Please describe your proposed solution.
The Cardano ecosystem is rapidly growing. As new projects, groups, tools and organisations arise a broad and diverse ecosystem emerges. The issue of a wide-angle view of this ever growing ecosystem becomes difficult to individually visualise.
Projects like Cardano <https://www.cardanocube.io/> provide a first generation solution to help the Community to navigate.
We want to develop a second generation community mapping solution focused on building an open source based interactive map of the Cardano Ecosystem.
As committed community members, we are already working on an initial Proof of Concept (PoC) of our envisioned map.
The code for the PoC can be found here: <https://swarmlab2.gitlab.io/ecosystem-map/>
The first example map here: <https://catalystswarm.com/ecosystem-map/>
Early development of the PoC was funded by the Catalyst Swarm Fund. Additional funding is now being sought to progress development to help us realise our vision of a visual, interactive Cardano ecosystem map.Therefore we ask the Community to fund our initiative and to allow us to build the map out :)
Our map has a high focus on visualisation and interaction. We will design a novel and hopefully unique experience through which users can explore the Cardano Ecosystem.
The map will be based on the concept of Project Nodes.The size and colour of the nodes will be adjustable and the interconnections with other nodes, updatable and modifiable.
The 3D visualisation is driven from simple data that is queried live using GraphQL to produce the relationships between the data instances on the map. The 3D environment is interactive and has a basic physics system to allow interaction with the “planets” including navigating through the 3D space, dragging and pushing the “planets” and potentially expanding nodes to fill the space with more complex and detailed structures. The current dataset is harvested from community requested data, and as adoption grows, richer metadata around projects and their relationships can be explored, increasing transparency and cross-pollination within the Catalyst ecosystem.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
With the Ecosystem Map, SwarmLabs creates its first product for the Catalyst & Cardano Ecosystem. The challenge is a general call out for builders, devs and creators to engage with Catalyst and provide value to the Cardano community. We believe that working on mapping and providing the community with a visual wayfinding tool of the expanding ecosystem will help with discoverability on a project-by-project basis as well as the understanding of the general ecosystem. This is an under-represented part of the Cardano landscape.
Planetary maps have been used to great effect over time. Continuing development of this ecosystem map will create a new product that offers new and existing users of Cardano to better navigate, explore and engage with the projects and groups working on Cardano. By providing a discoverability pathway through mapped links we will increase the quality of existing products through increased project awareness.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
As the SwarmLabs initiative is a very young one, the main risk would rely on effective coordination & management of the participating developers. As we envision new ways to engage & include developers in this project, we will first have to experiment with project management structures.
To mitigate this risk, we count on AIM’s & Fluid7’s experience and expertise in managing dev teams around projects.