Please describe your proposed solution.
In DAOs, monitoring member skills and contributions is a crucial but persisting challenge. While we know who is a great contributor to the Cardano community, we need a quantitative method to measure skill, skill acquisition, and tangible contributions. This hurdle needs to be solved for Cardano to be the premier choice for building DAOs.
Background
As a result of Gimbalabs's work over the past years engaging with different organizations in the Cardano ecosystem through Gimbalabs Playground, we have seen how this problem affects decentralized organizations. After two years of insightful observations and continuous improvement, we have developed and reached a significant milestone—an MVP that tackles the issue of tracking skills and contributions head-on.
Our solution
We created the Andamio platform to help organizations collaborate and build relationships within the community based on trust. Andamio's infrastructure is built with Cardano blockchain technology and integrates the following:
- Smart Contract-based Skills and Contribution Tracking
- Treasury management and reward contracts
We designed Andamio to engage organizations that are looking for a way to onboard contributors to their projects.
Our Impact
Various organizations within the Cardano ecosystem, like Wada, Cardano Foundation, Emurgo, MeshJS, and Swarm's Governance Guild, have already shared their interest in using Andamio to onboard contributors and improve their governance and community-building efforts.
Andamio is a unique innovation on the Cardano blockchain that offers organizations a smooth onboarding process. We will provide this open-source platform to Cardano organizations as a solution to simplify contributor onboarding through a skills and contribution tracking system powered by smart contracts.
We will demonstrate our impact on the Cardano ecosystem by helping organizations adopt and use our platform and evaluating improvements in their contributor onboarding processes.
This proposal aims to provide funding to take the Andamio platform from its MVP stage to a pilot project where we will offer it to other DAOs active on Cardano.
For this, we have identified the following needs:
- Beta testing: get the Andamio platform in front of potential contributors and DAOs to test the platform and gather feedback.
- Lead generation: establish relationships with DAOs within and outside the Cardano ecosystem that will benefit from the use of Andamio.
- Implementation and adoption support: make sure interested DAOs implement and adopt the Andamio platform and gather feedback from them.
- Design and prototyping: improving the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).
Our long term plans include, but are not limited to:
- Implementation of the Andamio platform across the Cardano ecosystem.
- Securing external funding and generating different revenue streams to continue to improve and promote our product.
The tools we are developing and will offer to communities include:
- Project-based learning platform - used to onboard community members and guide them to learn specific skills that are helpful for the community - for example, how to become a Project Catalyst Community Reviewer.
- Once the skill is acquired, the member can contribute by working as a Community Reviewer, and his contribution will be registered (e.g., successfully reviewed 25 proposals).
- A treasury system that will then automatically compensate the member for his work
- A set of smart contracts to manage the various interactions
This set of tools could be used for many scenarios within a community for more efficient and fruitful collaboration.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
The challenge asks “What tools can we provide to enable effective DAO’s creation and operation”?
While there are tools to create DAOs, there are no tools to help DAOs operate effectively. In order for DAOs to grow, they need mechanisms to define and distribute tasks and projects to their communities, onboard contributors and reward them for their work. Using the Andamio platform, organizations will seamlessly track contributions to their projects as well as provide onboarding and background material for contributors. Providing educational material will enable contributors to acquire the necessary skills to contribute to real-world projects. Tracking skills acquired and contributions to real-world projects will create a positive feedback loop of skill-building, contributions and community growth.
Quantitative impact
Over a period of six months, we will track:
- No. of DAOs using Andamio.
- No. of contributors using Andamio to acquire skills.
- No. of contributions made to Cardano organizations as a result of using the Andamio platform.
- Amount of Ada distributed as rewards for contributions made as a result of using the Andamio platform.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
In the short-term, we expect organizations using the Andamio platform to greatly improve their contributor onboarding process. In the mid-term, we expect to attract new developers to the Cardano ecosystem offering a more rewarding, low-risk/high-reward training and onboarding process. In the long-term, we estimate the Andamio platform will reduce the time and amount of resources spent in educating and onboarding contributors to real-world projects by at least 50%.
We expect that, In the future, the Andamio platform will be used not only by the Cardano community but by the education and learning services industry in general.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
We will share our progress reports through our website and through Project Catalyst channels.