DAOs <3 smart contracts for skill-acquisition and contribution tracking.

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

Additional applicants

• James Dunseith
• M. Ali Modiri
• Sebastian Pabon
• Nori Nishigaya
• Yoram Ben Zvi
• Adrian Hüetter
• Nelson Kshetrimayum
• Juan Salvador Magán Valero
• HongJing (Jingles) K

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

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

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

[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.” .

No dependencies.

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

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

Project will be fully open source.

[METADATA] Category of proposal

[METADATA] SDG rating

SDG goals:

End poverty in all its forms everywhere.

Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.

Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.

SDG subgoals:

By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship.

Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors.

Support domestic technology development, research and innovation in developing countries, including by ensuring a conducive policy environment for, inter alia, industrial diversification and value addition to commodities.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

Proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill.

Annual growth rate of real GDP per employed person.

Proportion of medium and high-tech industry value added in total value added.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

In DAOs, monitoring member skills and contributions is a crucial but persisting challenge. While we know who is a great contributor to the Cardano community, we need a quantitative method to measure skill, skill acquisition, and tangible contributions. This hurdle needs to be solved for Cardano to be the premier choice for building DAOs.

Background

As a result of Gimbalabs's work over the past years engaging with different organizations in the Cardano ecosystem through Gimbalabs Playground, we have seen how this problem affects decentralized organizations. After two years of insightful observations and continuous improvement, we have developed and reached a significant milestone—an MVP that tackles the issue of tracking skills and contributions head-on.

Our solution

We created the Andamio platform to help organizations collaborate and build relationships within the community based on trust. Andamio's infrastructure is built with Cardano blockchain technology and integrates the following:

• Smart Contract-based Skills and Contribution Tracking
• Treasury management and reward contracts

We designed Andamio to engage organizations that are looking for a way to onboard contributors to their projects.

Our Impact

Various organizations within the Cardano ecosystem, like Wada, Cardano Foundation, Emurgo, MeshJS, and Swarm's Governance Guild, have already shared their interest in using Andamio to onboard contributors and improve their governance and community-building efforts. 

Andamio is a unique innovation on the Cardano blockchain that offers organizations a smooth onboarding process. We will provide this open-source platform to Cardano organizations as a solution to simplify contributor onboarding through a skills and contribution tracking system powered by smart contracts.

We will demonstrate our impact on the Cardano ecosystem by helping organizations adopt and use our platform and evaluating improvements in their contributor onboarding processes. 

This proposal aims to provide funding to take the Andamio platform from its MVP stage to a pilot project where we will offer it to other DAOs active on Cardano. 

For this, we have identified the following needs:

1. Beta testing: get the Andamio platform in front of potential contributors and DAOs to test the platform and gather feedback.
2. Lead generation: establish relationships with DAOs within and outside the Cardano ecosystem that will benefit from the use of Andamio.
3. Implementation and adoption support: make sure interested DAOs implement and adopt the Andamio platform and gather feedback from them.
4. Design and prototyping: improving the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX).

Our long term plans include, but are not limited to:

• Implementation of the Andamio platform across the Cardano ecosystem.
• Securing external funding and generating different revenue streams to continue to improve and promote our product.

The tools we are developing and will offer to communities include:

• Project-based learning platform - used to onboard community members and guide them to learn specific skills that are helpful for the community - for example, how to become a Project Catalyst Community Reviewer.
• Once the skill is acquired, the member can contribute by working as a Community Reviewer, and his contribution will be registered (e.g., successfully reviewed 25 proposals). 
• A treasury system that will then automatically compensate the member for his work
• A set of smart contracts to manage the various interactions   

This set of tools could be used for many scenarios within a community for more efficient and fruitful collaboration. 

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

The challenge asks “What tools can we provide to enable effective DAO’s creation and operation”?

While there are tools to create DAOs, there are no tools to help DAOs operate effectively. In order for DAOs to grow, they need mechanisms to define and distribute tasks and projects to their communities, onboard contributors and reward them for their work. Using the Andamio platform, organizations will seamlessly track contributions to their projects as well as provide onboarding and background material for contributors. Providing educational material will enable contributors to acquire the necessary skills to contribute to real-world projects. Tracking skills acquired and contributions to real-world projects will create a positive feedback loop of skill-building, contributions and community growth.

Quantitative impact

Over a period of six months, we will track:

• No. of DAOs using Andamio.
• No. of contributors using Andamio to acquire skills.
• No. of contributions made to Cardano organizations as a result of using the Andamio platform.
• Amount of Ada distributed as rewards for contributions made as a result of using the Andamio platform.

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

In the short-term, we expect organizations using the Andamio platform to greatly improve their contributor onboarding process. In the mid-term, we expect to attract new developers to the Cardano ecosystem offering a more rewarding, low-risk/high-reward training and onboarding process. In the long-term, we estimate the Andamio platform will reduce the time and amount of resources spent in educating and onboarding contributors to real-world projects by at least 50%. 

We expect that, In the future, the Andamio platform will be used not only by the Cardano community but by the education and learning services industry in general.

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

We will share our progress reports through our website and through Project Catalyst channels.

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

Background

Gimbalabs' work within the Cardano community has focused on onboarding developers to the Cardano ecosystem through innovative and interactive educational programs like the Plutus PBL (https://plutuspbl.io/) and engaging with the community through events like Gimbalabs Playground and Gimbalabs Live Coding. The work that Gimbalabs has done for the benefit of the community speaks for itself, and its value far surpasses the funding it has received. 

Andamio

Gimbalabs's work over the years within Cardano has yielded valuable insights into the unique challenges organizations adopting blockchain technology have to face. Decentralized organizations, in particular, are venturing into uncharted territory and need more tools to forge a path forward when scaling their operations. The team developing this open-source solution for decentralized organizations, deeply rooted and aligned with the values Gimbalabs espouses, has worked for six months with no remuneration to establish another solution for the benefit of the community. This solution is not only open-source, which speaks to its accountability; it uses Cardano blockchain technology to provide an on-chain record of its use, providing an unprecedented opportunity to showcase the results of its use with the utmost transparency.

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

The main goals for the project are:

1. Provide an open-source tool that Cardano DAOs can use to improve their contributor onboarding process.
2. Provide contributors an on-chain record of skills acquired and real-world contributions made to projects. 
3. By providing these tools, improve the contributor onboarding process in general and for Cardano organizations in particular. 

As stated in the previous section ([IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?), we will validate the feasibility of our approach through quantitative measures.

[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.

Over the past 6 months our team has worked without pay bootstrapping a solution for the benefit of the Cardano community. Through our pilot Plutus PBL program, we have provided free education and onboarded new developers to the ecosystem.

Milestone 1: Andamio platform beta launch [ 6 weeks ]

Stage: Beta testing

• Internally test and document the contribution platform, preparing it for public availability.
• Conduct three workshops to showcase the Andamio platform and generate interest in its use.
• Gather user feedback and make necessary refinements and improvements.

Stage: Adoption and implementation

• Support the adoption of Andamio by at least two Cardano DAOs.

Stage: Lead generation

• Generate leads for further DAO adoption.

Milestone 2: Pilot project expansion and integration [ 8 weeks ]

Stage: Adoption and implementation

• Conduct one workshop to showcase the Andamio platform and generate interest.
• Gather feedback from DAOs using the Andamio platform.

Stage: Research and development

• Collect feedback from participants and DAOs to identify areas of improvement.
• Regularly evaluate and assess the pilot project's impact on skill-tracking, contributions and community engagement.

Milestone 3: Launch and community adoption [ 10 weeks ]

Stage: Design and prototyping

• Implement refinements and enhancements based on the pilot project and user feedback.

Stage: Adoption and implementation

• Monitor key metrics to measure platform adoption and use, including DAOs onboarded and contributor engagement.

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

You can find the online version of this document here

You can find the online version of this document here

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

For a more detailed budget breakdown, please see: Fund 10: DAOs <3 Cardano Budget

• Project management - 36,000
• Beta testing - 56,550
• Adoption and implementation - 28,600
• Lead generation - 20,100
• Design and prototyping - 30,400

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

Over the past years, we have actively engaged with the community to gain insights into their needs and challenges. Leveraging the power of Cardano blockchain technology, we have developed a minimum viable product (MVP) already delivering value to the Cardano community. We have worked on the project without any financial compensation for over six months, showing our commitment. In line with Cardano's mission to drive meaningful change and promote adoption, we are now seeking funding to develop further and scale this open-source Cardano product, which has the potential to make a significant impact on organizations both within and beyond the Cardano ecosystem, as well as the broader blockchain industry.

Some important benchmark metrics to keep in mind: 

In the U.S

• USD 170 billion (USD 1,286 per employee) is spent annually on employee training (300 billion worldwide).
• This cost represents, on average, only 42 hours of training per employee. 
• USD 90 billion is spent annually generating internal training resources.
• A typical hiring process consists of at least three stages (recruitment, selection, and onboarding), each with associated tasks and resource requirements. 
• On average, it costs a company between USD 4,200 - 7,500 to hire an employee; this does not consider onboarding costs. 

These problems are exacerbated in decentralized organizations, which depend on bootstrapping or seed funding to find and train talent. This problem is especially true within the Cardano ecosystem, which has a notoriously steep learning curve for new developers.

[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.