PACE: Skills credentials

Overview

In fund 6 two proposals got funded that have led to this proposal for a project based learning exercise for creating verified skill based credentials. The first relevant proposal is community credentials https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/PACE-Community-credentials/367221-48088 that got funded to help create a bottom-up community approach for creating use cases that help with Atala PRISM adoption and education. The second is Universal Skills Authentication https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Universal-Skills-Authentication/368250-48088 that will be providing an open protocol for universal authentication of individual skills.

The community would benefit from collaborating on a project based learning exercise to integrate the Universal Skills Authentication https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Universal-Skills-Authentication/368250-48088 protocol into a skills based credential example. Likely candidates for the skill to focus on could be Haskell, Plutus or Atala Prism due to their importance in the Cardano ecosystem. In execution of this proposal the project team would look provide a way for the community to verify these relevant skills and be issued a credential to showcase to the community.

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

A video explaining the proposal is at https://youtu.be/_kHi7jvopqw

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. The following are main roles involved in the project based learning exercises:

• Contributor - Contributors will provide development and other support to 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

1. Recruit able contributors who are interested in working on this project based learning exercise.

1. Vote on the skill that will be assessed for the skills credential. The contributors may wish to invite the community to vote on the skill selected if they deem that a more suitable approach.

1. Integrate with the protocol, API and application code from the fund 6 proposal Universal Skills Authentication https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Universal-Skills-Authentication/368250-48088.

1. Document the process and governance framework for issuing the skills credential and how a holder would be able to attain that credential, in an open GitBook resource.

1. Verify the skills credential on the community list in http://projectcatalyst.org to showcase the verification process, as an open source example. This verification step could instead be implemented in another site if this was more suitable. This will draw from the experience of verification steps used for the Community Credentials and Universal Skills Authentication fund 6 proposals. The code developed will be open source, so others will be able to replicate the same functions to verify the same or additional skills.

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 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. Additional information on PACE is available at https://cardanopace.notion.site/cardanopace/PACE-c1b5ed092f0c43bdb7045a75b8592b0e.
• LearnerShape (led by co-proposer Maury) has two funded Catalyst proposals, including for the Universal Skills Authentication protocol, which will provide key infrastructure for this project. LearnerShape will provide guidance and development support for integration of the protocol with this project. Additional information on LearnerShape is available at https://www.learnershape.com/.
• 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 - The leaders of PACE and LearnerShape are both part of the Atala PRISM pioneers cohort. In this program, we have been tasked with collaborating to create bottom-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. This wallet once available could be used to hold the skills credentials that will be issued through our proposal.

Feasibility

• Technology - Atala PRISM supports the core building blocks of self sovereign identity which is DIDs and VCs. This proposal focuses on the usage of this core technology so is technically feasible.
• Contributors - PACE and LearnerShape have strong teams that have been funded for other proposals. 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. We expect this pilot will be a first step in widespread adoption of community credentials, leading on to broader use cases.
• 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 other dedicated repositories (including the LearnerShape Github https://github.com/LearnerShape/lsgraph).
• 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

• Skills credentials issued - Number of the skills credentials issued (a) in total and (b) filtered by unique holders, to help indicate popularity of showcasing skills credentials to the wider community and helping with Atala PRISM adoption.
• 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 on the process and output of our proposal will 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 this would be done through best efforts including encouraging user reporting.

Budget

• Contributors hours (planning & skill voting - 20, execution - 230, governance model for selected skill - 40) - 290
• Coordinators hours (LearnerShape guidance and oversight, ensuring outcomes are met) - 60
• We will seek efficiencies where possible, including some contribution of unpaid time by PACE and LearnerShape. There may be cases of mixing more junior to senior engineers in the project and contribution received will look to reflect the quality of the output produced.
• Total hours: 350
• Total budget (hours * rate) - 350 * $70 = $24,500