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AIM Community Tools

The AIM Community Tools were first developed and used in Funds 4 and 5, and our first proposal was funded in Fund 5 ( https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/350981-48088 ). These tools were created to facilitate the process to the different Catalyst roles: Proposers, Community Advisors and Veteran Community Advisors, as further explained below.

Catalyst Assessment and Review Phases Overview

In the current Catalyst process, after proposals are finalized, there are three phases that make up the assess and QA processes before community voting:

1. Community Advisors (CAs) assess the proposals and give them a rating between 1 and 5 in three categories: Impact, Feasibility and Auditability, along with a rationale explaining each rating given;
2. Proposers review the CAs assessments, when they are able to flag low quality/unfair assessments to be checked by the Veteran Community Advisors (vCAs).
3. vCAs review assessments of proposals, using those flagged by the Proposers in the previous phase as a potential starting point.

Previous problems that the Community Tools are helping to solve

Previously, during the assessment phase, CAs had to navigate through IdeaScale website and search for proposals to access. In order to better distribute the assessments between proposals, CAs had to manually search for the least assessed proposals, which was inefficient, tiring and time consuming. During Fund4, to assist with this task, a document was created by IOG indicating the proposals that were missing a minimum number of CA reviews.

The assessments' review done by both Proposers and vCAs was performed using an Excel sheet, which was functional to perform the job, but in the case of vCAs reviews, there was no coordination during this phase. This led to an imbalance in the reviews of assessments: some assessments receive lots of reviews, and others receive none.

As seen in Fund4, CAs and vCAs got overloaded with the amount of proposals they needed to assess and assessments to review. Considering the expected exponential increase in Cardano Project Catalyst's size, it is crucial to improve the efficiency of CAs and vCAs work over time.

Our solution: AIM Community Tools

To solve these problems, the AIM team has developed three tools:

1. A CA Tool, to automatically suggest a proposal to be assessed by the CA based and his challenge preference and the least assessed proposals. Link: https://cardanocataly.st/ca-tool/#/
2. A Proposer Tool, to make it easier to go through all the assessments, set them as 'checked' and/or flag them. Under development.
3. A vCA Tool, to automatically suggest an assessment to be reviewed by the vCA based on his filter choices and the least reviewed assessments. Link: https://cardanocataly.st/vca-tool/#/

These tools aim to make the process of assessment and review easier, and also to improve/create coordination between CAs and vCAs during these phases.

The CA and vCA Tools were already developed and used in Funds 4 and 5, and received very positive feedback from the CAs and vCAs, who mentioned that the tools improved their productivity and made the whole process a lot less tiring.

Since the CAs and vCAs work is paid by Project Catalyst as well, we believe these tools are already increasing the Return on Intention related to these activities.

This proposal's goal

The development of the AIM Community Tools was already funded in Fund 5 ( https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/350981-48088 ). Although, Catalyst is an ever evolving experiment and these tools will need to be updated probably every Fund in order to keep them relevant and bringing value to the process.

As an example, during Fund 6, the IOG Research team presented a new rewarding scheme for CA's assessments, which changed the way that vCAs reviewed these assessments. These changes need to be included in the Community Tools, otherwise they will become outdated and cannot be used anymore.

Therefore, this proposal is a request for funding for updating and maintaining the Community Tools for two more Funds (6 and 7).

Technical Specs

The current version of the tools, developed for Fund 5, are three Vue.js SPA (Single Page Application).

CA Tool: the app will be updated with the new data for F6 and F7. The mechanism to keep track of the assessed proposal will be improved with a self-checklist for the CA that will include some guiding questions to help him to better prepare high quality assessments.

Proposer Tool: the initial version developed for Fund 5, was based on the R&Y Card system and all the data structure of the tool included all the criteria mentioned in the document.

In Fund 6, the new system includes different criteria (excellent/good/not valid), and the data structure will be updated according to it.

vCA Tool: the initial version developed for Fund 5, was based on the R&Y Card system and all the data structure of the tool included all the criteria mentioned in the document.

In Fund 6, the new system includes different criteria (excellent/good/not valid), and the data structure will be updated according to it.

Roadmap

• CA tool - F6 data entry (~ 9th Sep 2021)
• CA tool - Guiding question improvements (~ 9th Sep 2021)
• Proposer review Tool - Release (~ 17th Sep 2021)
• vCA tool - Updates (~23rd Sep 2021)
• CA tool - F7 data entry (prior to assess stage in F7)
• Proposer review Tool - Release (prior to assess QA stage in F7)
• vCA tool - Updates (prior to assess QA stage in F7)

Budget Breakdown

• CA tool - F6 data entry ~2 hours
• CA tool - F6 new features development / Static links and resources update + testing ~4 hours
• Proposer review tool - F6 updates + testing ~8 hours
• vCA tool - F6 updates + testing ~8 hours
• Management - F6 Meetings, planning ~10 hours
• CA tool - F7 data entry ~2 hours
• CA tool - F7 updates + testing ~4 hours
• Proposer review tool - F7 updates + testing ~8 hours
• vCA tool - F7 updates + testing ~8 hours
• Management - F7 Meetings, planning ~10 hours

Total hours: 64

Cost per hour: 50$

Total: $3200