Please describe your proposed solution.
More on the problem
Right now, when a funding round is over, the data and insights created by the community are pushed to the side, and largely forgotten. On Ideascale, the slate is cleared and the product of hundreds of individuals’ blood, sweat, and tears, is "archived." With the bulk of the data locked behind ideascale’s login page, casual observation and learning is impossible, unless you're willing to create an account.
What We Already Have:
We've already been working hard at Lido Nation to treat all of Project Catalyst’s history as equal, providing a robust tool for learning from the wealth of knowledge and talent of the Catalyst hive.
Our Catalyst Research tool lets you:
- Instant keyword search for proposal, title, content, and authors and co-authors for all past catalyst proposals that made it to the ballot…across all funding rounds.
- Useful filters and sorts for segmenting search results by fund, challenge, and funding status. - <https://www.lidonation.com/project-catalyst/proposals>
- A metrics dashboard for exploring catalyst by the numbers with reports (top funded proposals, word cloud of what popular keywords across proposals, completed proposals, etc) - <https://www.lidonation.com/project-catalyst/dashboard>
- Exploration of catalyst by fund and/or challenges - https://www.lidonation.com/project-catalyst/funds/fund-8
- Exploration of the almost 2000 proposers that made it to the ballot and their respective proposals - <https://www.lidonation.com/project-catalyst/users>
- Startups and groups within catalyst, word cloud of their top of mind concerns, their lead challenges, proposals and team - <https://www.lidonation.com/en/project-catalyst/groups>
- Voter tool to help you bookmark thumbs up and thumbs down proposals to speed up voting in the official voting app - https://www.lidonation.com/en/project-catalyst/voter-tool
We've also written over a dozen articles published and translated to Swahili and Spanish about the inner workings of Project Catalyst. New content is published each week.
Our next step:
We want to invest more in our coding and architecture to make the proposal search tool close to instant search.(Currently, it takes a few seconds with each filter interaction.) This will be even more important as we add more filters to account for things like new tags, SDG scores, etc.
## How will we do it
If funded, we will hire another dev to join Darlington in implementing these features:
* Move the proposal search to a Web Component Single Page application that plugs directly into our advance search engine (aka, instant search results)
* Add more filters (tags, SDG ratings, filter by group or company, one or more users)
* Create the ability to save and share your current search
* Create bookmarks that can be named and shared (maybe you want to compile all the DAO proposals, for example)
* Pull Proposal monthly progress reports and give users the ability to "follow" a proposal, group, or user to get monthly reports in their inbox!
*Add the ability to export and import pick lists that are compatible with existing tools at cardanoaim.io (for both the voter tool, and research bookmarks).
* Create the ability for the public to push a button to: generate a machine translation of a proposal, then edit and commit the edit.
* Add the ability for proposers to claim their profile and add, social media links, comments to their proposals, and, edit their bios
* Add the ability for groups to claim their profiles and remove or reassign proposals, add social media links and manage their core team
* Add the ability to create your voting list and share it with the community with your rationales!
* Add the ability to mint an ""I Voted"" NFT to raise awareness of Catalyst
* Internalization of the interface into Spanish, Swahili, Japanese, Chinese, and French.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
This project addresses many key areas of the "Dapps, Products & Integrations!”
The Challenge brief:
“Increasing the number of dapps and products available for the community to use that help to enrich the ecosystem with new use cases.”
Sometimes work on proposals gets started but for unforeseeable reasons have to be abandoned. Other times work was already started, but the team couldn’t complete because they weren’t funded and to return to their fiat jobs. One goal of the Catalyst Research tool is to help surface these proposals. Perhaps the relay partners from the community can pick up where the work started by repurposing or connecting with the original team to take over the project or combine efforts.
We are also working with the Accelerator and Mentorship effort to surface information about ways proposals can help each other. The big idea is to add to our group pages (ie: https://www.lidonation.com/en/project-catalyst/group/gimbalabs) services being offered by the team, help needed by that team, and contact information for reaching out
“Increased quality of existing products & integrations through suggested improvements that is supported by customer feedback or increased usage by the community”
The ability for the community to view companies and people in catalyst and the work they are doing has been a huge win for the entire ecosystem. Thanks to the existing version of our tool, we’re already seeing these specific increased in community feedback and engagement:
- There's been more conversations on Twitter Spaces.
- People have used the tool as a way to find service providers and other developers.
- Completion reports are up (112 completion reports submitted at the time of this proposal)!
For some the of the new features we will be adding:
The ability for anyone to “Follow” a project, person, or group and receive “progress reports” will open the lines of communication between funded proposers and the rest of the community in a brand new way. We expect better lines of communication and open “customer feedback” loops will lead to improvement in the quality of products being built through Catalyst.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Data access and availability is l the biggest challenge for refreshing the Catalyst Research Tool with new data from fund to fund. There is an incredible amount of manual data entry, cleanup, and migration required with each fund. Having the human power to facilitate manual data entry may become a challenge as Catalyst grows. We don’t anticipate this will be the case for fund 9. For fund 10 and beyond, We've heard that Catalyst will be debuting a Governance API, which would allow us to automate a lot more data flow.
There’s also the option of accounting for increased data entry labor in future proposals.