Please describe your proposed solution.
PositiveBlockchain is a non-profit association curating a Project Directory of impact blockchain projects, aiming to use the technology for social and environmental impact. This is used by various stakeholders in the blockchain and impact spaces for education, investment, collaboration, publications, academic research, benchmark, and others.
This year, the association celebrates its 5 years of impact in the space. It has also co-launched the BC100+, a leading initiative under the UN Charter of values bringing organizations to sign a Manifesto in support of blockchain for the SDGs.
The database has been established by own researches, web scrapping, partner contributions or submission by project owners directly. Every submission or edit of a database is reviewed by a qualified member from PositiveBlockchain or a partner organization, which ensures high quality and consistency of the database. This is very important when it comes to writing report or doing academic and qualitative research. The system is working well but can have limitation in scale as there are low incentives for data contributors and verifiers - beyond their belief and support in the positive impact for the ecosystem.
Previously, a Project Catalyst fund has supported the revamping the database tooling of PositiveBlockchain: improved database search, web interface, new API, custom forms, download options. This was a great improvement for the administration of the database and also for users on the interface. We are now ready to scale the activity on the Project Directory and create the missing incentives.
To increase our impact, we would like to boost incentives and rewards for more Data Contributions for two categories of contributions
- From individual contributors, whether they are member of the PositiveBlockchain association of not
- From Universities and researches which represents the main user group downloading our database on the website
This experimentation is the first stage leading to a possible future PositiveBlockchain DAO, whereby Data Contributors would receive governance tokens in order to participate in the DAO and make collective decisions for the evolution of the Project Directory.
Stages of this granted Project:
Stage 1: Concept
- Finalize the reward concept, types of tokens in the reward pool, documentation and communication (Milestones 1-2)
- Research the design of the reward concept and create documentation and communicate with the PB community to receive support in this area.
Stage 2: Constitute a Reward Pool with different types of assets
- Environmental Credit Tokens which could be used for emission compensation, as symbolic reward generating a positive impact - rather than a pure financial reward. We are here considering carbon tokens issues by web3 players in the growing ReFi and carbon markets, especially those built on Cardano such as Block Carbon, Carboono, CarbonFi or Veritree.
- Tokens giving access to Vouchers for online education, courses, books or other resources relevant for students within participating universities.
Stage 3: Define Rules of Data Contributions:
- At least 20 projects added or edited with at least 5 data sets filled out per project
- Establishing mature contact with a university or research organizations interested to bring Data Contributors (eg students getting involved in this role) - we will come up with a clear process to verify/justify a meaningful contribution here.
- These contributions need to be “claimed” through a form and validated by a qualified member of the PositiveBlockchain association - avoiding false claims and bad quality contributions
Stage 4: Transferring token to Data Contributor claimees
- Transferring tokens to the contributors for their contributions to the PB database via wallet transaction
- Finalise integration of tools to provide a seamless token claim process. We will look into possibility and potential benefits of using tools like Tosi Drop, and Drip Dropz.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
This will help sustain and scale the effort of mapping the Cardano and overall impact blockchain ecosystem, creating incentives for knowledge capture and sharing through the open data platform of PositiveBlockchain.
It will also help mobilize more universities, researchers, and qualitative studies around the work and impact of the projects listed in the project Directory.
Finally, it will help understand how such reward system can be optimally design, focusing of a utility token reward (not a direct monetary compensation) as part of a DAO concept.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
We will be looking to measure the following KPIs:
- Number of Individual Data Contributors
- Number of Data Contributors involved in creating relationships with universities
- Number of contributions done
- Number of new projects listed by Data Contributors
- Number of project edits by Data Contributors
- Number of data points on average Data Contributors add/update in the database
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
The project will directly engage communities, individual and universities external to PositiveBlockchain. The available fund in the pool will be visible for everyone, so will be the Data Contributions.
The results and also feedbacks from the Data Contributors will be used to further refine this system as part of a possible future PositiveBlockchain DAO.
One of the learnings we are looking to develope, is to understand what would have the biggest impact versus effort ratio: incentivizing individual Data Contributor, or recruiting universities and research partners which could be in lower number but have a much bigger and more sustainable capacity to contribute on data. This is why we split the token pool in 2 categories (see above)