DIMS : A decentralized system for managing and monetizing ideation and project contributions through asynchronous composable workflows

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

[GENERAL] Requested funds in ada

[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] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

Tools for decentralized knowledge/project management featuring a stability preserving economic model and an ecosystem of evolving DAOs without compromising people's freedom to act autonomously.

[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] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

Everything will be open source under the Apache-2.0 license

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Problems:

Project Catalyst and other systems on Cardano rely too heavily on a top-down approach for turning ideas into action. Proposal writing and vote solicitation aim competition, attention, and assessment at maintaining a barrier to entry, when other options could potentially improve the quality of contributor output:

• Competition is most useful when products already exist, and the incentive is to increase brand loyalty by improving the quality of the customer's experience. Competing at the entry level for votes is a popularity contest without any beneficial effects on the final product.
• Attention is most useful when something of value already exists. Premature attention can build expectations that might result in disappointment if the project differs from what potential customers had in mind.
• Assessment is most useful when there is already a proof-of-concept that people can play with to see where the faults might lie. Assessment as an entry barrier puts proposers in the uncomfortable position of trying to provide enough information to reviewers without compromising the opportunity to gain a first mover's advantage in the market. Research is also a major part of the development process, and can't be monetized if a review process requires it to be done beforehand.

Collaboration on Catalyst is an out-of-channel task without internal incentives for team formation. It would be better if teams could form on the fly around fine-grained tasks. For this to be possible, there would need to be interoperability between different projects that might share subcomponents. This is related to why large companies use large git monorepos and build extensive tools for searching and partially cloning codebases.

Going through the proposal and voting process blocks useful work from taking place until the extra administrative process of trying to acquire funding is completed. It would be better to find a way to let contributors get work done, and apply funding to where value is being created.

Value doesn't have to just be code or documentation. It could also be in the process of creating those things. There are lots of people who stream their work online and gain donations from those who are interested in learning how to do the things they do.

Minimizing the number of blocking operations that disrupt each contributor's workflow improves throughput.

Allowing contributors to focus on small pieces that fit together in composable ways reduces cognitive load.

Incentivizing people to find connections between what different contributors are working on makes it possible to find out where shared work can converge, as well as where different experiments can diverge.

With a small set of rules, it should be possible to produce a flexible and scalable ideation and monetization system that gives people freedom to discover where they fit into this dynamic game of life.

Solution:

This project will focus on developing a minimal set of tools to build collaborative ecosystems on Cardano. There will be some opinionated choices that will make the first iteration of this project easier:

• Identity will be based on the content and knowledge graph signed by an associated Cardano wallet. People can compose their ideas with other people's work, but everyone will have sovereignty over their own contributions, as well as the freedom to choose whether or not they subscribe to anyone else's work.
• Funding will be based on donations given to creators of content on the system, and donation receivers will have the ability to allocate a percentage of funds to other people or circles based on their own publically defined strategy at the end of each epoch.
• No voting will be necessary for this system. People can independently choose where to donate money, as well as when they want to stop participating in a particular DAO on the system, they can leave and give up any associated benefits, though, DAO creators may choose how onboarding works.
• No AI will be used in the production and operation of this system. AI is extremely energy inefficient and all the mechanisms involved in this project can be achieved with small efficient algorithms that produce better results. It will, however, be possible to use AI to generate content and act as a user of the system. If people derive value from its contributions, then people can donate.

There are a few different deliverables that will be a part of this project:

1. A stand-alone web-based explorer that people can deploy anywhere to make their contributions to the shared knowledge base public. Work in this form will be stored in a git repo, though edits and extensions to the knowledge graph could be done locally, stored in persistent browser storage, and exported into a change set that can later be committed back into the repo.
2. Research and documentation about the composability constraints, the incentive system, user experience and productivity, and design of an API for integrating other tools.
3. A server application that can deploy the web interface or integrate with other tools to update your knowledge base locally. Eventually, instances of the server should be able to link together into a network, allowing real-time collaboration on work.
4. Smart contracts for DAO structures and the tokenomics behind producing an internal source of stability for a Djed-like stablecoin not based on fiat. This may be implemented as a sidechain depending on how research goes.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

The idea is to build a collaborative ecosystem, allowing interconnected work between different teams. At every level, people vote on what they support by taking action instead of having a separate voting process. Because every individual has access to only a limited supply of resources and time, it shouldn't matter if they maintain multiple identities—though part of this project is to carefully analyze the incentives around this claim.

If you don't agree with the way one DAO structure is working on the system, you should be able to leave and join a different one, or fork it with the changes you want. If anyone doesn't agree with the constraints of the system as a whole, they can fork it and spin up alternative implementations that could ideally share the same knowledge graph.

Give people freedom to participate where they fit best and increase the amount of meaningful experiments in the Cardano ecosystem, while providing opportunities to discover how different projects can connect together and share work for the benefit of everyone involved.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Ken:

I have all the skills required and only require the time and compensation so that I can focus exclusively on this project.

I've been programming for 28 years, with a focus on distributed systems and programming language semantics. Ever since Fund2, the first public funding round of Catalyst, I've been participating and thinking about how to most effectively transform ideas into impact without compromising the ability of individuals to work freely and support their efforts.

Recently, I've been approved some funds to implement a new iteration of the Gimbalabs website, which will also be open source and under the same license. A large portion of the work on the web-based frontend for this project will overlap with work on the Gimbalabs' site.

Lots of work has already been put into thinking about feasibility, but experimenting with different ideas is required as part of the development process of this project.

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

First three months:

Total: ₳18,000

75% will be allocated to one full-time salary

25% will be available to other contributors upon approval through Gimbalabs

Deliverables

• Initial rough draft of documentation describing the different components of this project, incentive structures and tokenomics, composability constraints, user experience and productivity goals, and API design for integrating external tools.
• Initial implementation of the stand-alone web-based explorer.

Months Four, Five and Six:

Total: ₳18,000

75% will be allocated to one full-time salary

25% will be available to other contributors upon approval through Gimbalabs

Deliverables

• Refinement of Documentation and Research.
• Initial implementation of smart contracts for DAO structures and the system's tokenomics.
• Some work on the server implementation that may end up doubling as a sidechain depending on how research goes.

Third Quarter:

Total: ₳18,000

75% will be allocated to one full-time salary

25% will be available to other contributors upon approval through Gimbalabs

Deliverables

• Initial implementation of the server application.
• Integration with the web interface.
• Refined specification for the protocol and API for integrating external tools.

Final three months:

Total: ₳18,000

75% will be allocated to one full-time salary

25% will be available to other contributors upon approval through Gimbalabs

Deliverables

• Finalization of documentation
• Full integration of the web interface, server application, on-chain code, and a working API for interfacing with other tools
• Test-net deployment

Ideally, the platform would be ready to launch and host itself for further development and funding, though full testing and verification may be beyond the scope of one year of work and funding.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Ken Stanton will be responsible for all aspects of this project, however, 25% of this project's funding will be available for approved contributions through Gimbalabs if anyone wants to participate.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

Salary for one full-time developer:

₳4500 / month * 12 months = ₳54,000

Funds available to contributors through Gimbalabs:

₳1500 / month * 12 months = ₳18,000

Total Funding:

₳54,000 + ₳18,000 = ₳72,000

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

• ₳4500 / month is a fairly low salary for a full-time developer role. This is ok, because my expenses are fairly low living here in Malawi, in southeast Africa.
• ₳1500 / month is not a lot for contributions, but there is potential for me to apply an even higher percentage than 25% if opportunities to collaborate on this project warrant it.

This project could potentially provide tools to build entirely new collaborative economic ecosystems on Cardano. There's a lot of potential for the low cost of ₳6000 per month!