PACE: Proposal progress updates

Overview

The community would benefit from having access to a history of update logs from the funded proposals to inform the community of the progress of any given funded proposal. The update logs should be convenient to find and attached to the existing proposal data and the data will also be open source with the other proposal data so that anyone can use it within other tools and projects.

For the progress updates the proposers should be able to confirm which of their roadmap items have been completed so the community is able to see a rough percentage of completion as well as any relevant technical or visual information that showcases and confirms that update. The PACE team have done update logs for the project on a weekly basis https://cardanocommunity.notion.site/Project-updates-7f42f8cc1648444dbfe6e18b74ccc3b7 which provide a fairly accurate example of the type of updates that funded proposals could complete to provide more information for community auditing.

This proposal is a follow on from the following fund 5 proposals - improve proposal data https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Site-Improve-proposal-data/350686-48088 and project tracking proposal https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Site-Project-tracking/350699-48088 The enriched proposal data from these fund 5 proposals will be made available in an open source repository that anyone can fork and consume for their own projects. This proposal for proposal progress update logs will build on top of that data set and produce more data for that repository that will get updated through the https://projectcatalyst.org community site.

Creating public progress update logs for proposals will address the challenge by providing an easy way for proposers to provide information about the progress of their funded proposal progress that will make it more efficient and transparent when the community audits their proposals are being executed correctly. The data will be completely open source so anyone in the community will be able to consume or analyse the updates from proposers to distribute the auditing process.

Design

Check the attachments for a design mockup. This design is just to give an idea of what it could look like though please note that both how its executed and the design may change a closer to implementation as we think about the solution more!

Development steps

- Add a progress update form to the proposal pages so that a proposer can detail out what has happened recently with any links or demos to showcase a proposal update.

- Present the progress update logs on any proposal pages that have added them for the community to view.

- Use existing data for update logs given to IOG for previously funded proposals and add this data to the proposal information so that it is historically up to to date.

- Implement the addition of adding the update log data to the open source proposal data repository so everyone gets access to this proposal update log data.

Roadmap

Getting existing proposal information into an open source repository will the pre-requisite to this proposal which involves completing fund 5 funded proposals for improving proposal information https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Site-Improve-proposal-data/350686-48088 and project tracking https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Site-Project-tracking/350699-48088 The functionality will likely only take around 2 weeks to complete however there is also manual work in bringing together and likely standardising the historical update data that IOG has been capturing to date which will be added to the previously funded proposals and likely take around 3 weeks to complete. In total the proposal will likely take anywhere from 5 weeks to complete.

- 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 & Darlington has 14 years in software development with 7 years within cloud infrastructure and DevOps. Between us we covers the skills needed to standardise the data and host it on a public API for the community.

- Data access - A requirement for this proposal will be getting access to the update logs provided to IOG. As this process needs to be decentralized over time and IOG already provide required data on request this should not be an issue.

Impact

- Increase proposal progress updates exposure - Public exposure of the proposal updates will benefit the community in auditing any proposals progress and also opens up more opportunity for feedback and support where it's needed. If a team is blocked on a problem the community may collectively have an answer to support proposers execution.

- Inform future voting - Current progress reports from existing funded proposals makes for valuable information to guide future funding decisions. If progress is slow with a well funded team then the progress updates will help provide a way to audit that progress and adjust voters preferences.

- Usage across tools - Public access to this the completion report information should help to allow different types of tooling to emerge such as analytic dashboards or more in depth reports and reviews on different proposals in the ecosystem. The better the data quality and easier it is to access the more likely the community is to create different tools - especially ones concerning auditing!

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 proposers submitting proposal updates - We can track how many proposers adds proposal updates through our system providing IOG agrees this could become an accepted input source.

- Increasing the number of people viewing proposals - Tracking the traffic to proposal pages will give insight into the engagement of the community for a given proposal and viewing their progress update logs.

- Increasing the regularity and quality of the updates given by proposers - Setting a standard for the update logs should help make it fast and easy for proposers to provide updates on what is happening. The more proposers that complete this regularly the better information the community has for auditing each funded proposal.

What success looks like

The success of this proposal will come down to creating an effortless way for proposers to provide progress updates that provides enough information to understand how the project is doing. The second part is that it effectively allows the community to view this information and use the data as needed in any of their own tools or analysis for auditing. This proposal is an initial stepping stone for helping with auditability where a more refined proposal progress update system can be developed over time.

Budget

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

- Time allocation: Research & analysis (10%), Product and design (10%), Data handling (20%) Development (45%), Maintenance (5%), Collaboration (10%)

- Budget = 200 x $55 per hour = $11,000

- Hosting & Software = $500

Total: $11,500

Partnerships

We've partnered with Lidonation https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Treasury-Catalyst-Directory/366965-48088 to help with our existing fund 5 proposals about proposal data (Improving proposal information and project tracking), our fund 6 proposals about auditability and also for their own proposal that will help with improving the access to Catalyst data through a public production ready API.

- Darlington - 14 years in software development with 7 years within cloud infrastructure and DevOps. Also involved with content writing helping newcomers with blog posts

- Stephanie - Teacher, helps non-profits navigate and capitalize on technology. At lidonation, she bridges the gap between the tech nerds and everyone else.

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')