The current platform is not intuitive. Displaying content is crowded and often loses context, it is difficult for the user to understand the process and the changes between funds and challenges.
Research and deliver a useful prototype, a hub for management and network, with a focus on collaboration and co-creation of proposals with visualization of the groups/communities involved.
This is the total amount allocated to Parallel implementation of UI/UX to replace IDEASCALE, Crafted by Community, using Serverless and Edge Computing.
Ana Paula Petry
Lucas Boemeke
We rely on Catalyst Operation for final integration
Project will be fully Open Source.
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.
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:
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:
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:
(Yes, the project will not involve 3rd parties that can lock the deployment and will be aligned with perpetual and irrevocable licence.)
(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.)
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:
The main metrics that can measure the success of this project will be:
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.
Thiago Nunes
Being among the first Catalyst Pioneers, I was always a critic of the interface and the onboarding process, unfortunately, the initial management of Catalyst Operation did not provide doors to work with this problem, the decision was to keep IdeaScale. This proposal carries frustration as a motivation to get the job done, as many others in the ecosystem.
I have several years of experience in developing digital products and managing teams. I runned a marketing agency for more than seven years in Brazil, working with several clients and managing a team with more than 30 contributors, providing services for small businesses, to national and international corporations. I’m a Cardano Ambassador with more than five years of track record together with Cardano Foundation and one of the pioneers in several initiatives in Cardano, including being one of the ITN SPOs running under Ouros ticker and one of the organizers at Cardano Rio as also Director of Operations at Cardano Warriors.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thiago-nunes-72b95327/
https://twitter.com/tsnnst
You can read a short story about myself here: A short story about myself
Ana Paula Petry
Architect specialized in Residential Interiors with more than 10 years of experience in the area. In 2020, I decided to explore my passion for technology and design (UI and UX) by joining the blueshift.cc team, where I acquired a deep knowledge in UI/UX as also branding, social media, internal marketing, creation and management of online corporate events and onboarding.
Today I work at a startup called bohr.io, a serverless platform aimed at developers. My role is to support the development and marketing teams in creating intuitive and elegant solutions for users as we look to expand our market presence. I am passionate about innovation, creativity and technology and I am always looking for new learning opportunities. My purpose is to make the world a better place, one project at a time.
I came across Cardano through Thiago in 2020, before that I had never bought any cryptocurrency. I still have ADAs and since then I got to know a lot of exciting facts about Cardano which makes me believe in it more and more. I’ll be helping Thiago to organize Cardano Summit at Curitiba in November and promote Cardano there.
Even though I believe blockchain is the future, I often realize how disconnected this world is from people`s everyday lives. As a user with medium knowledge of web3 is really complicated for me to browse through Cardano`s platform and I think we can help the community building something more user friendly. This is not the first Catalyst proposal I engage but hopefully will be the first one approved.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anapaulaspetry/
Ana Paula Petry`s Portifolio.pdf
Lucas Boemeke
A developer with more than 20 years of experience in the field, he specializes in new technologies. As a Senior technology leader & edge computing advocate, he makes it all happen around here. He was the CTO of a software house for 12 years of existence and 3 years ago he decided to found bohr.io with the aim of making life easier for developers.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-boemeke/
https://www.youtube.com/@boemeke
This team has an extensive track record working together on several projects with large clients such as Rock In Rio and Bradesco, where both the concept of edge computing and serverless was explored. Portfolio: Ana Paula Petry`s Portifolio.pdf
The goal is to improve, simplify and engage the user experience of creating and collaborating in new ideas in an environment that contains many technological and educational challenges.
The only way to implement this approach is through constant, innovation, research and feedback interaction between the user and the product, for that, a big chunk of our time will be spent validating the steps that are being developed, with one to one or group interactions.
On the other hand we are aiming to deploy an scale and flexible infrastructure using serverless and edge computing, the reason for that is not only cost, but development experience, by facilitating the deployment and speeding up development as also maintenance in the future. All the technology used will be at the core open-source, allowing an easy migration to a monolithic infrastructure if needed.
The project will be developed by Quarters to facilitate management and reporting, resulting in a total of 12 months.
Q1 - Key Event Milestone 1 - Research and planning - Projected Cost: Q1 160650 ADA
Q2 - Key Event Milestone 2 - Wireframe, Design System and Development - Projected Cost: Q2 160650 ADA
Q3 - Key Event Milestone 3 - Implementation of the final project version - Projected Cost: Q3 160650 ADA
Q4 - Key Event Milestone 4 - Final Development Stage - Projected Cost: Q4 160650 ADA
Q1 Milestone
Q2 Milestone
Q3 Milestone
Q4 Milestone
Quarterly Budget
Q1 160650 ADA, $43375 (Month: $14458) - Q2 160650 ADA, $43375 (Month: $14458) - Q3 160650 ADA, $43375 (Month: $14458) - Q4 160650 ADA, $43375 (Month: $14458)
Ana Paula - Lead UI/UX Specialist and Designer
-UI/UX Research and Design
(Full Time - $4500/month [16666 ADA] | Total for the Quarter: $13500 [50000 ADA])
Lucas Boemeke - Senior Full Stack Developer and Serverless and Edge Computing Specialist
(Full Time - $5500/month [20370 ADA] | Total for the Quarter: $16500 [61110 ADA])
Thiago - Project Owner/Manager, Head of Innovation for the project, Cardano Technical Specialist
-Management, information consolidation, community outreach, and ideation.
(Part Time - $4458/month [16511 ADA] | Total for the Quarter: $13374,00 [49533 ADA])
Total budget of this proposal: 642600 ADA
All costs related to hardware acquisition, software subscription, hosting and tools and taxation will be deducted and paid by the team members from the given amount.
We carefully considered market rates, industry standards, and project complexity to establish this budget, it includes freelance rates, project management costs, technical documentation, and community engagement expenses.
This team consists of highly skilled professionals who offer cost-effective services without compromising quality, the rates fall within the lower end of averages for scientific, engineering, and managerial staff.
The value is set at a level that aligns with the global and local competition in their respective areas, ensuring that the compensation is fair and competitive. However, it is important to note that monetary incentives do not solely drive the participants of this project. We are deeply engaged with the Cardano Community and are motivated to deliver their best performance.
All project participants have willingly accepted the currency risk associated with being paid in ADA, showcasing our commitment and confidence in the Cardano ecosystem. A decrease in ADA price may result in lower compensation, but a rise in ADA price serves as a reward for investing in Cardano, aligning our incentives with the ecosystem's success.
Our conclusion is that this proposal offers great value for money within the Cardano ecosystem. With our expertise, transparent cost breakdown, and the value our project deliverables bring, we are confident in the substantial returns the Cardano community will experience in terms of functionality, innovation, and growth.
In conclusion, our proposal offers great value for money within the Cardano ecosystem. With our team's expertise, transparent cost breakdown, and the value our project deliverables bring, we are confident in the substantial returns the Cardano community will experience in terms of functionality, innovation, and growth.
Thiago Nunes
I will be the product manager and product owner, with relevant experience on Cardano and good reach in the community, I can guide the UI/UX and technology team on several corners of Catalyst and speed up the process. I will interact with Catalyst and align the team output with the expected milestones described and interact with Catalyst Milestone reports, on top of that I will also be responsible for managing the budget and keeping the expected output on target.
Ana Paula
I will be responsible for developing all the UI/UX design I will be developing all the UI/UX design of the platform through the whole process explained on our milestones.
Lucas Boemeke
I will be the main developer, responsible for the product development, front-end and back-end of the platform throughout the whole process, following the product requirements for the integration with Catalyst Testnet and Edge Computing Deployment.