Social Impact Marketplace (SIM)

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Johannes Ching-Ling Plambeck

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

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Co-proposers and additional applicants

Nathan Carlson, Ambidextrous Ltd.

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

6

[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)

We use Cardano's decentralized network for comprehensive economic impact evaluations, managing civic data and social impact bonds with smart contracts, and empowering community-driven analytics.

[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.”

Secretary of state for economic data, x/reddit/open-web-crawl, other public economic data reporting agencies.

[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 project is fully open source, fostering a community-driven approach akin to Chile's Project Cybersyn in the 1960s, which aimed to empower and innovate through decentralized input and oversight. SIM encourages global collaboration and transparency, ensuring adaptability and robust security through widespread review. By openly sharing the codebase, we guarantee that our system, designed for townships and local economic entities, remains cutting-edge and community-aligned.

[METADATA] SDG rating

Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure - Promotes resilient infrastructure, inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and fosters innovation. Our project contributes by developing new technological solutions for economic transparency and community-driven development.

 

Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities - Aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. By providing tools for better governance and community planning, our project directly supports the development of sustainable urban environments.

 

Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions - Focuses on promoting peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, providing access to justice for all and building effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels. Our project’s emphasis on data transparency and open governance aligns well with these objectives.

 

Goal 17: Partnerships for the Goals - Aims to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development. Through its open-source approach and collaborative nature, our project supports partnerships between governments, the private sector, and civil society.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Part One: Introduction

In the U.S., only 20% of citizens participate in local elections, with just 10% influencing policy decisions. This low engagement leads to policies that neglect wider community needs and result in inefficient public spending. Low trust in governmental processes further reduces voter turnout, intensifying the misalignment between governmental actions and community needs.

 

Building on efforts to increase civic participation, SIM (Social Impact Marketplace) enhances trust and transparency in local economies by leveraging a decentralized think tank model. Through the Cardano ecosystem, staked funds are used to ensure greater accountability and drive impactful change. Social impact bonds on this platform are funded by staking protocols and executed via smart contracts by analysts who develop data models for local policy evaluation. This generates extensive economic data, organized into a publicly accessible ontology for tracking and analysis.

 

SIM enables local businesses, citizen data professionals, and community members to directly influence and assess policy, fostering a decentralized and community-driven decision-making process.

 

Staking entities might include:

 

Local Businesses: Observe direct benefits from efficient public spending.

NGOs: Advocate for social equity but are often unaccountable.

Citizens: Desire effective tax spending.

Political Lobbyists: Seek impact evaluations to contest policies.

Cities: Address citizen demands to improve accountability.

Part 2: Cardano Solution

Our platform leverages the Cardano blockchain to create a decentralized, localized think tank that manages civic data and social impact bonds that power civic data analysis, transforming how communities handle economic data transparency and social impact evaluation. We integrate blockchain through projects like "Decentralized Funding Transparency Protocol (DFTP-core)", “NuNet”, and "DataToken", which ensures immutable records and secure data transactions.

 

Core Features:

 

Smart Contracts: Manage lifecycle of social impact bonds, automating fulfillment conditions to enhance accountability.

Enhanced Security and Data Integrity: Utilizes Cardano’s robust security features to protect sensitive economic data, ensuring it remains accessible only to verified stakeholders.

AI-Driven Decision Tools: Employs artificial intelligence to evaluate community projects' potential impacts, providing stakeholders with predictive insights into opportunity costs.

Community-Centric Engagement: Incentivizes local participation in data analysis, promoting community-driven economic solutions and fostering stakeholder engagement.

SIM seeks to reduce barriers to local economic development by driving civic data transparency and reducing information barriers that are detrimental to a thriving local economy. Our decentralized app (DApp) strives to help townships and local economic entities that want to see more effective public spending and public-private partnerships. Here’s how we plan to implement this visionary project:

 

Decentralized Data Ecosystem: Utilizing the robust Cardano blockchain, we ensure that a community’s socio-economic data is immutable and fully transparent. This foundational layer of trust is crucial for stakeholders (e.g. businesses, developers, city officials, lobbyists, citizens) who require assurance that data integrity is maintained without compromise.

 

Smart Contracts for Governance: By embedding smart contracts in our system, we automate the management of social impact bonds. This means that social impact investments are only released when agreed-upon conditions are met, which aligns incentives and ensures that projects meet their developmental milestones before additional resources are allocated.

 

Advanced Analytics Powered by AI: Our platform leverages cutting-edge artificial intelligence to analyze vast datasets and provide predictive insights. This allows local governments and stakeholders to identify high-potential projects and assess the potential impacts and costs of inaction, driving more informed decision-making.

 

Engagement and Collaboration Tools: Recognizing the value of community input, our solution includes interactive tools that facilitate stakeholder participation in the decision-making process. This platform feature ensures that the voices of local residents are not only heard but also acted upon.

 

Comprehensive Project Management: To streamline implementation, our platform offers an integrated suite of project management tools. These tools support the organization of workshops, orchestration of stakeholder interviews, and the systematic collection and analysis of data. The aim is to foster collaboration and ensure that projects progress smoothly from conception through to completion.

 

Open Source Commitment: In line with our commitment to accessibility and innovation, the platform’s framework is open source. This allows for continuous improvement by a global community of developers and ensures that our system can be adapted and adopted by other townships, thereby multiplying its impact.

 

By integrating these elements, our platform not only promises to enhance economic data transparency but also transforms how local governments engage with and serve their communities. This approach empowers townships to harness technology for sustainable development, setting a new standard for civic engagement and governance.

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ORIGINAL PROPOSAL:

Social Impact Marketplaces: Localized Platforms for Community Engagement

 

Written by Johannes Plambeck, M.Sc. Regional Science, Cornell University

 

Introduction

           

Community building occurs when individuals in a region are empowered to organize themselves around common needs. These include addressing discrimination in the workplace or in lending practices, school facilities, career development, affordable housing, social services and sanitation for the homeless, or city contracts. Ideally, the community proposes measures that create a “social impact” in order to address the needs of its members.

As more members of the community take part in this process, common awareness develops around the community’s interests. Nevertheless, communities may not act in a way that are truly representative of all their members, especially if special interests enjoy disproportionate influence. This process wherein individuals lose social equity - the quality of life experienced in their communities - to special interests has broken the way we ideally imagine ourselves living together in America.

Municipalities have a responsibility to ensure that individuals are involved in community building. But individuals also have a responsibility to demand sincere engagement from their municipal officials. Information transparency holds municipal officials responsible and is the essence of a bottom-up approach to local governance - or “agile governance”. This article proposes an internet platform that can raise community awareness around local issues in the most transparent manner possible. Citizens can use this platform to propose and vote-on “social impact” projects that matter most to their communities. Municipalities may interact with community builders on this platform, creating a marketplace for community-driven projects. The result is platform assisted “deliberative democracy”.

This proposal seeks to identify what an effective deliberative democracy platform looks like. What attributes does it have and what kinds of information need to be given to users in order to engage them as citizens? How can the platform ensure that its user base is representative of the community, regardless of age, race, or social status? A tool like this will be extraordinarily powerful, requiring safeguards to prevent its misuse by special interests. With greater adoption, this platform will package local infrastructure needs into social impact proposals that municipalities eventually finance.

 

A Common Marketplace of Ideas

By themselves, local community builders drive social impact in their immediate localities. Their efforts are noticed by city planners and integrated into regional plans that are administered from the top-down. Often, planners choose to develop programs with objective evidence of economic impact that can stand up to legal scrutiny. Take for example the Denver Council of Regional Government’s “Complete Streets” initiative, which sought to collect local street safety proposals and merge them into a comprehensive database for regional planning. Regional plans try to be all inclusive, but often heed to the loudest voices. Enter: participatory planning - an attempt to bottom-up localized planning.

Localized planning is not without its hurdles. Take for example a local initiative around affordable housing led by neighborhood counselors. Housing prices are municipal in scope, so an effective local initiative would require neighborhood counselors to look beyond their own fiefdoms. Local efforts may be stifled by a lack of synchronization. A platform could be offered to the local neighborhood counselor that embeds local issues in a regional scope. Neighborhoods would then be aware of shared incentives they have with other neighborhoods in their municipality. Consequently, they could coordinate their efforts when approached by planners and city officials, which could yield better outcomes for the city as a whole. A platform like this would provide local community builders with competing models to draw inspiration from for their own initiatives.

In the same sense that American progressives cite Canada or Sweden in advocating for medicare-for-all public healthcare, exposing community builders to ideas and perspectives from other neighborhoods could lead to innovation in municipal policy making.

Imagine a common marketplace where community builders propose and vote-on ideas that have a social impact. These proposals can overlap and compete with one another on this marketplace to help community builders reach consensus. For those already involved in community building, this marketplace helps introduce new ideas into the discourse. For those not already involved in community building, the marketplace brings them up to speed with the latest proposals put forth by the more politically active members of the community. A marketplace makes it possible to uncover the opportunity costs of competing proposals that intersect geographically or complementary proposals that do not. If a broadly popular proposal is not pursued by the city, citizens can hold them accountable for ignoring them.

A municipality therefore has an incentive to study where these interests originate and where they receive their support. They also study how these interests overlap in order to identify policies that lead to equitable economic outcomes. For example municipalities currently determine how much their communities might support affordable housing developments by using questionnaires, visiting disparate community events, or hosting city led forums. The community participants are often disproportionately privileged however, generally skewing older, wealthier, and whiter. This could result in the municipality concluding that there is less support for affordable housing than there actually is. A common market for community interests would yield a more accurate picture of both neighborhood and citywide opinions around affordable housing.

A common market of interests cultivates information transparency by cutting down the amount of research it takes to become aware of the needs of the community. When community builders are armed with knowledge, they can confidently engage municipal planners at city council, rather than the other way around. Agile governance emerges from this well-informed public. Take for example a case where a property developer wishes to rezone an area from single-family to multi-family. That developer goes to city council to present their case, but is unaware of affordable housing advocates with similar interests. Both parties go to city council to present their case for multi-family zoning, but their arguments are defeated by pro single-family zoning special interests (e.g. “Not in my Backyard”). Their common interest could have raised social equity had they been aware of one another. A common market of interests makes it possible to asynchronously communicate demonstrable need to other community stakeholders at city council.

 

A Marketplace for Local Engagement

I term this awareness “social impact intelligence” (SIMI). SIMI is the essence of “deliberative democracy”, which involves members of the community in their community’s participatory planning process. Deliberative democracy is touted as a potential tool for cultivating greater trust between community members and their local governments. Platform-assisted deliberative democracy is a path to more representative community engagement. Similar tools such as Facebook Community Pages or NextDoor.com have failed to create deliberate democracy. Instead, these forums have devolved into insular echo chambers of discourse. Unfortunately, special interests like “Not in my Backyard” thrive on these platforms and can easily stifle loosely organized community interests, such as affordable housing. SIMI emerges when it is possible to compare and contrast interests that face a community. This is an analytic process that enables healthy discourse between competing interests and is served in what I will call a SIMI platform.

Our current social media has yet to elevate insular forums into a locally integrated and standardized space. In this framework, only the loudest voices can be heard across the social network. For example, corporate “astroturfing” - or the misrepresentation of community interests by special interests - can misrepresent local voices. What if the “volume” of a voice was amplified by its proximity to the locality and by the local reputability of their proposers? If this were the case, local citizens could parse local proposals from regional or national ones.

 

A marketplace of local community projects would in this framework originate from the locality itself. The resources that fulfill the projects would also originate from the locality, but achieve scale economies through local partnerships. Each proposal on a local marketplace might raise resources through the issuing of social impact bond proposals. The social impact bond would pay-out a combination of interest payments and results, equal to the opportunity cost of neglecting the problem being solved by the impact bond. The SIMI platform would match the “supply” of resources (NGO’s, concerned citizens, volunteers, etc.) with the “demand” for resources (project proposals on the local marketplace). Incentives would need to be given to the supply-side, perhaps through gamification, monetary reward, tax-breaks, and reputation-building. The result is nothing short of greater community engagement.

 

Project Outline

I believe that the mission to build greater-community with deliberative democracy is pertinent for building a more inclusive society. Mass society has given rise to this notion that the voice of the individual is worth less than it has ever been. But I believe that we can use technology to determine how to make engagement fun and informative. A platform like this need not be centralized but rather duplicated across localities. Moreover, its administration and technical maintenance would be decentralized. Nevertheless, its creation would still require a multidisciplinary team: in the technical realm, we would develop cloud infrastructure to host data science applications, a geographic information system, and a front-end interface. In the non-technical realm, we would engage councilors, community forums, cities, mayors, and nonprofits.

As mentioned above, the platform serves community builders with a marketplace of social impact bond proposals. Each proposal on this market originates from a community builder or is inferred by machine-learning applications on the platform’s discourses. In other words, the platform applies machine learning to classify discourse subject matter. In machine learning, this process is known as “labeling”. The platform translates a labeled discourse into a “suggested” social impact bond proposal, which contains geographic and thematic information. For example, a thread about “homelessness” (i.e. the label) will contain geographic information that locates the problem on a map; it also contains thematic information that might indicate for example a sanitation issue. As more discourses are ingested from disparate forums, the platform’s map of social impact proposals grows.

The platform also models sentiment around labels. Whenever a thread off of a forum is ingested, a word-cloud model is trained around a label and expresses the sentiment surrounding a topic/theme. For example, take the theme ”Bicycle Lane”. The word-cloud model in the context of “bicycle advocacy” might include phrases like “safety” or “C02 reduction”. Sentiment is central to the problem of consensus building because it helps community builders contrast opposing interests. As consensus develops on the platform’s marketplace, users evolve into community stakeholders that inspire greater community engagement and deliberate democracy.

Safeguards must however be put in place to guard against spoofed user accounts. “Doxing” for example occurs when malicious users act as other users at the neighborhood level. “Astroturfing” occurs when malicious users over-represent a community at the neighborhood level. Whereas astroturfing can be controlled by weighing user input according to reputability and gamified engagement, doxing is a problem that may only be solvable with identity verification. Both problems however are prerogatives in ensuring a successful platform.

 

Closing Remarks

This proposal is a roadmap for achieving deliberative democracy and agile governance. The SIMI platform takes what people have learned from their communities and gives it back to the community. It educates citizens on how local government works and empowers them to influence it in a way that is engaging, accessible, and transparent. Newly agile local governments would strengthen the confidence and trust that citizens have in our democratic institutions, helping to reverse the current trends of disengagement and polarization. It is my greatest hope that this project will change the way we do democracy in America.

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

Impact Measurement:

To quantify the success of our DApp, we will use both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Quantitatively, we will track adoption rates across different aspects of a city's economic landscape, measure increases in civic engagement (such as participation in local elections and policy feedback mechanisms), and provide 1-2 case studies of economic impact measurements that would never have been possible without decentralized local data and decentralized analytic talent. Qualitatively, we will gather stakeholder feedback through surveys and focus groups to assess the perceived improvements in governance transparency and efficiency.

Sharing Outputs:

We will share the outputs and findings with the broader Cardano community through a variety of channels. This includes publishing whitepapers and case studies on our website (www.fortress-gridworks.tech), presenting at blockchain and governance conferences, and engaging with the community through webinars and workshops. We will also collaborate with academic institutions to further study the impacts and refine our methodologies, ensuring continuous improvement.

Project Success and Value:

The success of our DApp will bring substantial value to the Cardano community by demonstrating the practical applications of Cardano’s blockchain technology in enhancing governance transparency and efficiency. This serves as a proof of concept for local governments considering blockchain solutions, potentially leading to wider adoption of Cardano’s technology.

Measure of Impact:

The impact will be measured by the increased use of Cardano’s blockchain in governmental operations beyond our initial implementations. We will be able to track the effects of our insights on local economic development by tracking how government spending changes with additional transparency to citizens. Additionally, the adoption of our governance framework by multiple localities will serve as a metric of success and a testament to the robustness and adaptability of the Cardano ecosystem.

[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?

As a Senior Managing Data Scientist at Pfizer with a background in applied economics and regional science, and as the Secretary of the Colorado Forward Party Executive Committee, I have a deep understanding of what it takes to engage communities effectively and drive technology adoption. Moreover, I have a track record of leadership. My hands-on experience in software engineering and leadership roles solidifies my capability to manage complex projects and collaborate with diverse teams. For example, I am an active technical contributor to the Greater Denver Transit and YIMBY Denver, and have attended Regional Transportation District meetings to meet with government officials and pitch them on technical capabilities within these two organizations.

 

Execution Strategy:

 

Expert Team Recruitment: Utilizing my network and the Cardano community, we will contract out work to skilled blockchain developers, data analysts/scientists, and software engineers who are motivated by civic innovation. My business partner, Nate Carlson, an experienced director of engineering in his two previous roles, will oversee the technical development, ensuring high-quality on-prem solutions for cardano node maintenance and other service stacks.

Stakeholder Engagement: Continuously engage with city councils, economic development corporations, and NGOs. We will use platforms like Ventura’s City Selection Committee Website (City Selection Committee – County Executive Office (ventura.org)) for updates and feedback, ensuring alignment with local objectives and maintaining transparency.

Pilot and Scaling: Launch an MVP in Ventura or Denver, focusing on a significant urban issue identified by the mayor, utilizing insights from my experience in public agendas and community planning. This pilot will serve as a proof of concept for potential scaling.

Accountability to Catalyst Fund: We will maintain a Mattermost hub for posting regular updates with a weekly stakeholder check-in to provide updates on the 5 Phases of our rollout (see milestones section).

 

Fund Management and Accountability Measures

1. Detailed Budgeting and Regular Financial Audits:

Drawing from my experience in four startups, I understand the importance of rigorous budgeting and financial transparency. We aim to tie each value unit of the business (time and dollar costs for producing an impact study for the final milestone) to each hour of engineering performed during initial development. For our project, we will implement detailed budget planning for each phase of development and operational activity.

1. Outcome-based Funding Release:

Aligning with the principles of transparency and accountability that our business promotes, we will adopt an outcome-based approach to fund allocation. Funds will be released in tranches, contingent upon achieving predefined milestones and performance metrics. This method ensures that our spending is directly tied to project progress and outcomes, providing reassurance to stakeholders that the funds are being managed effectively and are driving tangible results in reducing wasteful public spending and enhancing public investment transparency.

1. Stakeholder Reporting and Feedback Integration:

As a business that is partly owned by its stakeholders through a decentralized funding model, maintaining open lines of communication with our investors and the community is crucial. We will implement regular reporting systems that provide detailed insights into financial spending, project progress, and impact metrics. These reports will be accessible to all stakeholders - especially city officials that we are pitching to - fostering a transparent environment where feedback is actively sought and integrated into project management. This participatory approach not only holds us accountable but also ensures that our actions remain closely aligned with the interests and expectations of the community we serve.

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

Full Node Integration and Blockchain Setup:

 

Objective: Establish a full operational environment on the Cardano blockchain by deploying a full node.

Tasks: Install and synchronize the Cardano node, establish secure connections, and integrate with existing infrastructure for data input and transaction processing.

Outcome: A robust blockchain backbone ready to handle encrypted transactions and smart contract executions.

 

Smart Contract Development and Deployment (Part 1)

Objective: Develop the foundational smart contracts to manage the lifecycle of social impact bonds.

Tasks: Design the initial smart contracts, focusing on fundamental operations and governance mechanisms. Conduct initial tests using mock data to evaluate performance and security.

Outcome: A base layer of smart contracts that is secure, efficient, and ready for further expansion and integration with other system components.

Smart Contract Development and Deployment (Part 2):

Objective: Enhance and deploy the smart contracts to support comprehensive governance processes.

Tasks: Refine the smart contracts based on initial testing feedback, optimize for performance, and deploy on the Cardano blockchain using Plutus. Implement advanced security measures to protect against vulnerabilities.

Outcome: Fully functional and optimized smart contracts that automate processes and enhance transparency in local economic systems.

Data Analytics Integration and AI Implementation (Part 1):

Objective: Establish the infrastructure for AI-driven analytics to process and analyze economic data.

Tasks: Select and configure the initial AI and machine learning models suitable for economic analysis. Begin integrating these models with the blockchain for initial data ingestion and processing.

Outcome: A foundational AI infrastructure capable of handling real-time data processing and providing preliminary insights for decision-making.

Data Analytics Integration and AI Implementation (Part 2):

Objective: Fully integrate AI analytics into the platform and demonstrate its capabilities through local case studies.

Tasks: Complete the integration of AI models with the blockchain, ensuring all data streams are properly ingested and analyzed. Train the models on comprehensive datasets from specific locations like Ventura, CA, or Denver, CO. Prepare demonstrations of the AI’s predictive capabilities and its impact on policy making.

Outcome: An advanced AI layer that delivers predictive insights, enhances decision-making, and supports dynamic policy adjustments, showcased through successful real-world applications.

Community Engagement Platform Launch:

 

Objective: Deploy a user-friendly interface for stakeholder interaction and community-driven governance.

Tasks: Develop and launch a web portal and mobile applications that allow stakeholders to participate in decision-making, track project progress, and interact with data.

Outcome: Increased community involvement and stakeholder buy-in, leading to more informed and accepted local governance decisions.

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

Denver Delight LLC, Ambidextrous Ltd: We are a data science and engineering consultancy committed to empowering organizations with advanced analytics and AI capabilities. Our skilled team includes data scientists, engineers, and business translators who collaborate closely with clients to address complex challenges and drive data-informed strategies.

  Key Personnel:

Johannes Plambeck: Senior Managing Data Scientist with significant impact across multiple sectors. Has worked at 4 startups and 3 major corporations in the over the last decade; has published two academic papers; serves as Secretary for the Colorado Forward Party Executive Committee (a political organization); and has produced work in conjunction with the Greater Denver Transit to help improve ridership for the Regional Transportation District of Colorado. Currently serves as a data science manager at Pfizer. https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannes-plambeck-47ba2520/

Relevant Specializations:

• Telecommunications: Expertise in integrating large-scale geospatial and pricing data to optimize sales and retention KPIs, with notable roles at PfizerConnect and Charter Communications.
• Health Care: Development of data-driven roadmaps for patient-provider matching algorithms and treatment plans, showcased at Rise Platforms Inc. Also involved in healthcare data solutions in collaboration with multi-disciplinary teams.
• Public Transit & Public Planning: Experience in creating geospatial machine learning algorithms and congestion models to enhance city-scale traffic flow simulations and public transit, demonstrated at Moove.AI and at Greater Denver Transit.
• Commercial Real Estate: Forecasts vacancy rates to aid strategic planning in commercial real estate markets, based on experience at Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. Development of site selection models for commercial real estate.
• Satellite Informatics: Introduction of novel sampling techniques for satellite imagery to accurately predict retail parking lot utilization, implemented at Remote Sensing Metrics LLC.
• General AI/ML: Comprehensive experience in implementing machine learning algorithms across various sectors including trading engines at ShapeShift.IO and call-center systems at Charter Communications. Skilled in scaling and architecting AI and ML platforms, as evidenced by the role of Vice President of Engineering at a tech startup.
• Automotive OEMs: Implementation of back-end and user-facing features using vehicular telematics data.

 

Nathan Carlson: Helping bootstrap engineering requirements. Software Engineering Director with extensive experience in spearheading engineering efforts in startups and established enterprises. Former Vice President of Engineering at Ouray Digital, where he played a crucial role in scaling the company's user base from 500 to over 150,000.

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

Relevant Specializations:

• Blockchain: Expertise in platform redesign and development within the blockchain space, highlighted by contributions in trade engineering and blockchain node maintenance at ShapeShift.

Blockchain Engineer [TBD]

Skills Needed:

• Proficiency in blockchain technologies, specifically Cardano and its smart contract platform, Plutus.
• Experience in deploying and managing blockchain nodes.
• Strong understanding of cryptography, consensus algorithms, and smart contract security.
• Ability to integrate blockchain with existing infrastructures and data systems.

Fullstack Engineer [TBD]

Skills Needed:

• Expertise in both front-end and back-end development.
• Experience with web frameworks such as React for the frontend and Node.js for the backend.
• Familiarity with database management and API design.
• Skills in UI/UX design to enhance user interaction on the community platform.

Data Engineer/Analyst [TBD]

Skills Needed:

• Strong background in data engineering and architecture.
• Proficient in machine learning algorithms and their application to large datasets.
• Experience with data integration from various sources into a unified blockchain system.
• Ability to perform complex data analysis and translate findings into actionable insights.

Talent will be initially sourced from: OpShin Den (https://discord.com/invite/6yHG6XZp) – Forum that helps expose Cardano applications to python users.

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

Compute Costs:

Fixed Compute Costs: $2000

Estimated cost for servers or cloud services to handle extensive data processing and storage. 

Engineering and Development Costs:

Will rely on me to really scope out technical requirements that are in line with vision. Will search for a possible co-founder from Cardano ecosystem for blockchain development requirements.

Software Engineering Team: $40000 ($100 per hour)

• Blockchain engineer (2 months - $20,000)
• Fullstack engineer (2 months - $20,000)

Cloud Services:

Ambidextrous offers a bare metal server with an 18-core Intel Xeon Gold processor, 512GB of RAM, and 22TB of storage space at $250 per month. This is far less than going market rates for leasing cloud dedicated bare compute resources.

Ambidextrous Ltd will offer a retainer contract for $100/hour for the setting up the infrastructure and any IT needs.

Data Engineering and Analysis Team (me, Upwork subcontracts): $5000

Funds allocated for a team of engineers to develop and maintain the blockchain-based platform, including front-end and back-end systems.

Covers salaries for data engineers and analysts who will handle data scraping, mining, machine learning, and model development.

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

Value Unit Correlation with Costs:

Our budgeting process strategically aligns costs with the expected value units by ensuring that every expenditure directly contributes to tangible benefits within the communities we serve. This means that:

1. Engineering Costs: By investing in top-tier engineering talent at competitive rates ($100 per hour), we directly enhance the technical robustness and innovation of our blockchain applications. This not only improves the functionality of our DApp but also boosts civic engagement and policy transparency—key value units that define our project’s success.
2. Infrastructure Investment: Our decision to utilize cost-effective solutions like partnering with Ambidextrous Ltd for server needs ensures that we maintain high data processing and storage capabilities without overspending. This careful financial management supports our ability to deliver real-time data transparency and robust economic analysis, crucial for assessing policy effectiveness and economic health at reduced costs.
3. Data Engineering and Analysis: Allocating funds for a skilled data team, supplemented by subcontractors through platforms like Upwork, allows us to efficiently scale our data processing capabilities. This directly contributes to our project's ability to provide detailed economic assessments and opportunity cost analyses—central to driving improvements in economic health.

By ensuring that each dollar spent is justified by a corresponding increase in value units, we create a budget that not only reflects cost-efficiency but also maximizes the impact of each investment.