Catalyst Explorer 2.5: Accessible Catalyst Data & Tools

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

Additional applicants

Stephanie King

[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.”

The tool itself is free to the public, and the api and air-table like access will also remain free to the community.

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Thanks to the support we received in Fund 9, the explorer foundation was written from scratch to allow for modularization, massive performance improvement, and a robust research interface around proposals at lightning speeds.

The big idea here is to do a version 2.5. Build on the solid foundation to implement feature requests received from the community over the last few months as well bring the same rich research capability to other catalyst datasets. The two new primary data we will be focusing on will be Users, and Companies.

The modules:

explorer bounties.

Lido Nation has spent the last few months developing and iterating on an onsite bounty system. We will be integrating this into the Catalyst Explorer to incentivize data enrichment.

We will be offering these bounties to start:

• Proposal social media information
• Companies associated with proposals
• jurisdictional registration information about public companies

Catalyst Communities.

We've seen a number of communities born out of Catalyst activities, Latin America, Wada, Catalyst Women to name a few. The big idea is to give these community tools to aggregate and showcase their proposals on the explorer. A landing page they can share to help discover proposals from that community, people from that community, and the products and services they are building as a result of Catalyst Support.

Users:

Catalyst as an embodiment of the Cardano ethos of sustainability is all about empowering the people that make the ecosystem go round. This module will be all about showcasing those humans and increasing the discoverability of them. We will be adding filters and sorts to the users page like we've done for the proposals. We will also be working with a designer to create a catalyst user report card that's intuitive to access the user's catalyst power contribution to the ecosystem. Users will also be able to embed their report card on their own site.

Companies and groups.

Catalyst is Cardano Premiere VC fund and we want to showcase and improve the discoverability of the companies being funded or partially funded by Catalyst. Like we've done with proposals we will be adding filters for companies. We will also have bounties to help sourcing company data.

Embeddable report cards.

We prototyped the idea of a report card and have gotten a lot of feedback from the community. We heard that the report cards were useful, but not intuitive. The prototype report card was designed by an unfunded full stack and DevOps engineer. With this project, we will be consulting a UI/UX professional to design more useful, intuitive report cards:

• For Proposals
• For Companies
• For communities

Draft Ballots

Before the Catalyst Explorer was funded, we prototyped a tool called "Picklists." After getting funded in Fund 9, we updated the tool and called it "Bookmarks. The idea now is to extend the bookmark tool to allow anyone to convert a bookmark in a Draft Ballot. Draft ballot is a special kind of bookmark created explicitly for staging your votes. You will be able to select proposals you will be voting foster and add your rationale at the proposal or category/challenge level. Like bookmarks, draft ballots will be shareable.

Ballot Submission Prototype

The catalyst testnet is near and it behooves us to prototyping and thinking about how we might reduce voter fatigue and leverage work people put into the researching proposals. What if after you've used the explorer to research and create draft ballots, what if you can simply hit submit and the explorer will submit the ballot saving you the step of having to open a voter app? This also lets us experiment with perhaps committing your rational to an on-chain record (say if you're a dRep?)? We don't know how rough the initial toolchain for the upcoming systems will be. At minimum the delivery for this proposal will be research and estimate work required to implement that, best case scenario we're ready to submit ballots in fund 12?

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

The Catalyst Explorer is a live product already being used by the community to seed rich discussions and significantly reduce the work required to research and vote on catalyst proposals. This challenge is all about products, products, DApps, systems, and other integration. The explorer it self fit the definition as both a product and a now critical catalyst infrastructure. Also, it enables cross-pollination between teams that would otherwise be relegated to the halls and crevices of discords and reddit sub-channels.

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

We would love to see more research needs being fulfilled by the tool measure by web analytics and direct feedback. Other metrics will also be looking for are:

• communities created
• companies added
• bounties completed
• engagement with the users and company data
• for a bonus, a working prototype on a test environment of submitting votes directly from the tool.

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

The tool is publicly accessbile for all to use as features are developed and rolled out.

We will also be holding after-townhall breakout rooms for reporting and feedback.

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

Lido Nation

The Lido Nation team has delivered 8 Project Catalyst projects, and is fully invested and involved in the community, at both virtual and in-person events.

Both project leads are Cardano Ambassadors.

Darlington is a full-stack Software and DevOps Engineer with experience running his own company.

Stephanie was trained as a studio artist, and works as a software consultant.

Our tool, the catalyst explorer

We built the v1 of the catalyst explorer on nights and weekend, successfully delivered v2 as a funded proposal in fund 9. The explorer is now a reliable critical infrastructure of Project Catalyst ~3k queries a month outside of the voting cycles.

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

The main goals are the deliver iteration on these modules:

• Catalyst Communities
• users
• companies
• report cards
• draft ballots
• ballot submission research

This is a low risk project. Tool is already live and is used daily. This is largely an iteration based on community feedback.

The optional desire to support ballot submission feasibility will be determined based on the catalyst open source core infrastructure currently being delivered by the IOG team.

[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: Interations & Improvements 3 wk

* commision design for single proposal

* commision deisng for report cards

* The ability to covert a bookmark into a draft ballot or create a new one and stage your vote

* The ability to share your draft ballot (with rationales)

* Implement design for single page

* Implement design for report cards

Milestone 2: Bounties 6wk

Add bounty support to the Catalyst Explorer.

Dashboard to view and complete bounties.

Claim bounty reward in ada or native tokens

Milestone 3: Catalyst Communities 4wk

Deliver tooling for create community and associated proposals with them.

Onboard 2 communIties

Implement new Single proposal page design

Milestone 4: Filters filters filters 2wk

Add filters to users and companies data sets

Milestone 5: Ballot submission prototype 2Months

Work with catalyst team and/or open source repo to prototype ballot submission directly from the explorer

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

• Users can create draft ballots
• users can share draft ballots
• bounty system exists with bounties for added social media detail to proposal and creating groups
• research tools and filters for catalyst users
• research tools and filters for companies partially or fully funded by catalyst.
• see report cards for companies user
• maybe catalyst your ballot from the explorer on a testnet environment.

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

UI/UX Design work, planning, user interviews = $8,600

Developer Labor = $34,000

Ada for incentivized bounties: $2,000

Server setup and hosting for a year = $1,200

Project Management = $2,800

Testing & Incentivized user testing: $3,200

Total: $51,800

Ada:172,666

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

The Catalyst Explorer has risen the level of critical catalyst infrastructure that's uses by 100s of people every day. Our low budget can easily justify the value it will bring to the community. Part of why we can charge this low is because we've already been in building tool for ecosystem and can rely on that foundation knowleDge to move at a faster pace. No doubt these iteration will help more people and maybe even significantly reduce the time to go from research to voting if we can make good progress on the ballot submission feature.

[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.