Please describe your proposed solution
<u>Problems:</u>
Project Catalyst and other systems on Cardano rely too heavily on a top-down approach for turning ideas into action. Proposal writing and vote solicitation aim competition, attention, and assessment at maintaining a barrier to entry, when other options could potentially improve the quality of contributor output:
- Competition is most useful when products already exist, and the incentive is to increase brand loyalty by improving the quality of the customer's experience. Competing at the entry level for votes is a popularity contest without any beneficial effects on the final product.
- Attention is most useful when something of value already exists. Premature attention can build expectations that might result in disappointment if the project differs from what potential customers had in mind.
- Assessment is most useful when there is already a proof-of-concept that people can play with to see where the faults might lie. Assessment as an entry barrier puts proposers in the uncomfortable position of trying to provide enough information to reviewers without compromising the opportunity to gain a first mover's advantage in the market. Research is also a major part of the development process, and can't be monetized if a review process requires it to be done beforehand.
Collaboration on Catalyst is an out-of-channel task without internal incentives for team formation. It would be better if teams could form on the fly around fine-grained tasks. For this to be possible, there would need to be interoperability between different projects that might share subcomponents. This is related to why large companies use large git monorepos and build extensive tools for searching and partially cloning codebases.
Going through the proposal and voting process blocks useful work from taking place until the extra administrative process of trying to acquire funding is completed. It would be better to find a way to let contributors get work done, and apply funding to where value is being created.
Value doesn't have to just be code or documentation. It could also be in the process of creating those things. There are lots of people who stream their work online and gain donations from those who are interested in learning how to do the things they do.
Minimizing the number of blocking operations that disrupt each contributor's workflow improves throughput.
Allowing contributors to focus on small pieces that fit together in composable ways reduces cognitive load.
Incentivizing people to find connections between what different contributors are working on makes it possible to find out where shared work can converge, as well as where different experiments can diverge.
With a small set of rules, it should be possible to produce a flexible and scalable ideation and monetization system that gives people freedom to discover where they fit into this dynamic game of life.
<u>Solution:</u>
This project will focus on developing a minimal set of tools to build collaborative ecosystems on Cardano. There will be some opinionated choices that will make the first iteration of this project easier:
- Identity will be based on the content and knowledge graph signed by an associated Cardano wallet. People can compose their ideas with other people's work, but everyone will have sovereignty over their own contributions, as well as the freedom to choose whether or not they subscribe to anyone else's work.
- Funding will be based on donations given to creators of content on the system, and donation receivers will have the ability to allocate a percentage of funds to other people or circles based on their own publically defined strategy at the end of each epoch.
- No voting will be necessary for this system. People can independently choose where to donate money, as well as when they want to stop participating in a particular DAO on the system, they can leave and give up any associated benefits, though, DAO creators may choose how onboarding works.
- No AI will be used in the production and operation of this system. AI is extremely energy inefficient and all the mechanisms involved in this project can be achieved with small efficient algorithms that produce better results. It will, however, be possible to use AI to generate content and act as a user of the system. If people derive value from its contributions, then people can donate.
There are a few different deliverables that will be a part of this project:
- A stand-alone web-based explorer that people can deploy anywhere to make their contributions to the shared knowledge base public. Work in this form will be stored in a git repo, though edits and extensions to the knowledge graph could be done locally, stored in persistent browser storage, and exported into a change set that can later be committed back into the repo.
- Research and documentation about the composability constraints, the incentive system, user experience and productivity, and design of an API for integrating other tools.
- A server application that can deploy the web interface or integrate with other tools to update your knowledge base locally. Eventually, instances of the server should be able to link together into a network, allowing real-time collaboration on work.
- Smart contracts for DAO structures and the tokenomics behind producing an internal source of stability for a Djed-like stablecoin not based on fiat. This may be implemented as a sidechain depending on how research goes.