Bring Decentralized Organization tools to the front of the community

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Curtis Myers

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

blockchain.relativity@protonmail.com

Additional applicants

Randall Harmon

Dave Patterson

Demilade Jaiyeola

Maija Grudule

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

8

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

Yes

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

Our technical plan involves the use of Stellar Contracts, which includes the Helios contract language. No further development is required for Helios to serve its role, and we have included a small budget for iteration of Stellar Contracts in this proposal. We will be using the Done Collectively platform as well, which is also ready for usage.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

No

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

Stellar Contracts is open source.  

The poshplum UI library from Done Collectively is already open-source. It provides React tools for UI and utility serving rich applications.

The project-management application will be open-source.

The Plum application framework from Done Collectively has an open-source track. (in development/will seek sponsorship for this in F11). 

This will enable people to run the open-source version of the project management application for personal use.

The Stellar-based dAPI packages for on-chain interactions will be open-sourced.

[METADATA] Category of proposal

dApp

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Four key features to streamline your organization: project management, contribution tracking, payout management, and a revenue-sharing application. All will be components of a Community-in-a-box offering. Connecting your community to a contribution pipeline and managing many of the normal operations in organization project management, has just got a lot easier.

We at d.Cypher, are working on Insight.IQ creating an inclusive, engaging, and sustainable community platform that empowers organizations and individuals to collaborate in sustainable, rewarding ways that promote organizational health. 

 The platform provides tools that benefit the many specific needs of an organization, and will expand to support the many types of communities and their specific needs. 

We aim to achieve this multifaceted mission gradually through active community involvement. Our plugin-based platform architecture will allow ecosystem contributors to contribute their solutions into an integrative experience emphasizing decentralization.

1. Project Management: We plan to incorporate a robust project management tool within our platform. We will use on-chain mechanisms for storing key project information and for payout mechanics. Detailed planning, executing, and project tracking will be done off-chain, ensuring efficiency and clarity in the management of initiatives. This tool will help our community members collaborate more effectively, streamline communication, and oversee project lifecycles seamlessly. 

2. Contribution Tracking: Recognizing the value of each community member’s contribution is paramount. We propose to implement a contribution tracking system connected to the project management tools, which will mint community-based Cardano-native tokens for contributors to hold in their wallets, while also tracking the specific contributions of each member. 

The contribution tracking system will promote transparency and acknowledge individuals' efforts and inspire continued involvement. We will extend the contribution metadata format used by Treasury Guild, forming a reporting database that communities can use for reputation, certification, and other outcomes.

We will empower every community member to contribute their unique skills and talents and feel valued and engaged, driving higher levels of sustainable contribution.

3. Payout Management: To honor the work done by community members, we will build a payout management feature. As tasks are completed and project milestones achieved, the community will be able to approve payouts, releasing funds for disbursement. Any types of Cardano native assets can be managed, including rewards, reputation tokens, and contribution-accounting coins. It will provide clarity and assurance regarding financial matters, reduce potential conflicts and misunderstandings, and reduce the overhead of mundane tasks.

4. Blockchain Integration: By integrating elements of these features with the Cardano blockchain, InsightIQ leverages the security, transparency, and efficiency of blockchain technology. The use of Cardano-native tokens for rewarding contributors enhances the utility and circulation of these tokens and promotes the adoption of the Cardano blockchain. 

Our vision is a regenerative world where communities collaborate, innovate, and create sustainable solutions for the environment, economy, and society, fostering a vibrant ecosystem of connection and collaboration.

This community-as-a-service: will simplify the community-building process, allowing you to focus on nurturing connections and driving engagement. We seek to unlock your community's true potential by fostering meaningful connections, driving tangible value, and empowering users to support each other.

Conclusion

In developing these features, d.Cypher will create an inclusive, dynamic, and rewarding community platform. We firmly believe that with the proposed enhancements, we can drive innovation, foster participation, and inspire loyalty within our community, ultimately leading to shared prosperity.

We invite you to fund this proposal and join us on this journey towards creating a holistic, community-driven ecosystem.

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

Effective Collaboration Management Platforms to Organize Community Intentions and Actions:

Cardano needs a thriving ecosystem of different products and integrations for the community to use that increasingly become the better alternatives over current centralized providers. We are directly addressing task-tracking and project management, the most frequent activities that decentralized organizations perform, even if they aren't using any DAO management tools.

Additional not yet existing tools to give Cardano a distinct advantage: 

Cardano currently has no tools for organized project management with integrated Cardano-native payout. Most of our organizations are using a project management that has high training and manual process overhead for contributors and administrators. We will integrate payments and workflows, removing many manual activities

Effective project management and payouts are top-tier cases for DAO community collaboration, DAO operation, and DAO governance.

Driving Adoption of Cardano: By building a solution on Cardano, we are contributing to the growth and adoption of the Cardano blockchain. As our tool scales and more organizations use it, the Cardano ecosystem would expand as well.

Showcasing the Utility of Cardano: Our project serves as a use-case demonstrating the utility of the Cardano blockchain for building complex and scalable solutions. This could inspire other businesses and developers to leverage Cardano for their own projects.

Enhancing Transparency and Credibility: Putting project management and Organization information on-chain enhances observations and deep insight into what is happening in Cardano. This insight will display the transparent growth of organizations operating on the project management platform, and provide a credible source of truth. 

Stimulating Economic Activity: Having a project management tool that also pays out to its contributors will boost economic activity and showcase all the work being done by many of the organizations operating on Cardano network. Making it easier to get involved, contribute value, build community, and get paid.

Building Community: By transitioning into a fully interactive community, we're not just building a tool but also a community within the Cardano ecosystem. This could lead to higher user engagement and increased interest in the Cardano platform.

Promoting Decentralization: Our project aligns with Cardano's core principle of promoting decentralization. 

By addressing the challenges and bringing these benefits to the Cardano ecosystem, our project aims to be a valuable addition to the Cardano community.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

We will engage ecosystem projects to test the effectiveness of our developing solution, integrating their feedback to retain their engagement and ensure it meets their needs.  

• Number of orgs testing our alpha versions
• Number of orgs who decide to adopt the product
• Number of project activities rewarded through the platform
• Transparent qualitative feedback of testers reported to Catalyst
• Savings in administration and project-management costs vs baseline after adoption (hours, value, and human experience)

With this information present we will get a glimpse into what resistances these organizations were experiencing and have a metric to measure the improvements our platform has provided. Further providing information on the priority of what tools are needed.

Valuable experience feedback we gather that cannot be measured with tangible metrics, is not lost, but in fact is just as valuable to us. We will be using tools like pol.is to discover insight into user experience and how the tool is adding value to their toolbelt. We also have a list of application behavioral requirements that we will use as a measurement of successful completion throughout the project.

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

dAPI’s for the on chain interactions and payouts will be made available in open-source form. We will also integrate them into a UI application that projects can adopt for on-chain project and payout management.

We will report on the qualitative feedback from testers.

 

And the data that will exist on-chain will provide insight into how organizations are managing themselves, available on-chain for anyone to review. With enough data on-chain, useful stats, charts, and deeper insight into how organizations are flowing within this ecosystem can be found. Services like LidoNation could offer observations or trends on their platform.

Insight.IQ’s vision is to be a comprehensive, user-friendly "community in a box" solution, bringing organizations “Community-as-a-Service (CaaS)”, which empowers communities to build, manage, and integrate their communities effectively, providing a central hub for community management. Insight.IQ enables organizations to create a vibrant community culture, nurture a sense of belonging, and achieve their community objectives. By leveraging the power of Community-as-a-Service, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence; Insight.IQ will unlock the full potential of communities and drive meaningful impact.

The full vision can be found at: d.Cypher_Lite_Paper

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

DCypher

Prepared: Building on our experience and community-driven insights, we have created a working internal project management prototype to get direct experience with workflows and database structures. This tool has proven effective in organizing and coordinating projects, and we are excited to transfer our learnings to make it product-ready.-. Many of our existing internal organization tools can be built out to offer services on the Insight.IQ platform.

Collaborative: We demonstrate our collaborative nature by engaging with various communities and decentralized groups in developing governance strategies, such as hosting a Cardano CIP-1694 Governance workshop, and by integrating community-driven insights into our platform development roadmap.

Committed: Our commitment is showcased by our active participation in initiatives like the Emurgo Hackathon, our relentless pursuit of innovative solutions such as using LLMs for generating insightful charts from voting results, and our dedication to advancing governance practices through collaboration with various communities and decentralized groups. We have been active in the Cardano community since the early Catalyst funds, and Dave has been an SPO since 2020.

Check out our submission to the Emurgo Hackathon: DCypher Emurgo Hackathon BUIDL 2023 SUBMISSION 

We have identified many of the suppliers, inputs, and outputs needed for the project, which will reduce friction during development. We intend to delegate budget management to the Treasury Guild, and community event management to Swarm services, to allow us to focus on development.

Done Collectively

Done Collectively brings many contributions to the project, including leadership, effective requirements-management practices, and working software. They are providing application infrastructure - a working platform where project management, education, community collaboration and other plugin components can be integrated, supporting the ambitious future roadmap of d.Cypher. 

Much of the complexity and long hours of designing and creating this pluggable system have already been completed. It will significantly improve our product lifecycle timeline. Maija and Randall will provide ongoing continuity, connecting prior efforts to the current objective.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

After identifying and experiencing the inevitable problem areas of operating an organization in a decentralized ecosystem, our main goal is to provide solutions to these struggles by creating a useful Cardano-native project management application.

We also seek to establish an application platform having headroom to grow through the future roadmap of d.Cypher. 

Our goals will have been achieved when most Cardano-centric orgs adopt our project-management tools instead of other solutions.

Our approach has been to address the many facets of feasibility and effectiveness. Focusing on details such as: amount of data that will need to live on-chain, how many transactions a typical contributor would encounter throughout a project roadmap, thresholds for migrating to a side chain solution, and other considerations. 

We have a list of objectives for how the application behaves - promoting workflow efficiency, effective user-experiences, and high performance (even when a project has a lot of tasks).

See below for additional information and steps we will take to ensure and validate the feasibility.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

[with Project Management at core of scope]

1. Project Setup and Prototyping: 1 Month / 68,550 ADA 
2. Project Kickoff: The Gathering by the fire!
3. Validate requirements (input from experience, existing products analysis, Swarm's Open Project Management requirements-gathering process; get prospect feedback)
4. Setup initial development environment
5. Develop Risk Management and Contingency Plan 
6. Project and technical Planning: design database schema, architectural design, software module identification, task planning)
7. SUCCESS when developers have a working development environment with a shell application, and the Outputs and Deliverables are met.
8. Buildout, Alpha Launch and scope refinement: 2.5 Months / 107,550 ADA Minimal working alpha version with key features is deployed to testnet for validation; gather results of validation and prioritize remaining work.
9. Product technical alignment, training time (define default process models, design for modularity & pluggability, metadata standards, support for rev-share contract integration)
10. Develop tier 1 product functionality
11. Setup continuous integration
12. UX wireframing, Graphic design prototyping 
13. SUCCESS when a working alpha version is deployed with essential product management features and ready for testing
14. Agile Refinement: 1.5 Months / 76,600 ADA Complete the highest-priority scope including refinements discovered during phase 3.
15. Develop tier 2 functionality of the software  
16. Identify and triage final tier2 scope: (find any refinements or additions to scope that are critical to customer success) 
17. Internal verification and requirements: d.Cypher will run early tests to verify that it works well enough to put in front of others
18. SUCCESS when new learnings are discovered and key scope for tier2 is implemented and deployed for UAT
19. User Acceptance & Critical Scope: 1 Months / 58,350 ADA
20. Work with community groups/ UI validation like ODIN, Swarm, Catalyst challenge teams to do lightweight test-runs to validate that developed alpha version meets the needs of those prospects, and that it can feed useful metadata (as Treasury Guild has already been using) 
21. Setup Infrastructure / Operations
22. Migration to mainnet - issue triage, critical bug-fixes 
23. Implement metadata to enable on-chain record-keeping
24. Develop initial user-documentation in alignment with the refined scope 
25. SUCCESS when application is available on mainnet and documentation is ready
26. Final Close Out: 1.5 Month / 63,400 ADA
27. Project result reporting
28. Survey alpha and beta users for a qualitative and comparative organizational impact survey 
29. Publish open-source application code
30. Deliver user-documentation
31. Establish pricing model and open beta signups
32. Final user-acceptance validation

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

• Project Setup and Prototyping
• OUTPUTS: Wireframes, API designs, architecture diagrams, deployment plans and high-level operational procedures, Defined default process model
• OUTCOMES:  A clear understanding of the project direction, confidence in the general scope and plan for our core development cycle, An actionable design that caters to the identified requirements and provides a foundation for the upcoming development phase.
• DELIVERABLES: Documentation of validated user requirements

• Buildout, Alpha Launch and scope refinement
• OUTPUTS: working alpha version, pol.is survey of validation results
• OUTCOMES: Early verification and validation that the design and implemented features meet users' needs. confidence that the remainder of our development budget will be focused on the most valuable capabilities to will serve our community and our customers
• DELIVERABLES: Video demonstration of the alpha version; pol.is survey of validation results, Test reports from d.Cypher and community groups.

• Agile Refinement
• OUTPUTS: metadata structure, refined beta software, survey results, cost analysis of on-chain interaction habits
• OUTCOMES: full featured integration, Completed the highest-priority features and functions covered by the budget, all payouts have contributor accounting metadata
• DELIVERABLES: Video demo of beta version, pol.is survey results, developed software released as open-source

• User Acceptance & Critical Scope
• OUTPUTS: Statistical report on usage
• OUTCOMES: project, task-management, and rewards-distribution is simpler and easier for all projects running on Cardano, software deployed to mainnet;
• DELIVERABLES: on-chain metadata and seeing transaction data, user acceptance report

• Final Close
• OUTPUTS: Statistical report on usage
• OUTCOMES: users are well-informed and trained about the solution usage
• DELIVERABLES: User documentation that aligns with the final scope of the project, Project result report, community-training sessions, user documentation, Community training sessions in After Town Hall

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Budget Allocation:

Our team believes that a transparent budget is key to a successful project. Here is an initial breakdown of how we intend to allocate the grant for each activity. We intend our budget allocation to provide economic opportunity for program contributors from our community, adding financial benefit to the Cardano ecosystem. 

Breakdown by Milestones

Milestone 1

68,550 ADA

Milestone 2

105,550 ADA

Milestone 3

129,200 ADA

Milestone 4

50,150 ADA

Milestone 5

63,400 ADA

Breakdown by Roles

Product Manager: $7,664.00

Project Manager: $16,050.00

UI/UX Designer: $15,800.00

Tech Lead: $24,000.00

Community Manager: $15,480.00

SEO Consultant: $560.00

Marketing: $1,760.00

Web Dev: $22,880.00

Plutus/Helios: $8,000.00

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Many organizations struggle with these inevitable problem areas, by providing tools for them they can grow beyond these hurdles, giving them more value. We see this as exponential value that is difficult to be measured, as any community using our platform could become indispensable and provide growing value to the ecosystem. Allowing more organizations that failed to start due to these problem areas without proper integrated tools for them, to get bootstrapped. Their community members will also grow, adding value and utility to the Cardano ecosystem. 

The initial cost of the project will represent a fraction of the cost savings provided to Cardano Organizations. But that is only the surface, the true value the platform brings is allowing communities that have operated in the dark due to these hardships to be brought to light by operating more decentralized, streamlined, and transparent. Increasing visibility and motivation for contributors.

We want to support decentralization, but too often we have seen DAOs try to operate and develop without paying their contributors in tangible funds, often relying on minting a token in hopes to build value. This consumes many developers time and potential money. We want to assure the contributors are fairly rewarded, this contributes to our budget.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept