Near Newspaper

Near Newspaper is a Near on-chain editor where you could type and format your text and ideas, play with colors, fonts & images, export, share and collect feedback on your newspaper on Near blockchain.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this product came from three schools in Limpopo province of South Africa. The learners from Mmaweshi, Driehoek, and Katane schools created their own newspapers and wrote articles dealing with issues that are important to them. They shared their newspapers with their communities to inform them about their schools and lives.

What it does

We wish to create a Near-powered authoring and self-publishing platform to support the development of community newspapers and publications on Near blockchain, thereby encouraging the development of an eco-system based on the foundation of sharing of ideas and active collaboration among the community members.

Near Blockchain-powered solution Features:

  1. Content design and formatting capabilities.
  2. Five sets of newspaper templates.
  3. A “Create your own template” tool to create layouts of your choice through different-sized and formatted text and photo boxes. Ability to share these templates and get feedback on improvements in content and presentation on Near blockchain.
  4. Ability to import pictures from the clipboard.
  5. Additional fonts that are related to the newspapers.
  6. Ability to share your newspapers with other community members and get feedback on Near blockchain.

Near Blockchain Modules:

  • Near-low code framework tools and community tooling for editor and analytics platform: Secure data storage, transparent data movement, data analytics, and data authenticity using Near-low code tools.

  • Feedback Report Management on Near Blockchain: We are also utilizing Near Protocol to receive newspaper feedback reports by educators and community members, store feedback details so that the newspaper creators could strategize more productively, and do early-stage improvements in presentation and content structuring.

  • Near's user content NFT registration module is to enable users to register their citizen IDs as well as their contact address details in a decentralized manner. We are also developing an NFT marketplace using Near blockchain for the generated newspaper content to incentive newspaper content authors and publishers.

  • We are also using and extending the Rust smart contract template on Near blockchain for Near Newspaper dapp modules.

How we built it

We have built Near Newspaper using Javascript, HTML5, and CSS on the front end and Near Blockchain:

  • Near-low code framework tools and community tooling for editor and analytics platform: Secure data storage, transparent data movement, data analytics, and data authenticity using Near-low code tools. Please visit https://github.com/aspiringsecurity/NearNewspaper/tree/main/Near-Newspaper-platform and https://github.com/aspiringsecurity/NearNewspaper/tree/main/Near-low-code-analytics-tools.

  • Feedback Report Management on Near Blockchain: We are also utilizing Near Protocol to receive newspaper feedback reports by educators and community members, store feedback details so that the newspaper creators could strategize more productively, and do early-stage improvements in presentation and content structuring. Please visit: https://github.com/aspiringsecurity/NearNewspaper/tree/main/near-user-feedback-book

  • Near's user content NFT registration module is to enable users to register their citizen IDs as well as their contact address details in a decentralized manner. An individual can be identified by his/her SSN and a contact address by Contact Registry Number both of which for now are integers between 0 and 65535 (16-bit integers). Every SSN or individual is associated with an address of an individual Near account. We are developing our own NFT smart contract from the ground up following Near's NEP-171 standard and the key tutorial shared on the Near GitHub website. We are also logging the identities of the newspaper content owners, and their newspaper content assets using the exchange of unique identifiers powered by Near. We are also developing an NFT marketplace using Near blockchain for the generated newspaper content to incentive newspaper content authors and publishers. Please visit: https://github.com/aspiringsecurity/NearNewspaper/tree/main/near-nft-marketplace

We are also using and extending the Rust smart contract template on Near blockchain for Near Newspaper dapp modules. Please visit: https://github.com/aspiringsecurity/NearNewspaper/tree/main/near-smart-contract-rust-module

Challenges we ran into

The Near Newspaper creators have to manually upload the newspaper file to create the newspaper-based NFT. It is not a problem for a small set of articles and newspapers where we can use csv to json conversion using open source libraries like phpexcel in ethercalc but problematic for a larger number of newspaper articles. At this juncture, the newspaper creators have to manually connect their wallets, and create the newspaper claim NFT.

AWS deployment: We were using PV (paravirtual) based classic instance. We were required to convert PV (paravirtual) instance to an HVM (Hardware Virtual Machine) and convert it from a classic instance to a VPC instance. We faced a number of challenges in converting our PV instance to an HVM instance as our instance was not reachable via ssh. We arrived at a good conclusion on the issue by doing the following: Created an ami of the current classic instance. Launch a new instance from this ami after shifting to vpc as the base with new VPC security groups and updated volume. The newly launched instance is working and we are able to ssh and has the code base. We purchased the developer support plan using AWS credits and have being shared key pointers on converting our VPC-based PV instance to a VPC-based HVM instance. This challenge would not have been solved without the support of AWS team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of encouraging the development of a Near-based decentralized eco-system based on the foundation of sharing of ideas and active collaboration among the community members using Web3 powered Near Newspaper platform.

What we learned

We can utilize SocialCalc, Machine Learning Models coupled with decentralized Near Protocol for developing a Web3 community newspaper platform, which could be utilized for collaboration and crowdfunding.

We also witnessed the great ecosystem available to developers to learn and contribute in the Near eco-system. We are also utilizing Near Protocol to receive newspaper feedback reports by educators and community members, and store feedback details so that the newspaper creators could strategize more productively and do early-stage improvements in presentation and content structuring.

What's Next for Near Newspaper

The platform is currently powered by Near and Sugar OSS platforms. We still need to focus on key performance indicators like throughput and measure the performance of our smart contracts before moving to mainnet. We plan to utilize OSS tools for measuring and benchmarking our smart contracts and unit tests on a variety of key parameters like throughput, and latency. We also wish to test our solution using AWS templates on compliance and security. We need to spend quality time learning analytics, and prediction methods and utilizing and developing open-source datasets.

We also wish to integrate Near Newspaper with apis of OSS Large Language Models to facilitate localization and internationalization of content.

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