Please describe your proposed solution.
Thanks to the support we received in Fund 9, the explorer foundation was written from scratch to allow for modularization, massive performance improvement, and a robust research interface around proposals at lightning speeds.
The big idea here is to do a version 2.5. Build on the solid foundation to implement feature requests received from the community over the last few months as well bring the same rich research capability to other catalyst datasets. The two new primary data we will be focusing on will be Users, and Companies.
The modules:
explorer bounties.
Lido Nation has spent the last few months developing and iterating on an onsite bounty system. We will be integrating this into the Catalyst Explorer to incentivize data enrichment.
We will be offering these bounties to start:
- Proposal social media information
- Companies associated with proposals
- jurisdictional registration information about public companies
Catalyst Communities.
We've seen a number of communities born out of Catalyst activities, Latin America, Wada, Catalyst Women to name a few. The big idea is to give these community tools to aggregate and showcase their proposals on the explorer. A landing page they can share to help discover proposals from that community, people from that community, and the products and services they are building as a result of Catalyst Support.
Users:
Catalyst as an embodiment of the Cardano ethos of sustainability is all about empowering the people that make the ecosystem go round. This module will be all about showcasing those humans and increasing the discoverability of them. We will be adding filters and sorts to the users page like we've done for the proposals. We will also be working with a designer to create a catalyst user report card that's intuitive to access the user's catalyst power contribution to the ecosystem. Users will also be able to embed their report card on their own site.
Companies and groups.
Catalyst is Cardano Premiere VC fund and we want to showcase and improve the discoverability of the companies being funded or partially funded by Catalyst. Like we've done with proposals we will be adding filters for companies. We will also have bounties to help sourcing company data.
Embeddable report cards.
We prototyped the idea of a report card and have gotten a lot of feedback from the community. We heard that the report cards were useful, but not intuitive. The prototype report card was designed by an unfunded full stack and DevOps engineer. With this project, we will be consulting a UI/UX professional to design more useful, intuitive report cards:
- For Proposals
- For Companies
- For communities
Draft Ballots
Before the Catalyst Explorer was funded, we prototyped a tool called "Picklists." After getting funded in Fund 9, we updated the tool and called it "Bookmarks. The idea now is to extend the bookmark tool to allow anyone to convert a bookmark in a Draft Ballot. Draft ballot is a special kind of bookmark created explicitly for staging your votes. You will be able to select proposals you will be voting foster and add your rationale at the proposal or category/challenge level. Like bookmarks, draft ballots will be shareable.
Ballot Submission Prototype
The catalyst testnet is near and it behooves us to prototyping and thinking about how we might reduce voter fatigue and leverage work people put into the researching proposals. What if after you've used the explorer to research and create draft ballots, what if you can simply hit submit and the explorer will submit the ballot saving you the step of having to open a voter app? This also lets us experiment with perhaps committing your rational to an on-chain record (say if you're a dRep?)? We don't know how rough the initial toolchain for the upcoming systems will be. At minimum the delivery for this proposal will be research and estimate work required to implement that, best case scenario we're ready to submit ballots in fund 12?
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
The Catalyst Explorer is a live product already being used by the community to seed rich discussions and significantly reduce the work required to research and vote on catalyst proposals. This challenge is all about products, products, DApps, systems, and other integration. The explorer it self fit the definition as both a product and a now critical catalyst infrastructure. Also, it enables cross-pollination between teams that would otherwise be relegated to the halls and crevices of discords and reddit sub-channels.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
We would love to see more research needs being fulfilled by the tool measure by web analytics and direct feedback. Other metrics will also be looking for are:
- communities created
- companies added
- bounties completed
- engagement with the users and company data
- for a bonus, a working prototype on a test environment of submitting votes directly from the tool.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
The tool is publicly accessbile for all to use as features are developed and rolled out.
We will also be holding after-townhall breakout rooms for reporting and feedback.