Please describe your proposed solution
Extended problem statement:
There is so much value on Catalyst, not only in the key role it plays regarding the practical DAO approach into managing Cardano treasury funds, but also into the decentralized quality curation of projects, collaborative environment, historical participation achievements, international openness to plural voices, time invested by proposers, reviewers, organizers, voters and social media community support.
Efforts, efforts, efforts.
But suddenly, voting power influence, luck, language barriers, lack or inability to offer proper time or dedication and many other factors can contribute to shape the huge proportion of also assessed, curated, fairly written, not-funded proposals. This huge database of good intentions gets frozen in time after voting ends. Some of the projects get stalled and are left behind. Others reapply virally with trial and error approaches expecting the chance to succeed, on some cases rearranging their old proposals (like this one) into new ones with more or less the same content, "spamming" Ideascale with more and more content, consuming more and more reviewers, organizers and voters efforts as well as the time consumed by these tireless proposers fighting for their dreams. the "cutted-off hydra heads" effect, everywhere.
And yet, one could think that the community has spoken and that those words are final, but voters… heroic voters find themselves frustrated by how some wallets with huge voting power can decide compared to their humble possibilities, and they might still want to support individually these not-funded proposals in a noble attempt to make Cardano the great blockchain they dream about. Frustrated voters organize themselves, reach out, try to find alternative ways of supporting builders and proposers who are still trying to innovate and deliver. And proposals could find their second chances thanks to these community members we are all so thankful to have. Yes, writer has encounter more than one across his 3 year old experience on this ecosystem and this is where this concept gets validated.
Kind and committed community members do exist and we are here because of them.
Describe your solution to the problem:
While in a testnet phase (Proof-Of-Concept), we've already built a community-driven DApp for ADA donations and other funding mechanisms that adds value to all these epic Catalyst Funds efforts left behind after voting. In addition, it also provided a way to generate income for many other participants, not just the proposers.
This took place in 2021. the Universal Dapp Connector specification has been massively improved, former Ideascale lack of API access over-complicated the PoC and Cardano APIs has changed a lot ever since.
Project Catapult needs a second chance to get a mainnet MVP, rebuilt from ground up, and this time it will get simplified, open to support community proposals even outside Catalyst, and built leveraging on open, permissionless, on-chain file systems using GCFS protocol.
Users will be able to create, update and share their proposals stored fully on-chain by updating their own on-chain file systems or DiskNFTs, assets that serve as pointers to the actual data stored and that serve as cryptographic signature for participating on the system.
Platform will allow users to search proposals and help fund them at least by P2P donations. Donation URLs and QR codes would be offered for proposal's promotion efforts. A modular design should allow for future features and categories.
Platform mirrors will be allowed by design, contributing to ecosystem resiliency and decentralization.
In order to be concise and avoid duplicating relevant information again, this was the former 2021 Catalyst Fund 7 not-funded proposal, with more insights on the technical aspect of the initial version of the project:
<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/60915>
For a glimpse of how it looked like back in 2021, serving as a prototype, please watch this presentation video: