Please describe your proposed solution.
Introduction: As a proposer, do you feel stressed when submitting proposals at the beginning of each Fund due to the short time to write them, improve them, and upload them to Catalyst, the form you are asked to complete does not invite you to develop storytelling or highlight your proposal before the others?
As a reader or community reviewer, you don't find it pleasant to read the proposals, you are not clear about the characteristics or reputation of the team, among other things? It's okay, we understand you, we have been in Catalyst since Fund 3 and we are done with this user experience, that's why this proposal seeks to improve the experience of all members of the community with a gamified approach.
Solution: We will develop a web application that will improve the user experience of the proposer when writing their proposals and submitting them to the community, as well as the interaction between members, improving the user profiles, direct message communication, giving them achievement medals, points (kudos), experience system and other gamified incentives that encourage interaction between users and allow to build a reputation. This proposal seeks to be one of the pillars of the future of Catalyst, with an open-source application focused on gamification and the possibility of infinite improvements.
Why this approach?
We believe that the focus of a gamified application is in line with the values of the community, encouraging the building of a reputation, the interaction between members, continuous improvement of the ecosystem, networking, collaborations, and much more, which is why, thanks to academic studies and use cases, it has been shown that gamification has a high impact on user experience satisfaction and engagement, as it is incentivized by various rewards (medals, experience, score, etc.).
Some examples of gamified applications are: IOG Marlowe, Game-Changer Wallet, Duolingo, Codecademy, Fitocracy, Mint, etc.
Some ideas of Catalyst Gamification, you can check our figma: [FIGMA LINK](<https://www.figma.com/file/83h81TTLVCzNSPYdMddjSU/Catalyst?type=design&fuid=910206990136310519 >)
Special features of the application: For the architecture of the web app we thought in "The Clean Architecture" with C# and .NET Core as a base, this's an architecture that allows us to develop the infrastructure of the application in different layers, something that favors the later modifications of the application.
Domain: defines key entities such as proposals, forms, and rewards. It is independent of the technologies used.
Application: Implements the use cases and business rules. It includes logic to complete forms and manage rewards and validations.
Infrastructure: Implements the interfaces defined in the Application layer, using MySQL to store the information and Entity Framework Core as ORM.
Presentation: Developed in ASP.NET Core, applying the MVC pattern. Includes gamification elements through Gamify.
And of course, as our approach is based on the user experience and gamification of the web application, if we are funded, we will establish contact and meetings with IOG to design the infrastructure of the application in compliance with security regulations, reliability and enabling future integration to the Catalyst infrastructure.
Azure DevOps will be used for hosting, taking advantage of its integration and continuous deployment capabilities. The development strategy emphasizes separation of responsibilities, layer independence, and abstraction dependency, which will allow modular, maintainable, and scalable development.
The i18N standardization will be included to allow language additions and fixes. On the front-end (ReactJS) libraries such as react-i18next or react-intl will be used for internationalization. On the backend (.NET Core), the framework's native functionality will be used for internationalization and localization, using the CultureInfo class and resource files.
According to the conditions of the Challenge, the web app will be Open Source under the conditions and standards presented (Apache 2.0, MIT license or equivalent for the software code; CC-BY-4.0 Apache 2.0, MIT license or equivalent for the documentation).
Once the project is finished it will be uploaded to a public GitHub so that any person or entity can follow its development, make modifications or take it as an example without limits or restrictions, this would immediately allow different things such as:
- Improvements in the UIX, separated by different layers (Proposal writing, Modifications in the gamification of profiles, etc).
- Perform and upload manual and accurate translations thanks to the i18N standard.
- Improvements in security, traceability, quantification, and data qualification.
Finally, this application was conceived based on the vision of the Cardano team to separate Catalyst from IdeaScale, so we take the opportunity to share a document that visualizes this shared future: DOCUMENT
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
The proposal is aligned with the challenge, as it seeks to considerably improve the user experience for proposers, readers, and community reviewers, in addition to developing a web application with a gamified and open-source approach that would allow continuing building and scaling it independently, in addition to offering an alternative to the limitations of Ideascale, something that goes with the vision of Catalyst.
This indicates a strong connection to the point:
2 - Systemic improvements (technical or procedural) that streamline or otherwise improve Project Catalyst processes.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
To measure the impact and success of the product, we have thought of these 5 families of metrics, it should be clarified that they may suffer modifications once the web design is completed since it will be objectively adjusted to the data we will have from each user and the periodicity with which they are compared.
KP1 Scope:
- Number of registered users compared to the previous Fund.
KP2 Activation:
- Percentage of new users with verified email address.
- Percentage of users with at least one draft in their account.
KP3 Active user:
- Number of users who have become proposers
- Percentage of users with at least one comment on a proposal.
- Percentage of community reviewers with at least 3 reviewing.
KP4 Engagement:
- Percentage of new users reaching level 5.
- Percentage of users who complete their profile at 100%.
- Percentage of users logging in 3 days in a row during the week.
KP5 Retention:
- Percentage of proposers who resubmitted compared to the previous fund.
- Percentage of readers who have re-read at least 5 proposals from the new Fund.
- Percentage of Community Reviewers who re-perform at least 3 reviews in the new Fund.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
To share the progress and results of the proposal, we will write blog articles written on Medium, detailing all the relevant information (updates and results), which will be shared by the community's Telegram and Discord groups, as well as IOG/Catalyst through the periodic form.
For the advances in the UIX of the application, we develop demo videos so the community can have a visual image of the development of the application, as opposed to a more quantifiable and informative vision of the blogs.
Also, so that any user can have a more orderly and accessible follow-up, we will create a Twitter account in charge of sharing the updates, week by week.