Please describe your proposed solution.
Our community is diverse, international, and multicultural, everyone needs to get up to speed fast to collaborate. Today if you land on the Catalyst Ideation Platform, you have a steep curve to understand how to interact and extract the best of human interaction and collaboration that our community has to offer.
But before diving on this proposal I need to highlight that we have another proposal addressing the UI/UX problem of IDEASCALE. The other proponent is the IOG Catalyst Team and they have different ideas in how to approach the restructuring.
As many of you know, diversity in how to implement software leads to better resilience/output in results, also a better diversity of features, and creates healthy competition. While IOG Catalyst Team focus is first to implement the voting side, our UI/UX will be focused on collaboration and onboarding with significantly more engagement with our community to explore those points. At some point in the future, we expect functionalities to converge cross-platform, letting the user decide the one that fits his needs. For example, our implementation of voting may be different.
As you can see, our community will always have a different opinion on how to implement things, and today we are locked out of this decision process.
Still, in the realm of differences here, our infrastructure perspective will be 100% open-source. At the same time, the Catalyst team wants to deploy on top of proprietary software, as they mentioned Firebase in their proposal. Again, they are free to choose how they want to deploy and do what they think is best; they are in control of this decision process, maybe not in the direction our community wants to go. **The word Firebase was removed from their proposal.
This proposal is the first step in having an alternative team working alongside IOG Catalyst Team. It’s also the first step in decentralizing this process, we want to hear and implement more ideas from our community. We want to do interviews and really consider your opinion and not return with a slippery slope response to dismiss the problem that the community wants to have solved.
Let's be a bit redundant here, our proposal is intended to be a complement, not a substitute to the work being proposed by IOG Catalyst Team: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/107599
We don’t need or want to implement all the same features as proposed by the IOG Catalyst Team, we’ll have an independent approach. In most, this will depend on the feedback we collect from our community.
Now let’s explore a bit more about our proposal:
We lack several innovative UI/UX components to extract this potential, a few of them very obvious other ones we need to find together, with community research and interviews. As a Catalyst Pionner(Thiago), I can easily identify some gaps, for example, in the interval between funds, where the proposal scope is suffering changes, we need a drafting area where the Catalyst Operation team could upfront the guidelines to allow community interaction ahead of time, giving the community the tools to collaborate publicly or privately in groups and increasing the chances of delivering high-quality proposals.
We should also be mindful of the small minority of specialized actors in our community and how to highlight their talents and community reputation in the ideation phase, something like the Linkedin of Catalyst where you can highlight your expertise and flag to new proposers that you are open to engage and work in new proposals.
With bigger communities, it comes a big influx of communication, and moderation starts to become king. We want to avoid bots, AI and create a healthy environment for collaboration. A moderation center and specific tools to highlight activity for moderators and reviewers are crucial.
As you can see, we can come up with endless possibilities to improve the ideation cycle and community collaboration, but we can’t and should not do this alone. We need to conduct research, work through interviews, identifying the key functionalities that the community feels are missing the most during the ideation process.
Not only that, we also need to be aligned with the work carried out by the Catalyst operations team, since many of the changes impact and will continue impacting during the development of this new ideation and networking platform.
On the development side, our proposal also aims to deliver the coded front-end, along with the necessary back-end, to have a proof of concept for the functionalities requested by the community derived from the research process. This is necessary because we understand that the Catalyst operations team would not have the responsibility to provide such integration requirements, considering that these are proof of concepts that will be optimized with the community.
One of the other important aspects of this proposal is to promote an inclusive development environment, allowing community developers to access and implement new functionalities in an easy, fast, and practical way. To achieve this, we will seek platforms and tools that deliver an automated CI/CD deployment pipeline based on serverless and edge computing. This measure is being pursued with the intention of lowering the barrier to entry in infrastructure configuration so that these developers can contribute more agilely to the project, allowing teams to create components in parallel.
It is worth noting that all this flexibility we are seeking in the way this project is being developed is precisely to provide a conducive foundation for innovation and new features.
Finally, to complete the cycle of continuous development, it becomes necessary to create communication channels for collaboration and development of this project. To that end, we will be creating a Discord server where we will keep the channels updated with project links and documentation. Additionally, we will provide support for developers and designers who interact with the documentation.
We expect that at the end of this development we achieve a better chance to have a state of the art ideation platform, onboarding users who are new to the platform, simplifying the initial experience, making it easier and more intuitive to participate in the ideation process. Enable more people to contribute with their ideas, increasing diversity and the quantity and quality of proposals simply by explaining better the information.
For experienced users, we can think in more advanced and professional features to enhance community collaboration and participation. Moreover, the Cardano community as a whole will benefit from having more engaged individuals contributing valuable ideas and fostering a vibrant collaborative environment.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
The benefits we’ll bring to Cardano ecosystem:
This project is important for Cardano because it promotes collaboration, decentralization, and community engagement. It aims to strengthen participation and diversity of ideas within the platform, leading to better solutions and innovations. By enhancing user participation and efficiency, it contributes to the growth and adoption of Cardano as a trusted platform for collaboration and project development.
The key points this project is addressing to bring more people to the community:
1- We’ll focus on the UI/UX onboarding process that educates at the same time the user evolves his interaction with the platform, respecting the learning curve of the user with a better onboarding process.
2- The way we plan to deploy the interface will allow our ecosystem to get stronger by providing a good experience for developer's interaction and community testing, by consequence, will improve the speed of innovation in Catalyst.
3- We are tackling more diversity of solutions for the Catalyst UI/UX Ideation Platform, a very concerning pain point from our Catalyst community.
How our proposed solution addresses the challenge:
Catalyst Systems improvements challenge main question:
What research and development is required to advance the state of the art of Catalyst and allow Catalyst to serve the community's needs better?
We must encourage independent exploration and develop diverse alternatives to foster innovation and inclusivity within our community. By doing so, we can bring Catalyst to a state of the art that truly resonates with the needs of our community. Ultimately, we aim to serve the community better by actively involving them. Our proposal plans to deliver that by adding up team coordination to research better UI/UX for all processes of the platform and implement the front-end and back-end solution using serverless and edge computing with full open-source CI/CD GitHub integration.
Campaign Brief:
Catalyst Systems Improvements are proposals that have or will have a high likelihood of advancing the state of the art for the innovation platform for Cardano offered by Project Catalyst. Proposals entered in this category must demonstrate improvements in one or more of the following areas:
- Engineering of decentralization and/or distribution of decision-making advances for the Catalyst Voting System
- Systemic improvements (Technical or Procedural) that streamline or otherwise enhances Project Catalyst processes.
- (Our proposal delivers a technical and procedural improvement that streamlines and enhances the Project Catalyst ideation through research in UI/UX, creating a collaboration platform. We’ll also open the door for a deployment framework that allows developer cooperation and top-notch speed infrastructure for our global community to expand the ideation and networking platform.)
- Academic research that clearly defines a known Catalyst-specific problem-space where the intention is to identify facts and/or clearly stated opinions that will likely assist in solving Catalyst-specific problems, or a detailed study of a Catalyst-specific subject, especially in order to discover (new) information or reach a (new) understanding.
- Community assent to promote a previously completed Catalyst System Improvement project from testnet to pre-production OR from pre-production to production.
- Proposals to take a testnet or pre-production candidate to the next stage can only be submitted by the original proposer or the fund operator
- [4] is NOT a requirement for promotion, and is only applicable if more resources are required to implement in the next stage or the fund operator has not prioritized the candidate release.
Technical proposals that cannot prove that they are feasible in their state of project readiness or which do not demonstrate that high degrees of testing and validation can be, or have already been achieved will not be eligible.
Our proposal does not generate or will include any component breakthrough that can impact proof of feasibility in our project state readiness, once this project plans to align the development with what is being proposed with the backend. At the current day, there is no publication or proof by the Catalyst Operator of an Open-Source development for UI/UX or proven to be achieved and recognized by the community as state of the art.
The process for testing and validation is as follows:
- The solution must first be deployed on the Catalyst continuous testnet. (Yes, our proposal can and will be deployed using Catalyst testnet.)
- It must demonstrate security and stability to the satisfaction of the community, or the fund operator where the community has instructed the fund operator to advance the solution to pre-production (Our proposal will be deployed by experts in front-end and edge computing, leveraging the experience to handle high demand and development iteration with integrate tools for CI/CD allowing a high level of contribution, in pair with the needs of a global community.)
- Unless security and stability flaws are demonstrated during the pre-production environment testing, a production-ready release candidate will be scheduled for the next production deployment window. (The team will comply with the Catalyst Operator requirements.)
In the absence of a community-appointed arbitration committee, it is proposed that an interim committee be formed, made up of representatives from Catalyst Circle and the major Cardano entities, to assist in evaluating the applicability and feasibility of a Catalyst Systems Improvement proposal voted for by the community.
All project output developed or used by the proposer for projects in this category must, as a minimum:
- Be fully open source subject to the conditions of the following approved open source licences (Apache 2.0, MIT License, or equivalent for software code; CC-BY-4.0 Apache 2.0, MIT licenses or equivalent for documentation);
- (All the project will be open-sourced to leverage community interaction and contribution)
- be universally accessible on a public repository by any community member, by the time the project has completed;
- (All project will be open-sourced not only by the time it’s completed but during the process.)
- Be available for use and further development by any person in whatever way they deem fit, without any limitations or encumbrances. If the project output is subject to 3rd party rights, the Proposer must provide a free, perpetual and non-revocable license for the community to use whatever rights belong to such 3rd parties without limitations and for whatever purpose.
(Yes, the project will not involve 3rd parties that can lock the deployment and will be aligned with perpetual and irrevocable licence.)
- Milestones must clearly include timelines for community review feedback, and standardized testing, and validation as set out in the process stated above.
(The milestones include community validation, community feedback and open participation.)
Where deployment to production would measurably increase Catalyst fund Operator costs, the fund operator is entitled to seek a variation to its operation budget to cover the increased cost of its operations before deployment. (Our proposal does not imply Catalyst operation costs.)
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
The success of the project can be measured during the development itself since it is part of the scope of development to collect feedback on the user's qualitative experience. Interviews will be done and samples of user experience will be collected to be re-worked and refined.
The main benefits of the success of this project for the ecosystem will be:
- To have open-source technology and documentation that was restricted to private actors in the ecosystem.
- To deploy a innovative solution to our community to interact and colaborate
- For the first time taking community feedback in consideration during the ideation phase
- The innovation can potentially increase growth of the ecosystem by onboarding new users and facilitating the process of creating proposals
The main metrics that can measure the success of this project will be:
- The successful deployment of the application using edge computing with a focus on cost reduction and fast development interaction
- Make the use and navigation easier, listening the users of the platform and understanding their pain
- Recognition by the community as leap forward in Catalyst Interaction
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
We have a plan to share the outputs and results of our project with the public. We will create a public repository where we'll store all project materials.
In the beginning, we will focus on researching and defining the project's main components. We'll interview both experienced and new users to better understand their questions, needs, and how they interpret the interface.
However, we are committed to effectively communicating the purpose and value of each milestone. Our goal is to be transparent and inclusive, sharing our project with the wider public, researchers, and potential collaborators to foster innovation and collective progress, for that we’ll be using several tools like Github, Discord, Gitbook and being present at Catalyst town halls giving updates.