catalystexplorer.com for Project Catalyst research, acceleration, & analytics platform

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Darlington Wleh

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

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Requested funds in ada

260000

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

8

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

No

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

Open Source the Lido Nation Catalyst Explorer and move it to its own domain: catalystexplorer.com. Add more tools for research, analytics, and business acceleration.

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

No

[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?

Yes

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

The current code base of the Lido Nation Catalyst Explorer will be extracted from the site, overhauled, made public and open source under Apache-2.0 license. The catalystexplorer.com tool will be available for free to anyone.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

The Lido Nation Catalyst Explorer is an amazing tool for Project Catalyst research, dicing and slicing and exporting CSVs of proposal data. This was an experiment that has proven to be needed and useful. It’s time for the experiment to graduate to a robust open source product that benefits directly from the rich Cardano hive mind. 

The big idea: catalystexplorer.com. 

catalystexplorer.com will take everything we’ve learned from the existing tool and build a beautiful and enjoyable product that  makes researching, and analysing Project Catalyst data as easy as possible. 

It will be Open Source from day 1 so that anyone who wants to contribute or help shape the production can jump right in.

For winning Project Catalyst teams, the product will also provide tooling for accelerating winning proposals into startups and companies.  

Lurkers and phd researchers alike, get ready to make sense of Project Catalyst data like never before.

Zero Click Insight

Lots of people come to Lido Nation to ask a specific question about Catalyst. What’s the largest ever funded proposal? What was the total voting power last fund? What are the top ten funded companies in Project Catalyst history? What’s the largest ever funded proposal? How many votes have my proposal received in the last 10 times of refreshing the page? The homepage of Catalyst Explorer will be a zero click destination to answer many of these common questions.

Deep Proposal Research

We’ve spent the last two months scraping telegram channels and a dozen other Project Catalyst related spreadsheets to compile a wide range of additional data including: funding distribution data, community review aggregate and payout data, milestone data, etc. 

catalystexplorer.com will enrich the already extensive proposal data to enable a new dimension of Project Catalyst research. Imagine seeing the true total cost to the treasury of each proposal, linking payments for community reviews and milestone reviews.  Imagine being able to link directly to the on-chain transactions for a given fund, or proposal? We’re still structuring and parsing the data to get a full sense of what’s permissible. See our milestone section for specific deliverables.

Dynamic Analysis & Charts

The current Lido Nation tool already has the concept of ‘Search Metrics.’ As you slice and dice, there’s a persistent bar that gives you limited aggregate metrics about the proposals matching your search. The big idea is to take this to the next level and show your full charts with fund over fund trends, and other metrics. 

Compare Proposals

In almost every fund, there are separate teams proposing similar ideas. A comparative table view stacking these ideas next to each other will help users suss out the best ideas without context switching between tabs or windows. 

Jormungandr Explorer

We’ve indexed all voting records from  fund 10 and 11. The big idea here is to add an explorer for seeing actual voting records from the Project Catalyst sidechain, just like we see transaction recordings on the Cardano main chain. For the first time the community will be able to click on a stake address and see votes cast for that stake address and voting power…while still preserving privacy of the specific voting details. This opens up all kinds of opportunities for analysis and addressing voter related issues or helping teams shape their marketing efforts.

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

Cardano community.

catalystexplorer.com will positively impact the Cardano community by:

Informed Voting Decision: Empowering voters with the necessary information to make educated decisions about which proposal to fund, critical in the Voltaire Era.

Zero click knowledge: Allowing any cardano community member to easy answer questions about Project Catalyst impact and successes (and challenges) with zero clicks. This makes a world of difference when you’re in a twitter space and all you have time for is to type three letters, accept your browser autocomplete and hit enter. 

Partnerships & New Ideas: Empowering the community to be able to drill down Project Catalyst knowledge well of ideas with ease will make it easy for budding entrepreneurs to find each other and build a stronger team. Perhaps you’re curious to see if anyone in Project Catalyst ever tried to partner with a German Car Maker.

Measuring the Impact

To measure the impact quantitatively and qualitatively, we will use the following metrics:

• User Engagement Metrics: Track the number of visitors, page views, and engagement in the research tools (search, filtering, etc). These metrics will be monitored through web analytics tools, and shared in project reports.
• Community Growth: Monitor the growth of created accounts on the platform and social shares.

[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?

The same team that brought you the existing Catalyst Explorer tool as well as sancho.1694.io is the team that will be delivering this project. Needless to say, governance tooling is kinda our jam. We deliver. 

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

Timeline 1 Month

Output: Community Workshop to gather some zero click questions and other needs. 

Acceptance criteria: Notes from community workshop

Output: User Stories

Acceptance criteria: pdf and miro board of user stories.

Timeline 2 Months

Output: UI/UX of all user stories

Acceptance criteria: Figma designs of pages 

Output: Open Source project bootstrapped and contribution guidelines defined

Acceptance criteria: link to Open Source repo with contribution guidelines

Output: New homepage works with charts and metrics

Acceptance criteria: You can visit https://www.catalystexplorer.com and see new homepage with charts and metrics. #ZeroClickInsights

Output: Proposals page is migrated

Acceptance criteria: You can visit https://www.catalystexplorer.com/proposals and search, filter and export proposal lists.

Timeline 2 months 

Output: Funds, Fund Category, People, Groups pages migrated

Acceptance criteria: You can visit https://www.catalystexplorer.com/proposals https://www.catalystexplorer.com/people, https://www.catalystexplorer.com/groups https://www.catalystexplorer.com/funds and browse catalyst people, funds, and the categories.  

Output: Accounts and login support

Acceptance criteria:  Public with existing Lido Nation catalyst accounts can login. Anyone can create a wallet or email/password login

Output: My registration and voting history, bookmarks, lists

Acceptance criteria: 

• Logged in user can see their registration transactions
• Logged in user can see their voting history
• Logged user can bookmark proposals
• Logged user can bookmark catalyst person
• Logged in user can create lists from their bookmark items

Output: Mint Completed Project NFT

Acceptance Criteria: User that have successfully completed and closed out their project can mint a completed project NFT.

Timeline 2 Months

Output: Jormungandr Explorer Live

Acceptance criteria: Public can visit a page to see all voting history txs, view a single tx, visit a privacy preserved single page view of any wallet voting wallet and see their privacy preserved voting history and associated voting power.

Output: Compare Proposals

Acceptance criteria: From the Proposals page, the public can bring up a table view coparing multiple proposals.

Timeline 1 Month

Output: Dynamic Analysis & Charts

Acceptance criteria: From the proposals page, the public can pull up charts of their current search results. Ie: you search ‘NFT’ now you want to know the trend of funded from fund to fund.   

Output: Funded Project Accelleration 

Acceptance Criteria: Logged user with with funded projects can:

• Say what help they need from the community.
• Say what they can offer the community

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

We are Cardano enthusiasts and a growing collective of dreamers who believe in providing insightful education about Cardano in plain English, Swahili, and Spanish. Most online blockchain content is written by and for developers and finance geeks. We break down complicated technical ideas for everyday people, and provide relevant news in quick bites, and build tools that everyone can use.

Our website is a resource for anyone who wants to learn what Cardano is, why they should care, and how they can participate. We want to make these resources accessible to as many people as possible.

Stephanie is a teacher and technologist with a passion for helping non-profits navigate and capitalize on technology. She applies her communication skills at Lido Nation by writing and editing articles, and helping to organize ideas in a way that people can understand.

Darlington is an engineer by day and at all times a dancer, humanitarian, idealist and entrepreneur. Darlington has deep knowledge about blockchain technology and broad experience in the Cardano ecosystem.

www.LidoNation.com

https://www.linkedin.com/company/lido-nation.

Darlington Wleh: Co-Dreamer at Lido Nation.

Co-Founder of Lido Nation. 

Senior Developer. 

Blockchain writer & Educator. 

Cardano Ambassador.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/profd2004

https://twitter.com/LidoNation

Stephanie King: Co-Dreamer at Lido Nation

Co-Founder of Lido Nation.

Art & Design lead. 

Blockchain writer & podcaster. 

Cardano Ambassador.

Project manager

https://www.linkedin.com/in/phuffyking

https://twitter.com/Lido_Phuffy

Emmanuel Titi: Nairobi Blockchain Lab Junior Developer Lead.

Titi has been on the Lido Developer team at the Ngong Road Blockchain Lab in Nairobi Kenya. Titi leads and manages an ever-changing staff of junior developers who come through our mentorship program to learn about Cardano, skill up on Web3 development, and contribute to active projects.

Donbosco Otunga: Digital Marketing Specialist

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

• 60,000 Ada Design UI/UX
• 80,000 ADA Senior Developer
• 75,000 ADA Junior Developer: Our Junior developers are a team of blockchain developer mentees at the Cardano Blockchain Lab in Nairobi, Kenya. Our mentees are not paid hourly, but on a project or “ticket” basis for tasks completed. The junior developer project work would be shared among members on the project team. Based on productivity and experience, our junior developers in Kenya earn between $400-$1800/ month, which is a regionally competitive salary.
• 20,000 Ada Server cost, Hosting and Maintainance for 1 year
• 15,000 Ada Project Management
• 10,000 Incentivised user testing and feedback

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

“Project Catalyst is the world’s largest decentralised innovation engine for solving real-world challenges.” For the engine to work and churn our impactful innovations, lots and lots of ideas have to be put, tried, and tested. 

Having a tool to make sense of all this data, raises the usefulness and value of Catalyst in ways we can’t even imagine yet.  

One concrete value we can imagine today is a much more informed voter.