The distribution to the Venezuelan university comes in two steps.
The initial idea was to host a Use-a-Thon, where students can enter a contest with prizes in bytes worth about $800 - which is comparatively much money to any student. Arranging such contest had the implication, that contestants would need bytes to experiment with transfers etc. so Tony suggested their domain was added to the white list of the email attestation bot, allowing all students to claim the $10 worth of bytes as reward.
The word spread like wild-fire and people were all over the place offering to pay other students to attest their email to get the referral reward (also worth $10) and that resulted in a complete craze. We had more than than 4000 attestations from students at the university.
What I believe is the best thing about this is, that while some will of course sell it as soon as they get it, others might hold on for a while. This allows the projects of the Use-a-Thon to materialize which suddenly makes their bytes spendable in actual use cases developed by the participants of the Use-a-Thon.
I've seen the suggestions about expanding the concept to other universities in developing countries where the $10 is comparatively worth more than ie. the US or EU. And this has been the plan right from the get go of this initiative.
At the moment, we're gathering information and experience from this first edition of the Byteball Use-a-Thon, which is definitely needed in order to expand to more universities. We encounter problems and questions on a daily basis, that we hadn't thought of, and some of the events at the university couldn't possibly have been foreseen. We also quickly came to the conclusion, that in order for the initiative to have more effect, it would be a smart move to also reward a team of documentarists. During the period of the Use-a-Thon, they will take pictures, do short interviews and/or video clips that will help us build the case when presenting it to other universities.
We also currently ran into the problem, that the university's mail server actually blacklisted the byteball.org domain (any decent spam filter would probably consider thousands of almost identical emails sent from the same address in a few days a text-book example of spam) so we had to get contacts from the Student Council and the on-site coordinating professor meet with the IT department of the university to explain the reason for this.
All in all, there's simply just SO many things, that we discover and learn from doing this, that it wouldn't be plausible to host multiple contests at this point in time. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I say that me and the two other organizers spend somewhere between 3 and 4 hours a day, sorting out issues, having correspondence with university representatives and making needed decisions on things we hadn't thought of before the contest was announced.
My long term dream is to run a series of contests at several universities in a broad range of developing countries. Then - have a huge inter-university contest, where all winning teams will compete against winning teams from other universities in one major Use-a-Thon. That one should of course have a massive prize pool, and preferably include some kind of event, where participants are invited to attend some kind of event where winners will be announced. All contestants would have their travel and living expenses covered. But this is a long term dream, and at this point in time, not feasible. But who knows what the future will bring
As soon as we start receiving material from the documentary team at the Universidad Simòn Bolìvar, we will start publishing articles and news on the progress, so stay tuned, and if possible, lend a helping hand with whatever the students might request help with. There's plenty to do, and I must say, that being able to directly affect the adoption of the Byteball project is really amazing! This is only possible with smaller projects like Byteball before they grow too big. Had this been an Ethereum-effort, it would simply be a drop in the ocean. I therefore highly encourage everyone to contribute and come up with cool ideas. The Byteball Grants program is open for everyone with great ideas. So get started!
Cheers!
Punqtured
