PACE: Idea collaboration tool

Overview

The faster that existing and newer members of the community can share their ideas the easier it will be to improve those ideas into better ones that are communicated clearly and have the maximum chance to find the skills required for the idea to be executed. Better idea flow, feedback and team building should help with creating higher quality proposals.

The purpose of an idea collaboration tool is to allow anyone in the community to submit ideas or even problems to the community at any point in time that they want to share and get feedback on or to find potential collaborators.

Currently the best way for people to share ideas is in the insight sharing part of Ideascale which only provides for one week of insight sharing. One week of insight sharing is not sufficient to start a continuous team building process. Furthermore, the insight sharing phase on Ideascale does not aim at matching issues with skills and services that people in the ecosystem can provide.

By creating a tool for idea collaboration, the community would have a way to add ideas at anytime outside of the funding window to discuss and collaborate on problems they think need addressing. The longer the time an idea is open to the community the better responses and criticism it can receive. An outcome to this should be helping to produce higher quality proposals with more collaboration.

The idea collaboration tool will allow people to submit ideas / problems to a list of ideas. Those ideas will ideally be tagged and may also have skills or services added by the idea creator to indicate they are looking for other to collaborate with. The community would be able to provide feedback to the idea with comments. A simple rating system can also be added to help better ideas float to the top so more people collaborate on those ideas. The outcome of this should be it can help the best ideas turned into proposals faster.

Future development ideas

The idea tool is also a great stepping stone towards looking at how can we help turn those ideas into great proposals. Once we have an idea collaboration tool we can look at types of different proposals (events, protocol development, DApp development projects etc) and see what type of information is needed to make great proposals in those different contexts. Ideas generated can then be changed into proposals with a request to add information relevant to the type of proposal they are making

Another area for improving the funding process with proposals is to have different funding processes depending on the type of proposal. For instance, a small budget proposal would benefit from a faster process with less information requirements as it is a lower risk to the community and the need for it could be time sensitive. This idea collaboration tool could help funnel those ideas into becoming proposals suited to these different funding processes. Ideascale is currently the only process used at the moment.

Development steps

- Create an idea collaboration form to add ideas with tags and optionally any services and skills required.

- Showcase a list of ideas that the community can filter from based off the tags or skills / services required and also provide feedback to the idea.

- Implement the idea upvote and downvote review system to allow users to review the idea and implement a sort by feature on the idea list so user can find the most upvoted ideas.

- Output the data periodically to an open source repository for other people to consume as needed.

Roadmap

This idea collaborator tool can be started straight away and has no pre-requisites to get started. The design and development steps above would be expected to take around 2 weeks to complete with around 3 weeks needed for the analysis, collaboration, maintenance and marketing that will be spread out over a longer period of time.

- 3 months - Development of the proposal, launch and start of integration within community and also monitoring and analysis of results. May also finish a completion report in this time frame.

- 6 months - Should be finished at this point though may write a completion report near the 6 month mark.

- 12 months - Proposal should already be completed

Feasibility

- Technology - George has over 5 years development experience in web and mobile apps which will be all that is needed for the development side of the proposal.

- Growth - Marketing will be the most important factor for this proposal. In terms of marketing the tool this will include any of the PACE team interacting with the community directly, using social media, town halls and likely comments in Ideascale to try and link proposals and ideas up from people in the community.

Impact

- Increase idea flow and feedback - The easier it is for anyone to add ideas at any point in time the more the community can contribute towards what ideas get turned into proposals. Allowing feedback will help to shape the ideas more quickly and hopefully lead to more proposals.

- Increase proposal quality - Providing more time for people to create ideas and get feedback will help to refine the better ideas and filter out less impactful ones that should lead to creating better proposals for each funding round.

- Increase collaboration - The ideas will be created by people who have profiles on the [projectcatalyst.org](http://projectcatalyst.org) website which will help inform others about the person. By being able to contact the ideator, it will be easier to share ideas and receive feedback. This should help to increase collaboration within the community on shared ideas.

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

Success metrics

- Number of ideas and proposals submitted - Increasing the number of ideas added or the number of proposals that were first created through the ideas of the community would be a good success metric to follow. Increasing these numbers can help lead to an increased quantity of quality proposals that have had more feedback and time to iterate.

- Amount of feedback given to ideas - An increasing amount of feedback given to ideas would be beneficial for increasing collaboration in the community. This metric would be a good sign that the community is engaged and improving new and existing ideas.

- Number of teams formed around ideas - Some draft proposal ideas may attract other members of the community to participate to bring that idea to life, the more teams established around good ideas the better for the ecosystem.

What success looks like

The success of this proposal will be down to it being able to help increase idea flow beyond what happens on Ideascale. Having a scoring system will lead to good ideas to float to the top and turn them into quality proposals. More community members can easily form teams for ideas they are interested in. The ideas on the other hand will receive more feedback than they would in the Ideascale process which further increases the quality of the proposal.

Budget

- Time required: 5 weeks = 40 hours x 5 = 200

- Time allocation: Research & analysis (10%), Product and design (10%), Development (30%), Maintenance (5%), Collaboration (5%), Marketing (30%)

- Budget = 200 x $50 per hour = $10,000

- Hosting & Software = $500

Total: $10,500

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')