Better Ideascale But Open-Source

Problem in details

Ideascale is not pleasant to use. As users, we feel more often restricted than empowered by this platform when proposing or reviewing new ideas.

Ideascale has many weaknesses: cramped and overloaded interface, too many user interaction choices by design, hard to understand what you have to do and when it is possible to do, not mobile friendly, and the list could go on...

These are some UX/UI flaws but there are some fundamental flaws. As a user, Ideascale doesn't propose efficient tools to skim through, filter out and keep track of a large list of ideas and feedback. It is like an email client that would not have ability to see already read emails.

We talked about Ideascale design flaws. Now let's talk about the open-source part. Cardano is an open public neutral project controlled by everybody, Ideascale is not. Ideascale is owned by a private company, therefore centralized and built for organizations working top to bottom in a classical centralized way. Idea generation platform for Cardano should be the opposite - built from the bottom up, open-source and improved by the community.

Solution, product

Cardano needs its own native idea generation platform dedicated to Cardano blockchain projects. Our main mission is to propose an alternative platform: open-source, simplified, gamified, modern, mobile, made to scale globally from bottom up. Focused on one simple goal: help great ideas to emerge from noise!

Core principles for the new platform are:

• Uncluttered interface
• Progressive disclosure design
• Simplified choices
• Richer and more granular interactions
• Made to easily skim and filter thru massive amount of contributions

We'll apply these principles to these following core features:

Proposers

• Create proposal
• Edit proposal
• Answer subtopic questions
• Request for skills/help

Community members

• Quick skim thru proposals
• Results page optimized for readability and speed
• Review proposal
• Subsection voting (Reddit style voting at proposal subsection level 🔼🔽)
• Subsection questions: Add ability to ask questions in proper context directly inside a subsection)
• Automatic update about reactions generated by my contributions as a platform user (questions, answers, up votes 🔼, …)

Advisors

• Improved interface for reviewing process
• Better access to past reviews and respective feedback
• New stats focused on reviews feedback

We also aim to refine the social dynamics and incentive model of user feedback. We think it would be a good idea to give a small cut off the future revenues generated by Catalyst funded projects back to people from the community that helped the project to grow by voting, commenting, helping to refine, or posting any positively perceived feedback according to the crowd (generating high amounts of upvotes). A reserve of 1% to 3% of the future revenues could be redistributed in the long run and used an efficient way to reward positive contributions and constructive feedback and help.

Involving community

During the pre-production stage we'll run interviews and collect feedback and ideas from fund1 and fund2 active users (people that have been using the platform extensively during the first funds).

Our design team will draft UX/UI concepts based on our initial ideas and their collective feedback. If feedback is positive, and community members like it, we'll implement the proposal. Else, we'll refine it.

Roadmap(complete plan will be publically available on Trello.com)

1. Writing the concept and user stories.
2. Collecting feedback and ideas from community members.
3. Making UX/UI high level.
4. Creating an interactive prototype.
5. Building a gamification engine/rules.
6. Proposing technical architecture for development.
7. Implementing design and making it a reality.
8. Implementing backend and smart contracts.
9. Releasing usable prototypes every 4 weeks.

Team

• Carolin Taling - Experience in business modelling, marketing and design. Been working 2 years with IT projects for web and mobile. Also running Huskypool.
• Jean Philippe - more than 20 years of experience in building IT and software solutions. Owner of an IT company 021 Studio.
• Dmitri - technical director of 021 Studio.
• 021 Studio - We have high-level expertise in SAAS and web platform implementation, micro service architectures, modern backend and frontend technology.
• Expertise in Plutus - open position!
• Game theorist - open position!

Timeline and resources

It takes around 6 months to build the project 'Better Idea Generation Platform'. To build that project we need:

• 2 backend developers
• 2 frontend developers
• 1 smart contract/plutus developers
• 1 UX/UI designer
• 1 product owner
• 1 part-time game theorist

55000