andytudhope/merrymerkle.africa

Repo for the Merry Merkle Goes to Africa Project

Making a Difference in Real Life With Crypto

Hello good people!

Last year, some friends hosted something called Merry Merkle. It was a Christmas donation campaign with a simple website and leaderboard that encouraged people from all over the world to donate a little crypto to those in need (in this case, it was a Children's Home in Toronto). They were very, very successful.

I would like to propose that we do something similar this year in Africa, and have just the place in mind which could really benefit from something like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAUup82RAXU

As you all know, education is one of our major goals at Status. If we want to build a better web, we need to make sure that we're taking people along with us on that epic journey. As you may not know, education in South Africa is my home country's single greatest post-apartheid failing. Particularly where my family lives, in the Eastern Cape, the education system borders on criminally negligent.

As a response, some friends started their own school, and have been educating around 100 local children for the last decade. It's called, appropriately, African Angels. The school offers an independent curriculum and education, and is one of the only hopes these kids have of a better life.

I think it would be great to set up a similar site and drive to what happened with Merry Merkle, but I want to get some of you out there, on the ground, meeting the kids and teachers, and hacking together in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Details

1. The website will go live in November, and there is the chance to help remotely get it all set up, QA'ed, secured and ready to accept donations.
2. The online campaign will run from December 10th - December 31st 2018.
3. We will be holding the in-person event in Cintsa East, South Africa from the 10th to the 17th of December.
4. We will be using an exchange in South Africa and some private volunteers to help get the crypto from Ether into Rand. We can only really accept ETH at this stage. If anyone has any bright ideas about how to use SNT as well, they would be welcome cc @rramos @barry @ricardo3 @yessin
5. I have accommodation for 10-12 people.
6. We will be attending the last 2 days of school with the kids (the 10th and 11th), perhaps helping with a coding class if we can organise that in time, watching their end of year concert and generally learning about the school.
7. For the other 5 days, we will be building a class with our own hands, because social impact is not just about software.

The school really, really needs this donation campaign. They'll be opening a high school next year and, so far, have no donors for it. It is completely funded by donations due to the, frankly, shocking nature of education in rural South Africa and so this project being a success is really important for them

You'll get to spend a week in the most beautiful part of South Africa (which is really saying something) having magical beach bonfires, building classrooms, meeting kids, listening to beautiful songs and generally making a small difference. I can't think of anything better...

Testing The Site Locally

Make sure you have node.js installed first.

1. Open Terminal and navigate to the project root directory,
2. Run npm install,
3. Run ./node_modules/.bin/gulp build,
4. In another terminal, run ./node_modules/.bin/hexo serve,
5. This prevents the need for any global installs, and will allow you to have live reloading for any changes you are making.