Catalyst Site: Project tracking

Project Catalyst Community Website - Addressing the Challenge

In the current project catalyst process, a growing number of proposals are getting funding and the community doesn't have an easy way to track the accountability of proposals and see their progress. Round over round, pain points start to become clearer as certain projects don't get funded or proposals don't deliver to their promises. At the moment, this data is not readily available on Ideascale.

For Community Advisors it becomes more complex to track the history of a growing number of different proposals and anticipate known problems of proposals. Currently there is no systematic and data driven approach to increase the quality of proposals. Along with this, proposers can't easily access existing information on the outcome of other proposals to guide their own proposals and prevent any previously made mistakes. Furthermore, it challenges distributed decision making because it limits the voters ability to make well informed decisions.

The purpose of the Project Catalyst Community Website is to tackle these current problems by providing useful historic data about projects within the Catalyst process for proposers, community advisors and voters. The Project Catalyst Community Website will become the source for education, collaboration and information about the Project Catalyst funding process because it allows all involved parties to get a comprehensive overview of all teams, topics and proposals over time.

What project data will be tracked?
The following are the starting points for what data can be tracked for a proposal to make it easier for the community to make better distributed decisions.

• How often projects get funded - Currently there is no easy way to track which projects have received funding against the proposals they have submitted. Community members would benefit from seeing how many times a project has been funded.

• Total funding amount - The total funding amount indicates the work that has been already done in the system. It will allow for ranking of the most important projects in the Catalyst process over time, indicate responsibility of certain projects and give an overview where the priorities lie.

• Linking projects to their products / websites - Evaluating funded proposals according to their funding and work until a certain point of time will be a benchmark across different proposals. Analyzing past performance will help to allocate future resources in a more efficient, meritocratic way. Linking existing products and websites to projects will be a first step to more transparency about progress.

Roadmap
The proposal aims to provide a single defined part in a community website that provides a central source of information which is constantly updated. It makes it as easy as possible for community members to see the history of different projects and track their success.
Integrating project tracking into the website will take ~5 weeks of work. Long term, more features will be added to achieve better distributed decision making within the community.

If you want to look at all solution ideas that will be integrated in the community website, take a look: https://www.notion.so/cardanocommunity/Catalyst-Community-Site-2b0616bedeb94c13a135d565eb883412

Development steps

• Extract all the funding data for the previous funds, standardize the data and then add it to the website database
• Create the single projects associated to grouped proposals to track the overall funding for a project with proposal breakdown
• Create the backend to allow people to search for projects using funding data and see all proposal data on a given project
• Create the frontend to show all the funding data for each project on the projects list and project pages

Expected initial implementation launch date ~6th June (+/- 1 week)

Auditability

The project is currently under development, weekly updates can be found here: https://www.notion.so/cardanocommunity/Project-Updates-7f42f8cc1648444dbfe6e18b74ccc3b7

Success metrics

Short term (3 months): Number of users viewing project lists and project information compared to total participants in Ideascale

Longer term (6-12 months): Tracking interactions between voters, advisors and proposers to determine if the quality of proposals is increasing over time as project and proposal information improves

Team and collaboration

The team consists of 3 international people with background in informatics, science, economics, psychology and political science

George L - Web and mobile developer of over 5 years (mainly React, React Native, GraphQL, Serverless and Prisma). Ref - https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgelovegrove

Jakob D - Research & analysis, management. Political Scientist and Business Psychologist with experience in strategic consulting

Ben S - Research & analysis, collaboration, marketing and documentation

Budget breakdown

Time required: 5 weeks (40 hours x 5 = 200)

Time allocation: Research & analysis (10%), Product and design (15%), Development (45%), Maintenance (5%), Collaboration (10%), Marketing (15%)

Budget = 200 x $40 per hour = $8000

Hosting & Software = $400

Total: $8,400

For more information on budget planning of all our proposals, take a look at: https://www.notion.so/cardanocommunity/Budget-planning-e39747c1f62f42b1928e374a8c0f287e

Join the conversation, if you want to engage in our proposal(s)!

Discord: https://discord.gg/RwM2DanP - Under F5 Catalyst Value Onboarding group => project-catalyst-community-site channel

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/adacatalyst