Sponsored Learning Program for next-generation smart-contract architecture with Stellar Contracts

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Randall Harmon

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

randall@inator.biz

Additional applicants

Newman S. Lanier

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

5

[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.” .

The open-source Helios project is one external technical dependency. We don't have reason to foresee any delay from it, as Helios has been stable and evolving.  

[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.”

The Stellar Contracts project is open sourced.

Its website and documentation is CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

We are seeking to retain commercial value after contributing open source, serving the community with learning while also generating revenue for our program contributors and creators.

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

Education

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Learning Cardano dev skills from online documentation is frustrating & lonely. It requires new skills, intuition and mental models. Quality instructors, lessons and support are hard to find.

We can provide learners with an impactful environment where they can absorb critical meaning, focusing their learning attention on key concepts and techniques.  We will guide learners through the dark forest of this complex topic space, drawing their attention to learning what is most impactful and helping them gain the most important practical knowledge on a guided learning path.

We are seeking Catalyst sponsorship for the program, to cover key costs for developing and operating an initial 10-week learning program for builders and developers.  Our learners will get familiar with key mental models for the next generation of architectural patterns for dApp development on Cardano.  It will cover program fees for 15 learners and the creation of the program.

Our learning program, co-designed by Randall and Newman, will begin with a brief introduction to key Cardano fundamentals without spending undue time on remediation, to use people's time efficiently. We'll serve builder audiences as well as technical developers, moving promptly through accessible material about utxo's, contracts, minters and tokens.  We'll give learners a choice of experiential learning activities so they can make guesses, check their intuitions - and be actively involved in their learning.

Nine subsequent weeks of activities are already designed to bring people efficiently through a program powered by curiosity, clear communication, analogies, examples, and experiences.  Check out more at https://stellar-contracts.org/docs/contributing/join-to-learn

Learners will have weekly sessions for practice and discussion, and a social environment where they can form connections - both human and mental.  You may be exposed to ad-hoc dad jokes and brief recaps of key learnings from prior weeks.  

We will make session recordings available for replay to session participants.

We will take responsibility for promotion, seeking to bring an additional 15 learners willing to pay their own way through the program, enhancing the commercial viability of the program, and paying additional rewards to each program contributor.  If class size grows beyond 30, we plan to split into two separate weekly sessions.  

We have reserved a project budget for meaningful contributions from our developer and facilitator communities, as well as for monetary rewards for incentivizing study.

—- more about Stellar Contracts —-

We seek to facilitate the next waves of developers who will incorporate on-chain interactions into regular-world dApps, so we can bring more regular people into the Cardano economy.  We won't get there all at once, but we gotta start somewhere.

Stellar Contracts is a place to start - with Typescript/Javascript classes that make it pretty easy to get started writing libraries of application-layer logic (running in the browser) that interact with smart contracts.  And, with smart contracts integrated into those same libraries, so that a simple, serverless static web application will be able to interact with smart contracts on-chain.

The next wave of architecture for Cardano smart contracts will involve smaller, simpler contract scripts that are easily audited, combined into a "Constellation" of collaborating scripts.  Stellar Contracts facilitates the patterns that make these constellations easier to build.  Our learning program will promote these emergent, leading-edge patterns of dApp architecture, so that learners will gain unique intuitions about high-impact approaches to transform their visions into practical solutions.

Stellar Contracts owes gratitude to the Helios project, where Javascript code compiles a beautiful, clean, typed functional language (designed especially for writing Cardano contract scripts) to on-chain Plutus (UPLC) code.

For latests updates about our project and proposal, please see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y8qRGfUTl5NBjPN38BLICgw5YKV6WlOJoOxm5n0qdnw/edit?usp=sharing

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

This proposal fits the ‘possible directions’ listed in the challenge brief.  It is ‘Education for development in the Cardano & Catalyst ecosystem’.  This educational program will not only improve the documentation and adoption of the Stellar Contracts library, but will support all Cardano open-source developers.

We are addressing no less than 7 of the goals from the challenge brief:

• Improve the documentation of open-source projects
• Increase the number of open-source contributions and maintainers
• More open-source projects, developers, and users
• Growing a marketplace & ecosystem of experts able to work on complex software is important to build and maintain the foundations of Cardano.
• Education for development in the Cardano & Catalyst ecosystem
• accessible knowledge
• Improve documentation --> increase adoption, increase the number of people that understand / can work on the project.

We are advocating for transparency for dApps' on-chain behaviors through readable requirements, open-source dAPIs, and clear auditability and certification; while enabling these dAPIs to be included in rich UI applications..

We intend our budget allocation to provide economic opportunity for program contributors from our community, adding financial benefit to the Cardano ecosystem.

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

We will measure:

• of students starting the program (target: 30)
• # of students reaching half-way (5 weeks) 
• # of students completing (10 weeks) the program
• # of students active in the experiential learning segments
• Increase in learner knowledge, skills and understanding (determined by pre-post surveys)
• Increase in personal relationships between learners (determined by survey)
• # of forks of a Stellar Contracts template project on Github
• Amount of rewards paid to, number of community members, and percent of learning-program budget paid for meaningful contributions to the program

Yes/No:

• Completion of all 10 weeks of instructor led sessions
• Completion of all 10 weeks lab sessions
• Completion of all monthly reports and Project Catalyst requirements

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

We are already sharing our software in open source form, and we will continue refining our website material as we work through the learning program.

We intend to report privacy-guarded statistics on impact from our program.

We will develop and refine further the publicly-visible material on the stellar-contracts.org website, serving self-guided learners who choose not to join the learning program.

We hope that we can continue with iterated versions of this program as a business offering.  If successful, we would love to issue verifiable credentials that program participants can present for qualification to ecosystem projects needing bona fide contributors.

Our milestone deliverables are also covered below.

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

Randall is an experienced software developer and a capable instructional facilitator. 

Newman's background in instruction and knowledge management will augment our lesson planning considerably.  

Our team is made of trustworthy Project catalyst / Cardano veteran contributors.  Reporting and managing funds will be done according to established processes.

Budget will be administered by the Treasury Guild.

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

Objective: We will design, develop, and implement an educational experience to improve the ability of the participants to contribute to smart-contract projects. This should improve the experience of teams building on-chain, smart-contract based software.

Goal: increase the number of open-source dAPI projects, regardless of whether their UIs are open-sourced, so that teams can generate and retain business value while maintaining auditability and transparency for the key chain-connected behaviors.  So people can know what the heck the on-chain software is supposed to do.

Objective: increase the number of people who understand and can work on smart contract-based projects (participants, completions, self-assessments), either as project builders or software developers.

Objective: guide people through shared experiences to understand how to create on-chain value and build intuition of key architectural patterns for building great software

Based on the team’s experience and analysis, our learning program is a feasible response to the learning challenges observed in our ecosystem.  We will continue to monitor and adjust our approach as necessary to meet our goals.

[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.

Phase 1: Start - 6 weeks (1.5 months)

Social Media Promotion

Team formation with roles and responsibilities

Project Management  & Treasury setup

Develop feedback instruments (survey, feedback session)

Prepare lessons (first 4)

Teaching first two sessions

Lab sessions

Phase 2: Teaching - 4 weeks  (2 months)

Prepare lessons (#5-8)

Teaching next 4 sessions

Lab sessions

Phase 3: More Teaching - 4 weeks  (2 months)

Prepare lessons (#9-10)

Teaching last 4 sessions

Lab sessions

Phase4: Wrap-up and Reporting (1 month)

Summative Evaluation instrument / session feedback

Facilitate feedback session

Website updates

Decision-point: start additional cohorts?

Closeout and result reporting

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

Phase 1: Start - 6 weeks (1.5 months)

A primary outcome we seek in phase 1 is to start teaching and connecting with learners quickly.

Deliverables:

Lesson plans

Project management plan documents

Role & responsibility documents for contributors

Treasury setup documents

Course promotional material - social media posts

Survey / feedback plan

Privacy-guarded learner activity statistics / demographics

• number of learners in session & lab/project-based learning segment
• number of successful completions of experiential learning activities

Video report reviewing the above

Successful when we deliver two courses.

Phase 2: Teaching - 4 weeks  (1 month)

Creating and maintaining connection with learners should be one of the primary outcomes of the second phase.  We intend for learners to have choices of some achievable and meaningful learning experiences ("project-based").  

As a result, our learning cohorts should gain intuition and understanding of high-value mental models for emerging best-practice architectural approaches for Cardano dApp development. 

Coding-capable learners will have access to experience using these approaches and share their experiences with their cohorts.  All students should build intuition for the low-level details and see emerging creativity, enabling inspiration to meet

Deliverable:

Lesson plans

Privacy-guarded learner activity statistics / demographics

• number of learners in session & lab/project-based learning segment
• number of successful completions of experiential learning activities

Successful when we deliver learning sessions #3-6

Phase 3: More teaching (same as phase 2)

Successful when we deliver learning sessions #7-10

Phase 4: Wrap-up and Reporting (1 month)

Deliverable: 

results of Summative Evaluation instrument / session feedback

Project Catalyst close out report and video

Output: Website updates with refined material (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 )

Decision-point: start additional cohorts?

Closeout and result reporting

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

By phase/milestone:

₳39k - Phase 1 / Prepare & start teaching

₳39k - Phase 2 / Teaching

₳47k - Phase 3  / More teaching

₳28k - Phase 4 / Finalize

By function:

₳18k teaching assistants (breakout rooms, second-weekly-session, answering first-line questions)

₳39.5k coordinator (staffing, milestone reporting, discord administrative questions. Maintain social media engagement. Could be a learner in the course)

₳10k facilitator 

Facilitate sessions - miro, intro, shepherd, follow lesson plan, time-cop. Not an official course student

₳5.3k General fund - Zoom costs, Miroboard, live event promotion, Misc costs, Student rewards

₳54.8k Instructor - Smart-Contract Subject Matter Expert (SME) - lesson material, presentation, drives learning objectives, second-line questions

₳7k Promotion - Social media campaign, Live event promotion, Promoter Payouts program

₳10.6k Treasury Guild - Accounting and Treasury Mangement

₳2k UX Research - Survey creation and analysis

₳22k volatility risk - insurance against negative price action

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

• Developer education - people always say Cardano development is hard.  We will share high-value architectural approaches that change the way people can think about structuring their solutions and get to building with these patterns.  Fewer people saying Cardano is hard: priceless.
• More ability to attract developers can be strong leverage to get more applications on our platform, leading to more utility, more audience, and more demand for ADA.
• Having created the open source Stellar Contracts library and already contributed "back" to the Cardano community, we seek to continue contributing, while generating business value retained by our team (as described in the challenge brief).  
• Our budget numbers are sufficient to ensure financial sustainability for key contributors to the learning program, so that our startup costs are covered.  If we succeed at our promotional efforts, then the program can generate additional rewards for every contributor.
• Relationships between learners and course developers / stakeholders

[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