PACE: Community credentials 2

Community project based learning exercises for a bottoms up approach to implementing, learning about and using verifiable credentials

PACE team funded from fund 6 Atala PRISM challenge, Gimbalabs community for project based learning and Atala PRISM pioneer contributors

Overview

In fund 6 a proposal for Community credentials https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/PACE-Community-credentials/367221-48088 got funded to help create a bottoms up tools that help with Atala Prism adoption and education. Atala Prism is new technology with no current implementations or easy educational courses. It quickly became clear that this fund 6 funded proposal is well aligned to use project based learning. With a positive response from the community to get involved in the fund 6 funded proposal we believe there is value in continuing this approach of project based learning with more projects.

New community focussed Atala PRISM projects can introduce more collaborators to help increase the use cases, implementation examples and education resources available to the wider community.

Based off the experience we gain from our fund 6 funded proposal being executed now along with what ideas the contributors believe will add the most value here are some of the most promising focus areas that the community contributors will consider whilst they continue to implement a bottoms up approach to Atala PRISM adoption:

• Catalyst credentials - Explore producing credentials for tasks performed by different roles within Catalyst such as a credential that represents how many assessments a community advisor made for a given funding round.
• Enhance existing tools - Extend the tools made from the fund 6 proposal such as tooling to make batching credentials, issuing credentials or managing credentials as an issuer easier for community projects.
• Cloud wallet agent - An app & web extension based wallet is already being planned to be implemented by Atala PRISM pioneer members mentioned in our partnerships. Using this knowledge and open source implementation a cloud wallet agent could be explored as an alternative way for community projects to manage being an issuer so multiple project team members can issue credentials under the issuer identifier (DID).

The following ideas are less likely as focus areas though will be up for consideration:

• Mentor credentials - Produce a process for mentors to provide educational help and guidance to newcomers to the technology that can be rewarded with a mentorship credential.
• Credential translations - Expand on the fund 6 proposal tools by considering extra functionality like best practices for applying translations when issuing or verifying credentials.
• Existing web platform credentials - Issuing identity or reputation credentials based upon the usage of accounts from existing web 2.0 platforms such as Reddit, Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, YouTube, Twitter.
• Community suggestions - Consider other ideas for credentials or tools from community projects that would benefit the community whilst also being a good project based learning exercise.

For this proposal the intention will be to focus on one these project ideas listed that is in highest demand. The team of contributors who are part of the project based learning exercise will vote on what idea(s) are selected to be executed based off community feedback from our fund 6 proposal along with collaborations with the community that help determine what's needed most at the time of funding.

The progress of the funded fund 6 proposal and this future proposals will be documented in the following GitBook: https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/cardano-community-identity/

https://youtu.be/5v5moKSh03Q

Project based learning

Atala PRISM is new technology with no current implementations or easy educational courses. It became clear that the fund 6 community credentials proposal was well suited as a form of project based learning. Due to this opportunity to help with education this proposal will be executed in a project based learning environment to maximise collaboration and education within the community.

Gimbalabs https://gimbalabs.com is a community project focussed on project based learning who have already been working on Plutus based projects to help the community learn about smart contracts in Cardano. This environment is the perfect home for also exploring and learning about Atala PRISM in a collaborative setting. By collaborating on the proposal in a group setting the education on how to use Atala PRISM can be maximised and shared between the contributors and also to the wider ecosystem with recordings, examples and documentation.

Project based learning roles

• Contributor - Contributors will be those who help take the funded proposal from finalising requirements through to implementation.
• Tech coordinator - The tech coordinator will ensure that tasks are prioritised, fairly distributed and also logged with who completed which tasks.
• Outcome coordinator - The outcome coordinator will ensure that the execution is documented including code or meetings and that any deliverables such as education resources are completed and released to the community.

Development steps

• Collect contributors who are interested in working on this project based learning exercise
• Vote on the idea(s) to be implemented. The contributors may wish to invite the community to vote on the ideas selected if they deem that a more suitable selection approach.
• Develop the tools needed to issue and verify credentials for the selected idea(s)
• Document the decisions and collaboration of the execution into an educational GitBook resource
• Verify credential ideas on the community list in http://projectcatalyst.org to showcase the verify steps needed for the credential as an open source example. This verification step could instead be implemented in another site if this was more suitable! This should be a small part of execution as the same verification steps will be implemented for the community credentials fund 6 proposal

Roadmap

• 3 months - Finalise contributors involved for the project based learning exercise, select most suitable execution idea and start execution.
• 6 months - Finish execution and focus on getting usage feedback along with finishing educational resources. Wrap up with a completion report on what went well or could have been improved.
• 12 months - Proposal should already be completed

Team

• PACE - The PACE team https://projectcatalyst.org will be highly involved in setting up and ensuring the delivery of this proposal. We will assist with coordination and development, while finding other coordinators and contributors to deliver key elements of the project.
• Gimbalabs - Gimbalabs https://gimbalabs.com delivers project based learning to the community in a way that maximises education and collaboration. Gimbalabs will be supporting this proposal as a way to use the credentials in their own community as well as helping those same tools be used in other community projects.
• Atala PRISM pioneers - As part of the Atala PRISM pioneers cohort we have been tasked with collaborating to create bottoms up use cases for credentials, contributors from the cohort will be a main part of executing this project based learning exercise.

Partnerships

• Atala PRISM Wallet https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Open-Source-Credential-Wallet/382078-48088 - We're working with the Atala PRISM pioneers to support the implementation of an identity wallet that's needed within the community

Feasibility

• Technology - Atala PRISM supports the core building blocks of self sovereign identity which is DIDs and VCs. This proposal focusses on the usage of this core technology so is technically feasible.
• Contributors - There are a number of developers with sufficient development experience that have presented themselves from Atala PRISM pioneers cohort for the team forming of the fund 6 community credentials proposal. You can join the Gimbalabs Discord server, find the 'community-credentials' chat and join the conversation here - https://discord.gg/TVvCYacmwd 

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 different verifiable credentials within the community the chance for increasing Atala PRISM adoption increases.
• Developer adoption - Project based learning exercises are a fantastic way to collaborate in a educational team based setting that can also guide better quality educational resources based upon the learnings of the project. This should help with increasing community developer familiarity with the technology and wider developer adoption from the resources and content produced.
• Shared learnings - The contributors to the projects will gain experience of creating tools to help the community that will provide useful learnings to share with the community and other projects

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. Some of the code for proposals can be found on the PACE Github https://github.com/projectcatalyst however the project based learning exercise code may get placed in another dedicated repository which would be shared openly.
• To see an overview of the entire PACE team information and active and funded proposals you can visit our documentation - https://cardanopace.notion.site/PACE-c1b5ed092f0c43bdb7045a75b8592b0e
• PACE weekly development updates can be found here - https://cardanopace.notion.site/Project-updates-7f42f8cc1648444dbfe6e18b74ccc3b7
• The meetings for the project based learning exercises will be recorded where possible and shared online

KPIs

• Number of credentials issued - The more credentials issued to in total but also filtered by unique holders helps show how impactful the proposal has been in helping adoption of Atala PRISM.
• Number of contributors / spectators - The more contributors involved the more that the education from building can be spread amongst the community. Spectators to the project are also valuable as they can learn passively from watching contributors.
• Usage of educational resources - Educational content can be hosted on a GitBook which will provide stats as to how many viewers it is receiving https://docs.gitbook.com/features/insights
• Usage of open source code - Number of times the code gets forked and used in other projects. It will be difficult to know where this code gets utilised so naturally would be a best efforts situation.

Budget

• Contributors budget (hours allowance for the collaboration and execution of the selected proposal focus areas) - 230 hours
• Coordinators budget (ensuring outcomes are met, helping organising contributors and execution) - 30 hours
• Total time required - 260 hours
• Budget (time * rate) - 260 * $70 = $18,200