day so we realized that proper accountable transfer transparent manner to monitor this connectivity in real time it's really needed and at the same time also a more transparent way to to do the whole process of interacting with the service providers make them accountable and make sure that whatever the government is paying for it's being delivered at the same time so yeah that's where we are and I'm gonna let no Marcela explain a little bit what we think look change some of that we can so you all are here today because you're interested in blockchain so how does blockchain fit into all of this we see that there are four main areas and as Niroula mentioned really the way that this can come in is around accountability and transparency so how can you use distributed ledger systems in really low resource areas which is where mostly where UNICEF works so there's four ideas up here one is an idea around an application that will connect donors to districts so if you look at a region how can a donor at a very high level so not an individual but think a government or a major NGO that would be putting in like a million plus dollars how can they look at a district and get an assessment of the connectivity in that area at the same time how could ISPs bid on providing connectivity to the tax districts so if you see that only 30% of the schools in that area are covered how can an isp go in take an assessment and make an accurate and fair bid on that and then how can governments and the public view all of this as it's happening in a way that there is accountability and then finally how could we use smart contracts to make sure that the connectivity is actually delivered as we expect so if a network provider has gotten a contract and says that they're going to provide be providing a certain speed or level of connection and they're only providing it ten days out of the month then how could we perhaps use smart contracts to get another person in line and have them safer so I'm gonna put up just a short slide of technical specifications I won't go too deeply into it but just to give you an initial overview of what the kind of data that we're working with at this point is like so we have some school data that we get generally from governments and what it looks like there's some administrative level data such as where it is what you know municipality it's in what kind of school it is things like that and then we have connectivity data that is coming from probes that's checking what's what's this beep what's the connection like we can go back to this later if there are questions and so what I do at UNICEF is I am a software developer that's actually not working on this blockchain project I work on a different project and we are doing a map visualization around many different things but this in particular is around connection and as another all I said what we've been doing so far is when we get information it's not in real time so we might get a monthly update we might get a yearly update but we're not having real-time data and so what we're looking to do today is we're hoping that people who are interested in this project can help us start to piece all of these different aspects together and get things into a map that will be sort of public and open and transparent thanks guys conversation steena yeah so UNICEF France has put up a bounty for ten beef to work on the four elements that Marcella mentioned and so there's also the details on the bounty is that bitly / I can also pull it up and but we've essentially outlined those four elements and for the bounty we're asking for two of the four elements we complete in my feet yeah so this is the bounty and then it's broken up into the four buckets that Marcello was talking about so the first is how do you actually get funding from donors whether those be individuals institutions our government to a specific region the second part is how do you get companies to actually arise East to bid on providing connectivity for that area the third bucket is how do you ensure that the connectivity speeds are the real speeds so you're not having like principals writing on a form and mail those in I'm so using something like probes or software in their schools to record that and write that directly on chain and then the fourth is around the management of those contracts so there's four buckets to the bounty but essentially building on building on what's already there from the project just for for Ethan here yes so this is all one project it's all they're all interrelated the four components mean those are just our criteria for completion yeah you could you could work on something else in and submit died because they told me just wish I said there so that we'd have to check with the equal team I that I'm not familiar with we can we can go talk to the global team afterwards that's not about yeah we can do that and they may be able to be that and we hopefully would be able to integrate these submissions with a visualization that we are creating eventually so that they new functionalities are also part of the solution that we are meeting and if this is something you're interested in working on beyond this we can we can also look at the possibility if they're being follow on bounties that are just open to the public afterwards to work on these types of projects there's like a big one sort of whenever right for this weekend yeah other question no cool well we'll hang around here if you have any other questions otherwise thanks for joining us