Please describe your proposed solution.
Our proposed solution addresses a persistent issue in the remote work landscape: disputes arising from direct work contracts between organizations and remote developers. Problems often surface as delayed payments or incomplete deliverables. This issue has significant implications, as a survey by the Independent Economy Council shows that 74% of respondents experienced delayed payments, and 59% are owed $50,000 or more for completed work.
Currently, escrow services offer a buffer to these issues, securing payment and protecting both remote developers and hiring organizations. However, these centralized services, such as Fiverr, tend to be expensive, with commission fees reaching up to 25%, and maintain total control over the dispute resolution process. Our unique approach challenges this status quo by decentralizing escrow services, thereby reducing costs and ensuring a fair dispute settlement process.
Socious will significantly impact two primary stakeholders: remote developers and hiring organizations.
The platform's design encompasses three core benefits:
1 Decentralized decision-making: Socious champions community-wide decision-making, utilizing on-chain governance processes and its unique "Socious Experts Certificates". These credentials, issued only to individuals with an impact score above 700, are non-transferable, ensuring that governance power is widespread and held by informed decision-makers. The Socious Experts become the decision-makers in dispute resolution, motivated to make impartial and fair decisions due to their active involvement in the Socious platform. For more information about Impact Score, please visit <https://socious.notion.site/Socious-Whitepaper-58fbe2c106f547898df42e409a00c73e?pvs=4>.
Every "Socious Expert Certificate" serves as a dynamic record of a user's passions and proficiency in distinct social and environmental issues, tailored by their actions within the Socious app. The certificate's influence, in terms of voting power, is calibrated according to the user's interests and proficiency relevant to the matter at hand. To illustrate, if a vote is required to allocate escrow funds for an open-source project aimed at combatting climate change, the ballots of Socious Experts who have invested their resources - time, expertise, and finances - into environmental projects and enlisted developers for similar initiatives would be given proportional weightage. Unlike centralized platforms, where decision-making rests with the platform owners, potentially raising concerns of censorship and bias, Socious ensures democratic decision-making facilitated by a selected panel of three Socious Experts.
The role of Socious Experts extends to mediating dispute resolutions between organizations and their contracted remote developers. In a scenario where a developer has completed their assignment and provided the code, but the hiring organization disputes the completion and withholds the escrow funds, the developer has the opportunity to submit a dispute. An agreement by both parties to disclose specific information to a panel of three Socious Experts helps facilitate the process. To initiate a dispute, each party stakes a designated quantity of tokens as dispute settlement fees. The party whose claim is upheld will receive their staked tokens along with the refund/payment, whereas the unsuccessful party forfeits their staked tokens, which will be awarded to the adjudicating experts.
The Socious Expert status is exclusively available to individuals demonstrating active use and contributions to the Socious platform, inherently instilling a commitment to fair and unbiased decisions. This prerequisite ensures a network of trusted experts working towards the collective good of the platform and its users.
2 Automated payment: Socious' decentralized escrow mechanism includes an automated payment system implemented via smart contracts. The agreed-upon amount is transferred to an escrow wallet once the project status turns to “hired”. The organization can't move the asset, and upon project completion, the funds automatically transfer to the freelancer. If a project is canceled, the funds are automatically returned to the organization.
3 Cheaper Fees: The use of blockchain technology for payments eliminates third-party fees often seen on centralized platforms. Also, community members handle dispute resolution, significantly reducing the operational cost associated with it.
This solution is uniquely relevant to Cardano, as it leverages the power of blockchain to build a community-oriented platform. It aligns with Cardano's commitment to developing decentralized solutions and fostering innovation in the industry.
As the escrow mechanism project has already been successfully funded and completed in the Catalyst Fund 9 Developer Ecosystem Challenge, our focus now lies in decentralizing the dispute resolution process, thereby allowing community members to make decisions rather than the central Socious team. The aim is to create an ecosystem that genuinely values and implements community decision-making. Our solution's impact will be demonstrable by the increased resolution of disputes and the cost-effective, streamlined experience for both hiring organizations and remote developers.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
Our proposed solution directly responds to the challenge by tackling its central questions, thereby enriching the Cardano ecosystem:
Firstly, the challenge asks, "What tools do we need to prioritize first?" We firmly believe that fostering an optimal developer experience is paramount. To this end, we've focused on secure and timely payments, ensuring developers receive their rightful earnings. By providing a more cost-effective escrow service coupled with an unbiased dispute resolution mechanism, developers can concentrate their energies on creating successful applications rather than worrying about financial uncertainties.
Secondly, the challenge seeks to answer, "How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst?" The solution lies in our innovative “incentivization structures”. We propose to draw developers to the Cardano ecosystem by offering tangible incentives such as our impact score and THANK tokens. These rewards not only attract but also inspire developers to create on the Cardano platform.
The challenge also calls for "Support structures" and "Collaborative structures". Our decentralized escrow system extends this support, fostering a nurturing environment for both freelance remote developers and hiring organizations. This system relies on a democratic decision-making process, mediated by community-based impact experts. Furthermore, by offering automated payments and reduced fees for both freelance developers and hiring organizations, we enable a conducive collaborative atmosphere.
In line with the strategic objective of “increasing the number of open source projects on Cardano,” our project exemplifies this ethos as Socious has been an open-source initiative since its inception. We encourage developers on our platform to similarly champion open-source projects within the Cardano realm.
Our project aligns seamlessly with the challenge's key metrics:
- Number of developers actively building on top of Cardano: By safeguarding developers' work through our escrow system, we pave the way to attract a greater influx of developers to the Cardano ecosystem.
- A strong community of developers and proposers thriving on active collaboration: Socious, being a social networking app, lays the foundation for developers to connect with their peers, foster community spirit, and engage in meaningful dialogues.
To date, we boast over 3,700 registered users, a significant portion of whom are developers who had not been presented with opportunities to work with Cardano prior to joining Socious. Through our project, we foresee not only an increased adoption of the Cardano platform but also a vibrant, synergistic community fostering open-source innovation.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Our project proposes significant benefits to the Cardano ecosystem:
- Drawing external developers into the Cardano fold via well-designed incentive structures such as impact scores and THANK tokens.
- Cultivating an enhanced developer experience through protective measures like secure payments, reduced escrow protection fees, and a balanced dispute resolution system.
- Propelling the count of open-source projects on Cardano, with a specific focus on inciting developers to champion these initiatives.
We will evaluate our project's success through quantifiable and qualitative metrics:
Quantitative Metrics: One key metric is the count of registered users on our platform. At present, Socious enjoys a thriving community of over 3,700 registered users, a substantial portion of which are developers newly introduced to the Cardano ecosystem. By the culmination of the project, we aspire to boost this figure to 6,000. Given Socious's current growth trajectory and the invaluable proposition our project offers to the platform and the Cardano ecosystem, we believe this target to be pragmatic and achievable.
Qualitative Metrics: We will also gauge success through user testimonials and feedback, understanding their experience with our platform, the effectiveness of our dispute resolution system, and their perceived value of our incentive structures.
Our innovation stands to bolster Cardano's productivity and growth, both immediately and in the long haul:
Short-Term Impact: Cardano developers can leverage our platform to circumvent wage disputes and economize on escrow protection, enabling them to concentrate on crafting successful Dapps on Cardano.
Long-Term Impact: Our unique mechanisms of Impact Score and THANK tokens promise to lure more developers to embark on open-source projects within the Cardano ecosystem, thereby expanding its range and reach over time.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
We plan to spread the project's outputs during and after its completion. While building, we provide monthly and milestone reports, and present in two Town Hall meetings every two weeks: the Eastern Town Hall and the Pacific Town Hall. We regularly attend these town hall meetings to provide project updates and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Because we are based in Japan, these two town halls are the only ones we can attend on a regular basis. Occasionally, such as upon completion of the project, we attend other town halls to give presentations, although they occur at 2-3AM for us.
We will share the projects’s outputs, impact and opportunities with the community members. The links to our close-out report and video will be publicly available on Youtube. We will also share information on our website and social media. Because we are a gig marketplace, gig opportunities for Cardano developers will be listed on our Socious platform.
Since Socious is an open source project, our code base is public on our GitHub page and Cardano developers are encouraged to fork and use it for other projects.
We will be using the escrow protection and the dispute settlement features to hire more developers and further our development activities.