PACE: Community credentials

Overview

Self sovereign identity will become an important part of the growing amount of decentralized applications being developed on Cardano. For the Project Catalyst community, the use of an identity solution can help with allowing community members to build up a reputation and trust in a way that can be self owned and verified. Atala Prism will offer the building blocks to start creating a digital identity, where people will have ownership of that identity and can verify it to other people and protocols.

The purpose of this proposal is to develop tools and provide examples for some of the foundational blocks of Atala Prisms initial implementation of self sovereign identity (SSI). This includes both decentralized identifiers (DID's) and verifiable credentials (VC's). The proposal will help projects establish themselves as issuers and provide credentials to community members based on a certain condition. The initial verifiable credentials for this proposal will focus on verifying participation and completion within community projects.

This work can be expanded on in future proposals, where we can also look at how trust and reputation networks could be introduced using things such as ADA as trust collateral or endorsements from trusted people for helping with reputation.

This initial proposal addresses the challenge as it aims to provide a simple way for the community to start using the identity solution using Atala Prism. This allows the community to build up their knowledge on its importance and also helps provide open source examples for other developers looking to integrate Atala Prism. Increasing awareness and usage of Atala Prism identity in the community along with helping speed up developers integration of the identity solution by providing examples should help with driving faster adoption of Atala Prism.

Example credentials

The following are two examples where you could issue some simple participation or completion credentials. Other projects could use the same source code to achieve a similar outcome!

- Catalyst Swarm Attendance - Issue an attendance credential to people who attend after townhalls or weekend sessions to let people know who is active in the community session.

- Catalyst School Workshop Completion - Issue a completion credential to people who completed a Catalyst School workshop to showcase their new knowledge.

Community credential tools

The first and main part of this proposal is providing the tools necessary for a community project to issue credentials to another person that has an Atala Prism identity wallet. These tools will make use of VC's and DID's. The idea behind the code for these tools is that other community projects could copy it and change what they want to about the credentials and use it for their own use case.

projectcatalyst.org verify integration

The additional smaller part to this proposal is providing an example of how you could verify an issued credential. The verification step consists of checking a credential against the trusted issuer address and that it is valid. We will integrate a verification process into the projectcatalyst.org site to showcase a simple example of verifying a credential by letting community members add the credential to their profile. This added example will guide other projects integrating Atala Prism on how they could verify credentials in their own application.

Development steps

- After the launch of Atala Prism we attend and learn from the associated pioneers program

- Determine appropriate data to add to the participation or completion credentials

- Develop the tools needed to issue and verify credentials for the project team

- Document steps to issue credentials to a given community member

- Integrate the verification of a given credential issued by respective project teams so that they can be added to a projectcatalyst.org community member profile

Education workshop

After we've completed development of the tools for issuance and accepting credentials for community projects along with the verifying example on the website we can then look at providing a workshop at a After Town hall to answer questions and support other projects looking to integrate Atala Prism.

In the workshop we will showcase the product, reveal how projects can use the credentialing system on the projectcatalyst website and discuss different examples. Depending on the feedback we will iterate and use the input to further develop the product for upcoming funding rounds.

Roadmap

In the short term, an accurate delivery time will be difficult to provide for this proposal as the work has the pre-requisite of having Atala Prism available to develop with. It has been mentioned previously this should become available in Q4 of 2021. Once the date is confirmed and the documentation is available, it will become easier to determine more exact dates of delivery. We can provide a roadmap for the development work to be completed where it should likely take anywhere between 5 to 7 weeks to develop after Atala Prism is available followed by at least 4 weeks for onboarding, monitoring and collecting feedback. The completion time could be slightly reduced or extended based on how easy it is to work with Atala Prism in its first iteration after launch - which for the moment is an unknown at the time of finalizing this proposal!

- 3 months - Development of the proposal, launch and start of integration within community

- 6 months - Monitoring and analysis of results, should finish a completion report in this time frame

- 12 months - Proposal should already be completed

Feasibility

- Technology - The PACE team joined the Atala Prism After Townhall and confirmed that the core parts of self sovereign identity (DIDs and VCs) will be functional when Atala Prism is launched. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5bn8yweqPs This proposal as a result is technically feasible after the launch date of Atala Prism as planned and builds upon some of the core concepts of self sovereign identity.

- Team - George has spent a couple of months already looking at self sovereign identity space in a previous proposal https://servnetwork.org and has over 5 years development experience in web and mobile apps.

Impact

- Awareness - By helping existing community projects, the execution of this proposal should help to provide increasing awareness to people who join the community and get involved in different ecosystem projects.

- Community adoption - By showcasing the possibilities of participation and completion credentials for community projects the community adoption of Atala Prism will increase.

- Developer adoption - Examples of integrating Atala Prism will help speed up other developers integrating solutions into their own applications and also potentially help other developers generate ideas on how they could also integrate Atala Prism into their own applications.

- Shared learnings - Our experience of creating tools to help the community will provide useful learnings we can share with the community to prevent common pitfalls

Auditability

- Open source code - The code developed for this proposal will be open source and free to use for the community making it easy to audit both its progress and final result.

- Finished development of any of our proposals can be found on the community site https://projectcatalyst.org or our Github repository https://github.com/projectcatalyst

- To see an overview of the entire PACE team information and active and funded proposals you can visit our documentation - https://cardanocommunity.notion.site/PACE-c1b5ed092f0c43bdb7045a75b8592b0e

- Our weekly development updates can be founded here - https://cardanocommunity.notion.site/Project-updates-7f42f8cc1648444dbfe6e18b74ccc3b7

- The workshop after developing the Atala Prism solution will be recorded and uploaded to Youtube

Success metrics

- Number of credentials issued and verified - One metric to assess success will be trying to attract a large number of the community to engage with using the solution to get participation or completion credentials. We can track how many people are issued credentials by community projects and also how many try verifying the credential on the https://projectcatalyst.org website after the first few months of completing the proposal development work.

- Usage of source code & technical discussions - A more qualitative success metric will be helping other projects start using Atala Prism solutions. Technical discussions with teams on implementing Atala Prism based on the experience from this proposal would be highly valuable towards producing more innovative and ambitious solutions.

What success looks like

Success of this proposal will be defined by community projects having an easy way to issue credentials that are valued by an increasing amount of members of the community as the tools get adopted. A write up of any conversations with other project teams that benefited from the workshop or discussions about Atala Prism will also help to highlight value brought by the execution of this proposal.

Budget

- Atala Prism Pioneer program - No time is included in the budget for the time spent in the Atala Prism pioneer program, this will be out of the teams own personal time.

- Time required: 10 weeks = 40 hours x 10 = 400

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

- Budget = 400 x $50 per hour = $20,000

- Hosting & Software = $500

Total: $20,500

PACE Team

The team currently consists of 2 people with background in software development, economics, psychology and political science. Full team and partnership details can be found here https://cardanocommunity.notion.site/Team-Partnerships-6d1a8bc8a5474b63ade005ab3cdacf21

- George L - Web and mobile developer of over 5 years (mainly React, React Native, GraphQL, Serverless and Prisma).

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

Social accounts

Twitter - https://twitter.com/adacatalyst

Discord - https://discord.com/invite/uPv97TvGvC (Find the chat called 'projectcatalyst-org' under 'Ecosystem Tools')