Key Points
- Programmatic tools for researching and evaluating Catalyst Projects that will save tens of hours of user research
- Governance is a massive area within the blockchain space. We will provide leadership for auditing votes, adding transparency, and creating equitable accessibility to data for all users.
- The Wolfram Governance Analytics proposal will help improve and grow auditability by automating parts of the time-consuming process of reviewing Catalyst funding.
Link to Supplemental Information (Text & Visuals): <https://wolfr.am/Governance-Analytics>
We believe another layer of transparency is required to automate parts of the auditing process so that participants can understand metrics such as the ROI from grants.
We will help to solve the auditing problem through the completion of four phases: Discovery, Working, Presentation and Communication.
I. Discovery Phase
We plan on executing a discovery phase from present until April.
The discovery phase will be a community-based process starting with a meeting in late March to go through the data and analytics that we have already assembled and solicit questions from the Cardano community.
Current questions we can answer will be based on data we found from our initial discovery process here: (<https://wolfr.am/Governance-Analytics>) which looks at proposals that were funded or not over several cycles. We can explain how one could answer high-level questions like: "is there a correlation between overall score?, the requested amount of funds, and if the proposal was successful in winning funds?" among others.
We will follow-up this initial session with two more virtual seminars during the month of April. These sessions will help ensure that we include a significant amount of open brainstorming about how analytics can help inform individuals and other projects within the Cardano Community.
If this proposal is funded, then we will extend this into the additional portions of the solution.
A. Data Assembly
Create curated data sets from Fund1 - Fund7.
This curation will be done partially by hand as initial funds (1 and 2) do not have machine readable formats available. This takes time because the data exists in different formats and needs to be highly structured. In addition, some of the data is in several different locations.
At the moment, there is an important class of questions related to entities/people who have submitted proposals over time that we cannot investigate because the data exists behind a website or is separated from Ideascale completely. While we are still sifting through the data, we will uncover more problems and solutions to our current questions. We believe this is a community effort for uncovering data sources.
We can also investigate the quantitative and qualitative data contained in existing surveys.
B. Future Discussions
In the future, we plan to add access to APIs that would help contextualize performance of projects. We'd like to note that this is probably a stretch goal for this project; however, it is useful to note the questions that this data might help solve from an auditing perspective.
The APIs we'd like to investigate adding are the following:
1. Create access to IdeaScale's API
Access to Ideascale's API opens up the ability for us to ask questions related to the entities/people who have submitted proposals over time.
- Ideascale API (https://a.ideascale.com/api-docs/index.html)
- The Ideascale service contains personal information so it has limited access; however, it may be possible for Ideascale to create a custom API that limits access to only publicly accessible information.
2.Create access to code commit APIs:
Access to the number of commits in funded proposal repositories, with this data we can audit projects with the number of commits and unique participants in a project's repository to understand the general sense of a project’s scope and scale. This would also be useful to potentially measure the impact of developer libraries.
- Github API (https://docs.github.com/en/rest )
- Gitlab API (<https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/>)
- Other public “git” based services.
3. Social Media Services
Access to a number of social media services that could provide insight into the usage of services and how often those services are mentioned.
- Reddit API (https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/)
- Twitter (<https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api>)
- Etc.
II. Working Phase
A. Quantitative & Qualitative Check-ins
Create a survey (Survey Monkey) with quantitative elements and subjective questions (e.g. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/CJBWSPZ - NFT Marketplace Survey). This could help provide a framework for programmatic checking, comparisons etc.
B. Create Notebook Reports
Reporting notebooks will provide an interface for community members to see our work and begin formulating their own questions and analysis directions. These notebooks will be the basis for our educational events where catalyst participants come to learn more about what can be known from the data and help direct our future insights. Reporting notebooks will work as a second function as well, for the community to give feedback in a quantitative, structured survey form and in a qualitative, collaborative discussion form (most likely Zoom call and breakout rooms).
We hope community members will feel empowered to pursue this opportunity to work with the data they've structured.
III. Presentation
Periodic virtual seminars to review the work and brainstorm things that can be answered with Governance Analytics. These presentations will help to engage the Cardano Community and help to answer questions directly.
IV. Communications
Create summarized reports to send via communication channels. This represents a consistent touch point for updates regarding events in the Cardano space and updates on the governance analytics from Wolfram Blockchain Labs.
One of the largest challenges of humanity is trying to separate out how we can become more efficient with the use of automation.
In the "Improve and Grow Auditability" Challenge our goal is to help the field of blockchain analytics by expanding what can be done with governance analytics.
By providing governance analytics, humans will be more efficient in their reporting of their challenge progress and more efficient in their analysis of that progress as well.
The Cardano Catalyst program grants tens of millions of Ada to projects, serving as the inception point for some of the most important projects that Cardano will see. At present, however, one organization is responsible for auditing all of the data and progress of the projects to ensure there is a reasonable return on investment for the Cardano Community.
This auditing is a daunting task and the burden should not fall on just one of us or IOG alone.
Not only is there a tremendous amount of data available from the individual Fund series 1-7, but when investigated collectively there exists a multitude of time series based data analysis which has yet to be done. This knowledge about Project Catalyst needs to be made computable so that there is an equal opportunity for everyone, veterans and newcomers, to understand what the data can tell us.
It would be incredibly difficult to audit all of these projects solely through subjective analysis. In fact, this has given rise to the importance of the Community Assessor role and Veteran Community Assessor role - both play an important part for helping voters evaluate key metrics determined by the community. Even so, the vastness of materials to consume, digest and validate across funds represent an increasing problem over time.
The current growth rate of proposals is 33% per fund, which means there might be thousands of proposals eventually.
The data cannot live in spreadsheets. We must liberate this data so the community can improve and grow the auditability of Project Catalyst.
We created "Governance Analytics" to help automate this process by making the data computable and we'd like support for this effort from the Cardano Catalyst community – both in terms of questions to potentially solve as well as financial support.
We have already started the initial discovery phase of this project. The largest risks are lack of community engagement and lack of current data that is available/captured.