Reach your people - social media and messaging integrations for DAOs and NFT projects

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

Additional applicants

None

[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

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The solution in a single paragraph:

Imagine Alice and Bob are holders of a governance token for the $NICE DAO. Jeff is a community lead in the DAO. Alice and Bob are busy people, and Alice only has access to email on the go most of the week, while Bob has Discord, but never checks his notifications, since there are so many. He is fairly active on Twitter, though. Jeff is publishing a summary for the newest vote on how to use the treasury in 2024. He presses send, and an email pops up in Alice's inbox. A notification about a Twitter DM with the same content and a link to the proposal appears on Bob's phone, seconds later. The twist: Jeff does not know Alice or Bob. Nor does he know their wallet addresses, email address or Twitter handle. He does not need to, since his DAO uses "Vibrant".

One of decentralizations biggest challenges is the ability to connect people that are distributed across the globe, time zones, availability of devices and apps, with the things they care about in the Cardano ecosystem. The last two years have proven to be a challenge for DAOs, DeFi projects and NFT communities when it comes to getting the word out to their members, which in turn are interested in the improvement and growth of their respective projects.

Both parties benefit from this growth and interaction, because it brings value to the project and in turn thriving projects bring value back to their community. Unfortunately the limitations of decentralized governance and connectivity quickly show their ugly underbelly, with conversations being spread out across dozens of different messaging apps, forums and domain-specific tools, or projects having to enforce only a very limited set of apps to interact on, which immediately limits the people that can participate at all to specific groups.

We are proposing to build a framework and standards to allow connecting different social media, instant messaging and notification tools together in a way that allows everyone to listen (consume), regardless of how consistent their internet connection is and with an ability to remain private. The second must-have goal is to allow the publishing (speaking) part from the projects themselves, using a verification process (for example via CIP-0066 - https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/pull/294 ) as well as a way to publish project communication channels (possibly via Beacon tokens / CIP-0089 - https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/pull/466 ).

We believe it is not possible to unite all people under one shared messaging app, and we do not think the blockchain itself should be used as that application. Instead, creating reusable APIs and event models, as well as sample integrations, will allow Cardano to stand out as a "connect how you want" blockchain when it comes to DAO evolution.

The solution would include the following

• Standards (a CIP proposal) dealing with publishing a project's supported communication channels to the blockchain
• API definitions for a relay-based, open source implementation to allow connecting arbitrary IM/Notification systems
• Docker definitions to quickly spin up a specific set of services
• Documentation on how to deploy and use the services
• Two or three sample implementations (as libraries) for protocols. A small list of potential protocols
• Discord
• Telegram
• Email
• Twitter
• Push Notifications
• Slack
• GitHub
• Directly in web-wallets
• A usable deployed version of the solution available on mainnet
• A guide (or even an NMKR-based integration) on how to publish the connectivity information for your project

What we are NOT trying to solve with this solution

• We are not building an encrypted messaging solution (messages sent through relays will be publicly visible, which makes sense considering everyone should be able to read them if they would like to get updates from the DAO/project)
• This phase of the solution does not cover the members actually being able to reply - this may be done with leftover funds or as a second phase, once the success and adoption of the publishing solution is confirmed.

Note: This project has some overlap with our proposal in the SPO category, which deals with SPO-verification and does not include protocol design - just a HAZELnet integration. If both proposals get funded, the parts of the funding that overlap will be used towards building additional integrations or as bounty for other developers to build integrations.

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

Creating a framework for connectivity to social media and instant messaging + notifications in a standardized way addresses the DAO challenge in the aspects of collaboration management and adding solutions to the Cardano ecosystem that are giving us a distinct advantage for governance and communication, considering very few tools like this exist.

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

Success during the project development can be measured by the number of projects/DAOs participating in testnet and mainnet, as well as with public Dashboards showing number of sent and received messages.

On the adoption side, we can track the usage frequency of the proposed libraries via the public npm and Maven package registries, which track how often certain tools are downloaded, as well as the usage frequency in the solution that will be deployed by our team.

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

All source code will be in an open-source repository that is available throughout the development of the project. These repositories will also contain documentation on how to deploy the services.

We will also share a public dashboard that includes links to commit activity, count of tokens minted related to communication channels etc.

In addition to the source code, a running version of the solution will be available for use on the HAZELnet platform.

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

I am Director of Development at a leading business process management solution that builds enterprise grade web applications. With over 25 years of experience in web development, building full stack applications for companies with more than 50.000 employees, I was able to bring this knowledge to Cardano to build a community integration solution called HAZELnet, that as of today is used by more than 600 Discord servers serving more than 600,000 users. In two years of consistent contributions in code, leveraging Cardano infrastructure as a stakepool operator of HAZEL as well as providing educational content for the Cardano ecosystem, I have shown the ability to build, deliver and reiterate on my projects, all the while making sure that the input of the community comes first in deciding what needs to be done.

In addition, I have good relations to several DAO teams (Summon, ADAO, Clarity, RatsDAO) to build towards their needs, as well as the ear of the NMKR team and other active developers in the ecosystem to enhance and combine CIPs in ways that make sense for the entire Cardano community.

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

The main goals are to provide a generic framework for notifications and messaging to be connected to blockchain based publication of such channels on a per-project basis.

Every project can decide which channels they support and want to broadcast to, as well as ensure only they can publish official content. Feasibility has already been proven on the integrations side by HAZELnet.io, and the proposed standard for project verification CIP-0066 was in use by roughly 100 projects at the time of May 2023. I am in contact with the NMKR team (who spearheaded the CIP-0066 development) and the teams of ADAO and Summon Platform (as DAO platforms) to ensure a seamless mapping between any newly built standards and the existing, in use-standards.

I have existing implementations of Telegram, Discord and Slack connectors that can be leveraged, showing that at least 3 integrations are feasible, and Email/Text message/Push solutions are widely understood as standardized solutions that are easily built.

[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.

Milestone 1 (Month 1)

• Architecture modeling for service components, on-chain components, determine best candidates for on-chain and off-chain aspects
• Designing the metadata model for publishing communication channels, investigate relationships and interactions with CIP-0025, CIP-0068 and CIP-0027
• First draft of the CIP is being written

Milestone 2 (Months 2-3)

• Initial API definition for publishing and data retrieval is public
• Prototype on-chain data indexing solution
• Start to build first integration service, including adherence to the API definitions and with container definitions for easy deployment
• CIP PR is submitted for review

Milestone 3 (Months 4-5)

• Complete on-chain data indexing solution and create individually configurable container images for them
• First integration service in beta, started work on second integration
• Integrate existing services (messenger integration and on-chain parts) into a docker-compose/Kubernetes cluster for testing
• UI for publishing messages is available on the HAZELnet mainnet site to use with first integration service

Milestone 4 (Months 6-7)

• Finish second (and potentially third) integrations based on existing standards to verify composability and required flexibility in standard definition, refine API and CIP based on findings
• Marketing/Community Building efforts to create awareness for the project outside of the already signed up DAOs, in particular for end users to start testing, potentially with incentives
• Create TypeScript and Java SDK libraries for projects to interact with their own or other public relay providers
• Work with ADAO, Summon or another DAO entity to add a sample integration to their own solution

Milestone 5 (Month 8)

• Finalize API documentation
• Finalize deployment configuration documentation and samples
• QA service deployments in various configurations

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

Milestone 1

• Architecture model available publicly (diagram and link posted to source repository)
• Metadata model documented in public document as an ADR (Architectural Design Record) in the repository
• Decision on first integration has been made

Milestone 2

• CIP PR is available in the CIP repository
• OpenAPI definition available in the source repository
• Initial source code for first integration available in source repository

Milestone 3

• Documentation and container definitions to run the relay/on-chain solution together is available in the source repo and can be tested by anyone
• Users of HAZELnet (free tier) can test-drive the first integration

Milestone 4

• Source code for second and potentially third integration available in repository, including container definitions
• Daily social media interactions from the HAZELnet team to drive test participation
• Public npm and Maven package registries have a published version of the SDK

Milestone 5

• Collaborating DAO confirms integration from Milestone 4
• Deployment documentation is available in repository and confirmed to be working by someone not on the proposal (may be the entity involved in the prior mentioned integration)

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

Our Budget Breakdown for the total of 315,000 ADA (estimating 0.28 USD per ADA) is:

7 months x ~$500 for ongoing operational costs

• $300/month (monthly backend server cost - current + estimated additions)
• $99/month GitLab CI/CD pipeline with automated security checks and private repositories
• $10/month cost for AWS Amplify Website hosting
• $100/month for Twitter basic API usage after month 6 (second integration)

8 months x $1500 for a part-time project manager position

• Based on an annual salary of $55000 and the expectation that we only need a part-time role with ~ 15 hrs/week.

2 months x $1500 for a part-time community manager and marketing material creation

• About $50 / day for social media exposure and outsourcing any design work required.

8 months x $8750 for a full time Full Stack Developer

• Based on an annual salary for a mid-level Full Stack Engineer of $105000 in the US Northwest. Engineers with this level typically have no blockchain knowledge or no enterprise experience. The in-depth knowledge required to work with Cardano commonly comes at a premium that is ignored here.

A spreadsheet of the budget breakdown by Resource and Month can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l9sRsqje2Hoan5o2cX13ssJSyawag2PSWHFwEd-Pgcc/edit?usp=sharing

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

An open-source, API-based solution that uses information on native assets to publish to and through the official communication channels of a project allows anyone building on Cardano to easily leverage standards to connect with a wider audience for the projects, without requiring them to build their own custom integrations.

[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.