Respect Games bond community and bring value to Cardano Ecosystem through Fractal Governance Pilot Project

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Jorge Ramos

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

Entity (Not Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Co-proposers and additional applicants

UpScale DAO

[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 postulate that both, Incumbent advantage and Rational Ignorance can be minimized by applying a permanent Respect Game, which randomizes the participants into small groups of p2p accountability

[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

MIT license.

[METADATA] Horizons

Connected Community

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Core Protocol

The presented protocol is based on the ideas of this whitepaper, which states:

"Money can be viewed as a measure of respect someone has earned for past contributions to a community. We value money because others value money. Money is therefore respected. When money transfers hands, one person loses this measure of community respect and another person gains it. When you sell a product that someone in the community values, you earn respect. Note that all “property”, of any form, is a measure of respect. Theft of “property” is a form of disrespect... "

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Consider a small community within the Cardano ecosystem, no larger than 1K members. We propose to tokenize a community-agreed measure of the Respect each participant deserves.

Respect by its very nature, cannot be bought, sold or transferred. It can only be earned by deeds. The greater the feat, the greater the earned Respect.

The proposed protocol works as follows:

Part I: Overall setup

1. A weekly, one hour, virtual meeting is held, open to all community members for as long as this experiment runs (6 months). Participants are required to show their faces in order to guarantee proof of humanity.
2. In order to mitigate Incumbent Advantages and the effects of previously possibly formed cartels, in these meeting all participants are randomized into breakout rooms.
3. In order to reduce Rational Ignorance, each room will be of size 6 (max). So that all participants will have the opportunity to be heard and ask questions within a small room.

Part II: Members' contributions

1. Within each room, each participant will report his/her contributions to the Cardano community. That is, each participant will answer the following question: What have you done during the last week, to benefit the Cardano ecosystem? Peers can ask questions and request for evidence that supports any claim from anyone.
2. After checking the provided evidence, each participant will rank his/her peers, according to contributions, from the most valuable to the less valuable.
3. The final score of each participant will be the average of the rankings given to him/her by the other peers in the same room.
4. The six given scores are mapped to the Fibonacci numbers: 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. This helps to reflect the Pareto, long tailed typical distribution of efforts. These Fibonaccies are the Respect quantities participants will get.
5. A non transferable token: RESPECT, is issued to each participant according to the above amounts. RESPECT, just as in real life, cannot to be transferred, bought nor sold; it can only be earned.
6. Ideally, a certain amount of ADA, from the budget of the game, is also sent to the participants, pro-rata, according to the amount of Respect each of them received.

Part III: Community Council

1. At any moment in time, the community's Council will be formed by those members with the highest rolling average of Respect from last N meetings. N here being an adjustable parameter, chosen by the community.
2. It is this council of highly respected individuals, the very one entity responsible for the treasure of the Respect game. They hold the keys of any associated smart contract or any good owned by that sub-community.

The above presented process can be fractalized to both communities within communities or communities of communities. Thence, we call it Fractal Governance.

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This proposal aims to get financing to conduct a pilot project of the above protocol using Cardano as a test community and ADA as the transferable token. The meetings will be open to any community member that wants to play and bond.

This proposal doesn't aim to develop the necessary smart contracts to bring the game on chain; the required budget for that would be much larger than what's requested here.

Conducting a super low cost pilot, using web2 tools, measuring relevant data, familiarizing the community with the proposed protocol while receiving feedback from the community is what this proposal is all about. 

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

Motivation:

In human organizations, those who are in positions of power can, and have the incentive to, leverage on their power to increase the likelihood of remaining in power. This is an emergent phenomenon, inherent to most forms of democracy, known as Incumbent Advantage. It is well known and documented in political science. Incumbent Advantage tends to degenerate into cartel and, eventually, ruling elites formation; the ultimate form of centralization. A no-and-no for Cardano.

On the other hand, Rational Ignorance refers to a decision, an individual may take, to remain uninformed about something because the cost of acquiring the information (in terms of time, effort, or money) outweighs the perceived benefit of having that knowledge. This concept is often applied in economics, political science and choice theory, particularly in voting behavior.

In the case of the Cardano ecosystem, the effects of Rational Ignorance are mitigated by the delegation system. However, this has the unintended consequence of amplifying Incumbent Advantage. This is because, by its very nature, delegation removes the incentive of delegators to verse themselves in the nuances of the ecosystem. Given that knowledge is power, this increases the relative power difference between delegators and delegates. This power difference is then further amplified by other factors such as name recognition and the establishment of support networks whose information flow can easily be affected by the incumbent. The more advantage the incumbents gets, the more susceptible the system becomes to centralization.

Centralization of power in itself isn't a bad thing; centralization of power tied with lack of effective accountability is. Thence, we propose a solution in which every bit of power, any entity has within a community, is constantly legitimized while Incumbent Advantage and Rational Ignorance are both significantly reduced.

[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?

Feasibility

The presented gamification of Respect is already being used successfully in several crypto-communities in which a Delegated Proof Of Stake system failed to preserve decentralization.

Most notably as a big part of the EOS community grew unhappy with governance decisions from the block producers, who have got into power by community voting and then self perpetuated via vote buying, the only currently surviving groups are operating under the protocol presented here, even under extreme conditions of lack of funding.

Three examples of communities running successfully this protocol and growing and bringing value to their corresponding ecosystem are:

• The Optimism Fractal
• The UpScale Community.
• The Fractal of the Spanish Language

Capability

1. In all of these communities the proposers have been directly involved, either in protocol design and tuning or smart contract coding.
2. The presented protocol is, in fact, the result of several years of tuning and iteration with communities that were struggling to solve their governance problem.
3. As a consequence of the above 2 points, we are probably the best suited team in the world to bring the gamification of Respect to the Cardano ecosystem.

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

The successful implementation of the Respect Game protocol will be done in three stages. Each stage will have its corresponding milestone.

First Stage: Teasing for Engagement

Period: First month, starting at the day of receiving funds.

Objectives:

1. To make widely known by the Cardano community the imminence of the Respect Games.
2. To get the community familiar with the dynamics of the games.

Deliverables:

• Teaser video presenting the rules of the game and the available prices.
• At least 2 visual posts a week, announcing the game starting day, in all Cardano community main channels.

Milestone funding amounts: 3K ADA

Second Stage: Execution and data collection

Period: 2nd to 5th months

Objectives:

1. Execution of the game.
2. Gathering of the data.
3. Gathering of community feedback.

Deliverables:

• One video meeting every week uploaded to YouTube.
• Spreadsheet with the data of scores of participants.
• Whatever the contributions of the participants are, that will add value to the Cardano ecosystem

Milestone funding amounts:

• Zoom Video conferencing subscription: 19 USD/month x 5 months = 85 USD
• Meeting Host salary: 30 USD/week x 22 weeks = 660 USD
• Spreadsheet creation and updating for all the weeks: 500 USD
• Prizes for participants: 100 ADA on average/participant x 20 estimated participants/meeting x 22 meetings = 44K ADA.

Period: 2nd to 5th months

Objectives:

• Aggregation of collected data.
• Summary of community feedback.
• Beginning of formulation of recommendations and next steps for the Cardano community.

Deliverables:

• Data from the experiment, published to the Cardano community.

Milestone funding amounts:

• Data aggregation and analysis: 200 ADA

Period: 6th month

Objectives:

• Analysis of collected data and community feedback.
• Design of possible next iteration of the protocol.
• Submitting of recommendations and next steps for the Cardano community.

Deliverables:

• Final Document of the experiment published in all main channels.

Milestone funding amounts:

• Final document preparation: 400 ADA.

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

Name: Jorge Ramos.

Project manager, Protocol design and optimization

Formation

• Physicist, University of the Andes, Colombia.
• Data scientist.
• Math models
• Python, C++, jupyter-lab, SymPy

Role:

• Main responsible for the pilot.
• Data collection and analysis.
• Document preparation
• Video meetings host.

Contact:

email: eliecer_immortal@uniandes.edu.co

Linkedin

Name: Vladislav Hramtsov

Principal developer

Products:

• EOSETF
• Consortium.vote
• Fractal.games

Expertise: 

• Frontend: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ajax, ReactJS, Angular.
• Backend: C++, solidity
• DevOps: Aws, Docker
• Four years of building smart contracts on the Antelope (EOS, WAX, TELOS) and Ethereum ecosystem

Contact:

• Github
• Email: hramtsovvladislav@gmail.com

Name: Lennar Lehestik

Frontend Developer

Products:

• EOSETF
• Consortium.vote
• Fractal.games

Expertise: 

• Frontend: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ajax, ReactJS, Angular.
• DevOps: Aws, Docker

Contact:

• Github

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

Milestone stage 1:

• Video creation: 2K ADA
• Community engagement in social channels: 1K ADA

• Total milestone 2: 3K ADA

Milestone stage 2:

• Zoom Video conferencing subscription: 19 USD/month x 5 months = 85 USD
• Meeting Host salary: 30 USD/week x 22 weeks = 660 USD
• Spreadsheet creation and updating for all the weeks: 500 USD

• Total milestone 2: $1245 = 3K ADA aprox

Milestone stage 3:

• Data aggregation and analysis: 200 ADA
• Final document preparation: 400 ADA.

• Total milestone 3: 600 ADA

Prizes for participants: 100 ADA on average/participant x 20 estimated participants/meeting x 22 meetings = 44K ADA.

• Total prizes: 44K ADA

TOTAL FOR REQUIRED FOR THE WHOLE RESPECT EXPERIMENT: 50.6 K ADA

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

For any human organization to be successful, culture is one of the most important things to get right.

Having a quantified measure of the contributions each member has done to a community, and to tie that to a symbol of Respect, of who is who; who is actually pushing things forward. Who is actually doing the work, what quality is being obtained from each individual or entity and in what quantities and, most importantly, create a culture in which this information is legitimized by active community consensus. This may be the single most important cultural shift any community needs to do in order to be able to effectively chose who should arrive to positions of power.

Allowing this information to be updated efficiently —not every quarter after results are evident— but as fast as possible, can determine community assertiveness and pivoting capacity amid times where DAOs are competing for resources of every imaginable kind.

 In the above presented budget, about 90% of all the requested funds will be redirected to the community in the form of prizes. The overall effect will be that the Cardano ecosystem will make an investment, and get almost 90% of that investment returned to its members within the next six months.

But then it is the big plus: getting the added super benefit of having arrived to consensus, at least in regards to the participants of this pilot, about the honesty and caliber of contributions from each individual; and being sure that funds were given mostly to the most respected individuals according to a Pareto distribution, as is natural to the quality and quantity of the work done by people in organizations. Plus, making sure that this recognition is tied to both a monetary reward and a symbol of status.

There are other benefits of implementing this process such as community bonding, familiarizing everyone with everyone's work; increased harmony and communication and participation, among others. Al these things can be guaranteed to occur. However, because those goodies are best if seen rather than heard or read, we prefer to let the community experience, first hand, the additional potential benefits of what has been presented so far.

This is real value for the money!