Open Ideas and Data For Cooperation

Build data pipelines off-chain to integrate proposal and community tools in a form suitable for integration by structures of accountability.

Ro Mathew is a ML Lead, ex PM Decision Support Systems with 10+ Years Experience in BA, DS and Product Management.

This is an Adagov.org Project.

Why is Open Ideas and Data Important?

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We build hierarchical, categorical proposal submission systems that are inefficient for messaging and we ask ourselves: "Why don't groups cooperate more on Catalyst?"

The systems we have are perfectly designed to give us the results we're getting.

We need more than to generate proposals:

1. We need a way to assess proposals against a collective direction

2. We need to ensure projects deliver Return On Intent

3. We need to ensure project teams are held accountable and rewarded for their contribution. [6]

The goal is to create a more holistic, integrated, community friendly system (initially off-chain) that can expose proposal and review data so that we can build systems that can offer curation and accountability. This will improve processes and systems that will help each funding round and build between the gaps.

Currently we manually repeat processes with spreadsheets but as we scale, these will have their limits.

The Truth About Data

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Data is the core to data-driven decision making - which provides multiple perspectives on the objective truth. The closer we are to truth, the better chance we have at making successful decisions and funding projects and teams that work.

When we reinforce these systems with peer-review and allow feedback to occur, we get the best results. [6]

Good data hygiene and systems to support this are fundamental to building the technology that drives our community and dealing with issues of scale, fairness, audit-ability and traceability.

Note: Placing this data on-chain is a separate process to experimenting and defining the way these systems will work.

Summary

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Data Management is the heart of the Project Catalyst Community and key to a Meritocracy. The success of the community depends on the ideas we pick. Every product or offering evolved out of Catalyst will first begin as a proposal within these tools.

We also want to feed-back these delivery metrics into a believably or merit weighted results to make future rounds easier.

As an extra we would like to gamify the process further so repetitive work, where it cant be automated, is more engaging and that reviewers who contribute and get it right earn recognition.

Who Is This Proposal For?
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These tools are for the Project Catalyst community to help:
1. Voters easily decide who they will vote for in subsequent funds based on performance.
2. Proposers effectively draft, collaborate and submit their best ideas and find teams as they do so.
3. Community advisers review, contribute and rate these ideas using supporting tools.
4. Allow Veteran Community Advisers provide training and feedback ensuring a fair and equitable outcome.

It will improve the following challenge metrics:

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Proof of iteration: Round over round, "pain points" like data curation, processing and reporting would evolve.

Re-election rates: More proposers receive subsequent funding.

Embracing failure: Community would be able to track and see value in & learn from proposals that did and did not work out.

Auditability

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Fund 5 Scope: We will comprehensively examine, select and trial and integrate an alternative idea management platform into data analytics and reporting tools so that reviews can take place faster, more effectively and at scale.

[Completed] Develop a requirements framework for open data sharing between ideation and auditing platform.

[Completed] Develop a comprehensive review of idea management and execution platforms [5]

[Completed] Trail free-to-trail services around idea management. (Trailed Nectir, Monday.com and Ideanote)

[In Progress] Investigate and pursue Data Interoperability - Access to IdeaScale API

[Pending] Investigate alternative integrations / Data and Reports Area

[In Progress] Begin accepting community feedback.

[Vote-Pending] Onboard interested members of community for trail and feedback. (3 month)

[Vote-Pending] Present in swarm which options pose risks and recommendation. (3 month)

[Vote-Pending] Further review of on-chain integration (and suitable rollover pathway). (6 month)

[Vote-Pending] Integrate to existing projects and offer the data back to the community. (6 month)

[Vote-Pending] Develop training materials to allow interested members to connect. (6 month)

[Vote-Pending] Swarm session to review project in context of others. (6 month)

[Vote-Pending] Ensure the interfaces for the framework meets suggestions previously made for IdeaScale (where needed). (12 month)

[Vote-Pending] Provide, open free community curated data with a data model via a common interaction point. (12 month)

[Vote-Pending] Build basic reports so that proposals are fairly evaluated (3 month)

[Vote-Pending] Build review and cross review tools and systems that can help anomalies be identified. (3 month)

[Vote-Pending] Idea Atomisation - Break proposals down into smaller components for continuous review and reuse in later Funds. We will connect with other groups in F5 that are working on this concept.

[Proof Of Concept] Proposal Wizard - Guided proposal wizard to educate and direct novice Catalyst users to submit proposals: http://submit-proposal.adagov.org.

[Vote-Pending] UX / UI Design consultation sessions toward a Social UX/UI system.

[Vote-Pending] Onboarding and Training of Administrators and Devs.

Fund 4 Scope: Vote for us in F4! Setup Adagov and Design Consultation Sessions for Social UX: Swarm Sessions.

[Self-Funded] [80% Complete] [Proposal: http://fund4.adagov.org]
[Complete] Create channels of communication in line with that of Project Catalyst.
[Complete] Test the appetite for a Working Group / Community of Interest
[Complete] Begin onboarding projects that genuinely share the same principles and values: Voltaire Assistant, Swarm Sessions
[Complete] 4 Workshops: Swarm Sessions 01-08
[Complete] Establish understanding of high level group constraints, wants and needs.
[Self-Funded] Take advantage of corporate/ team discounts to provide groups with tooling: Miro, Airtable
[Complete] Subdomain projectname@adagov.org and limited hosting to project / proposal teams.
[Vote-Pending] Establish a members agreement that would state basic rules of engagement with adagov.org
[Complete] Update our communications for visual engagement: https://adagov.org
[Complete] We may provide endorsements / guides for interoperable or cooperating projects in F5.

Budget

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1. Tools and Licences (Community Data Portal, Tools Hosting Swarm Sessions)

$8400 USD for Stacker, 15 Administrators Community Size 2000, 2 Years - API w/ 5 Tp/s

$8640 USD for Airtable, 15 Administrators, Community Size 2000, 2 Years

$7860 USD for Miro, 20 Administrators, 2 Years, Day Passes for Occasional Administrators, Community Access

2. Review and Identification Tasks $1000

3. API Endpoint PII Deidentification, Processing and Integration Work $5000

4. Swarm Sessions and Training $2500

5. Training Creation, Hosting and Explainers $250

Total = $33470 USD

Feasibility
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How can we build production grade software this quickly and cheaply?
1. We'll investigate existing solutions in the field
2. We'll pick the solution that covers the most features with the best UX for a reasonable price
3. We'll negotiate a better enterprise licence model for our community
4. We'll negotiate to have developers enhance the tools further as a part of licencing
5. We'll configure the tech to match the requirements.
6. Where gaps exist we'll create integrations to connect to other tools.
7. We'll overcome risk of delivery by leveraging a class of applications known as middleware
8. We'll ensure integrations can deliver data reliably and securely to publically accessible sources
9. We'll audit our work to ensure PII is not being leaked
10. We'll review and present progress regularly to the community.

Impact
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Our objective is to have a smoothly working alternative dataflow and data reporting setup as soon as possible.
We estimate if our Fund 4 vote is successful, we can have such a system by Fund 7.
We will continue to work with the community and IOHK in training and handover.
The key goals of this project are high impact items for the community:
1. Automate much of the repetitive work done between funding rounds by community advisors so they can focus on community and proposer issues, growing proposals, maintaining community documentation and standards and providing feedback.
2. Provide the community with standardised open access to data so they can grow and build out the tooling ecosystem.
3. Support off-chain decision making with data while on-chain systems are established.

References

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[1] Catalyst Problem Sensing has 74 out of 223 entries related to incomplete UI / UX or have needed alternate solutions

[2] Project Catalyst Discord [31/03/2021@2:14 PM] #reviewing-the-reviewers. See: https://discordapp.com/channels/756943420660121600/810761956210376735/826701078590390322

[3] https://youtu.be/4KHaVo3vqeg?t=1967

[4] http://fund4.adagov.org

[5] http://ideamanagement.adagov.org

[6] https://youtu.be/3_wJOF4Y8gU?t=548

Launch Date

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Project is in Alpha at http://apps.adagov.org.

Release in Sep 2021.