Cardano Worldwide Community Hubs

-

Our Difference (USP)

The difference between our online platform and most of the existing online resources focused on Cardano, is that our primary objective is to be a marketing operation designed to actively attract new members to the community worldwide and to support them. As part of this outreach campaign, we are curating existing content onto our platform so that it can be read in multiple languages, and providing a clear pathway to all the existing resources, in line with the new member's objectives and stage of learning.

As an introduction we invite you to take a (4 min) tour of the Gerolamo site to get an overview of what we propose: https://youtu.be/tY-cXsZD3xM

We would like to make it clear that the current platform is a work in progress. It is a prototype that needs to be finished and perfected. Our intention is to invite the Cardano community to join us in producing a far superior product that will exceed the aims of this challenge.

Our future aim is to turn over the majority ownership and governance of this platform to the Cardano community where it can develop into a fully functioning Distributed Autonomous Organization(DAO) that evolves to meet the emerging community needs.

Our story - An update from Fund 6

In Catalyst Fund 6, we put forward various proposals across several Challenges to experience and learn the Project Catalyst funding process. This was a highly successful and rewarding experience because it helped us learn more about the system.

And most importantly, it helped us better identify the Cardano ecosystem's most pressing needs. This in turn motivated us to reconsider and refine our original initiatives. As a result, we adapted our ideas to bring a more holistic and timely added value that could better serve the overall Cardano ecosystem at its current state of development.

You can see a list of the Fund 6 proposals we incorporated into our current Gerolamo project initiatives here at this link: https://gerolamo.org/about-us/fund-6-catalyst-proposals/

PROBLEM #1 - The Challenge "Scale Up Cardano Community Hubs"

We started by asking ourselves: What is a Community Hub or Community Centre?

Wikipedia states "Community centers or community halls are public locations where members of a community tend to gather for group activities, social support, public information, and other purposes of engagement. They may sometimes be open for the whole community or for a specialized group within the greater community."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_centre/

Based on this vision, we created Gerolamo to provide the framework needed to build an open, multilingual, online "Community Hub". Gerolamo aims to attract new members and encourage all members to network, engage and organize themselves across working groups at the local community, regional, country or continental level to help them realise their Cardano goals.

PROBLEM #2 – Consolidate and Curate the latest Cardano & Project Catalyst Information

We also concluded that Cardano information in general is not easy to navigate. Learning about Cardano is a complex task for new comers. So, in order to expand participation and adoption, we wanted to build a straightforward and complete source of information that people could rely on to discover Cardano and Project Catalyst at their own pace.

And to keep the site relevant over time, we want to provide a central and reliable source of information that keeps people up to date, - inspiring the community with the latest developments, achievements, and emerging capabilities.

In this sense, Gerolamo is designed to offer guidance and a point of contact for people just beginning their Cardano journey. At the same time, it also offers more advanced streams of information to help people identify emerging opportunities and potential partners. In addition, Gerolamo will offer guidance to locate the tools and preparation necessary to capture, pursue and realize each member specific Cardano goal.

PROBLEM #3 – "Out of the world's approximately 7.8 billion inhabitants, 6.45 billion do not speak English."

Since all Cardano and Project Catalyst information currently appears in English, many people across the globe are excluded from the transformational potential Cardano offers. What is missing is a single source of truth that pulls all the information in one place, where it can be accessed and exchanged in any language.

The Gerolamo multilingual platform offers a solution to this problem by removing all language barriers. It not only gives access to the foundational Cardano and Catalyst information and news streams across the globes' many languages, but it allows people to effortlessly share their Cardano experiences across a multilingual international community. This will surely foster a more expansive global exchange of ideas and collaboration across the Cardano ecosystem.

DEMOGRAPHIC - Who will Gerolamo.org Help?

We are targeting three primary groups of participants:

• Individuals

• Businesses and Organizations

• Developers.

We will offer a clear path for each group to help them achieve their specific goals and create journeys according to different levels of expertise.

Starting with beginners, people who have very little, if any, knowledge of Cardano, Gerolamo will guide them with clear and simple action steps to get them to the necessary level of awareness to interact with Cardano. We also introduce them to Project Catalyst so that they can consider creating local projects that will bring new additions to the current Cardano ecosystem.

More advanced modules will allow members to explore and discover more complex Cardano opportunities. Gerolamo will also help them achieve their distinctive goals by pointing them to educational resources and existing community hubs for continued learning and potential collaborations.

The Gerolamo Solution – The Worldwide Cardano Community

Please visit our Gerolamo prototype: https://gerolamo.org/

After clearly defining the urgent needs related to the problems detailed above, we decided to self-fund an initial working prototype of the Gerolamo platform to illustrate how we can offer an immediate solution to overcoming these pressing challenges.

Although the platform is still "A Work in Progress", we have delivered the basic building blocks to serve as a solid foundation for the, current and new, Cardano ecosystem participants to begin to grow a seamless global interactive community, for the community by the community.

• Curated Documentation

• Instant Translations

• Social Media

• User Generated Content capabilities

• Community Feedback Pages

You can see a more detailed list of the features of the platform on this link:

https://gerolamo.org/about-us/fund-7-gerolmo-org-platform-features/

ACTION PLAN – Advancing Development for the Community by the Community

In addition to completing the information and technical aspects of the platform, our main focus will be to reach out across the seven continents to promote Gerolamo membership. We will reach out across multiple channels of the Cardano Community, inviting them to join us, engage with us and contribute – and motivate them to connect, share and participate with each other using Gerolamo's initial features.

But most importantly, we want to establish strong community feedback loops to help decide the future development of the platform according to emerging needs. Our objective is to turn over the majority of ownership and governance to the Cardano ecosystem. In this spirit, we will invite volunteers to contribute content and participate in other work that needs to be done based on a rewards system that will be decided and implemented in the next phase.

With our intention of goodwill and to deliver immediate value, we have invested hundreds of hours to produce a working version of the platform ready to receive new members. We are committed to completing this project and going live with a fully functioning version by February 2022 at the very latest.

The funding we ask for will help Gerolamo accelerate and insure the delivery of excellence and scope that can be offered to the Cardano Community.

Target Gerolamo Members:

• Local gatekeepers, influencers and organizations surrounding Cardano and Project Catalyst initiative

• Proposers from current and previous Catalyst funding rounds.

• ADA wallet holders across the Cardano ecosystem.

•New entrants to the world of blockchain, applications and digital currencies.

ROADMAP - The Road Ahead

Phase One: Pre-funding work in progress - Prototype Launch

The foundational structure of the Gerolamo Platform Framework is already "live" in the form of a work in progress that offers an initial version of the following capabilities:

• Automated translation of all pages across the platform in 60 languages

• Landing Pages for 3 types of visitor profiles (Individuals, Businesses and Organizations, Developers) for Cardano and for Project Catalyst.

• Welcome Pages to seed the creation of Global Community Hubs across 7 Continents

• Set up of Cardano and Project Catalyst initial centralised information and News pages (Including Glossary of Terms)

• Functional Social Media platform with User Accounts that can:

o Follow, email & private message other Users

o Publish/Share Posts across linked users

o Create and Join specialized Groups (interests, languages)

o User Generated content to publish on the site (articles, glossary, links to resources

• Admins to set up Community Group Pages for each Language to register platform members

• A community feedback page

Phase Two: Budget use from Fund 7

During fund 7, we will focus our efforts on building and perfecting the parts of the platform that inform and attract people to Cardano and Project Catalyst. The aim is to build a certain level of critical mass in terms of interest and membership that will consolidate the community values Gerolamo is founded on.

Having delivered the basic framework for functionality and content presentation, the next phase will use any Fund 7 budget to accelerate the work already underway:

• Extend technical infrastructures required to support, maintain and support the site

• Refine curation of the content to expand and optimize the information pathways

• Hire team for research, data entry and to keep content updated

• Deploy professional translators to improve the automated multilingual messaging

• Carry out active membership onboarding and participation through outreach campaigns

• Develop methods for Community feedback for further Gerolamo development and governance

• Build and publish Gerolamo human translated Landing Pages in multiple languages to increase the platforms' international online footprint and multilingual search engine optimization (SEO)

This development phase will result in the launch of a completed Beta-version of the Gerolamo site which will provide a:

• Single resource for Cardano and Catalyst information delivered in a multilingual interface.

• Reliable way to connect Cardano communities across the globe, enabling them to interact together on a single platform.

• System to engage and reward the Gerolamo Community for their contributions to the site (work and content)

• Gerolamo Community feed-back loops to guide further development and set community governance standards

Phase Three: Fund 8 and the Future

For Fund 8, we already have our sights set on the next objectives.

We intend to request additional funds to continue further development of Gerolamo in order to deliver a fully functional Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

As stated earlier, we plan to turn over the majority ownership and governance to the Gerolamo community. With this objective in mind we have included a simple "Community Feedback Page" to help us gather opinions through surveys, voting and suggestions relevant to this process.

Community Feedback Page: https://gerolamo.org/feedback/

In addition, we have more commercial features we are proposing such as a Jobs and Business Directory which will give members even more opportunity to collaborate. Plus, we want to add a Helpdesk where members can raise issues about everything Cardano and Project Catalyst to gain support.

To manage more transparently and precisely the future decision-making processes we intend to pursue the following components:

• We will be launching a Native Cardano Token called "Gero" that will be used to govern the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

• We intend that the White Paper for the launch of the "Gero" Token is written by the community and the Tokenomics are decided by the community.

• All documentation will be multilingual to ensure the widest possible international participation.

• We intend to create a Gerolamo Stakepool, and the DAO will become a Stakepool Operator (SPO) with the profits used to build the DAO and the community.

KPI (Key Performance Indicators) - How will we know we are succeeding?

The effectiveness of the Gerolamo platform and its achievements will be easily tracked as they will be evident through the public online presence and social media. There will also be data available via analytics tools such as google search console both on site and off site.

In addition to usage data and numbers of registered users on platform, our results can be judged on the following criteria as outlined in the challenge:

• How many new Cardano Community Hubs do we establish in the next 6 months?

• How many businesses or organisations do we attract to become digitised using the Cardano Blockchain and accepting ₳DA.

• How many new Haskell and Plutus developers, and their applications, did we introduce into the Cardano ecosystem?

• How many people of Cardano ₳DA opened new Yoroi or Daedelus wallets?

• How many external organizations did this community-focused challenge bring into the Cardano ecosystem?

KPI - specific 6 Month Targets

• A target of 1,000+ new Registered Community hub Members with wallets & ADA

• 60 Active Online Community Language Hubs with at least 4 members each

• Human translated Landing pages in 60 Languages with initial content

• Fully developed Information pathways for individuals, businesses & developers

• Completed Cardano and Project Catalyst Information (validated and updated)

SKILLS REQUIRED - How can the community have confidence Gerolamo will be completed?

We have a substantial team of in house and external developers, translators, researchers and data entry assistants. You can see a list of employees, their activities and proposed cashflow for this project on a link you will find in the budget below.

We also we have numerous advisors and executives we could bring into this project as it grows, up to this point there are three key management individuals that have been guiding this project forward who have all worked together for a period approximately 10 years on multiple projects:

Carl Henry - 43 Year career as a serial entrepreneur and turnaround consultant. 20+ years building business websites using PHP, CSS, HTML, multimedia, AI, Running teams of up to 50 developers.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlhenry/

Lisa Santillo - University of New Hampshire - Bachelor of Arts; Multilingual executive, skilled in sales, marketing, interpersonal communication and technical project management. Six years recent experience connecting emerging software capabilities with industry opportunities. Leader in cohesive cross functional team engagement, building data driven product strategies to ensure successful outcomes.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-santillo-616104164/

Ankit Dave - Gujarat University - Master of Business Administration, finance, information technology and business analysis - Experienced Chief Executive Officer and founder of Tailored Solutions Pvt Ltd - Leading Joomla, Magento, Wordpress, Laravel, PHP, Mobile Application Development Company. with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Strong entrepreneurship professional skilled in IoT, Bluetooth Low Energy, Mobility, E-commerce & IT Solutions.

Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankit-dave-indolytics/

BUDGET - Project catalyst funding request

We would like to make it quite clear that we are not requesting funding or any repayment for works done up to this point and we are only requesting a contribution to the overall cost to take this project to the next phase in Fund 8.

The three managers of this project have not charged any fees for their involvement in bringing this proposal to its current stage.

Budget figures

Accounting (reporting actual expenditure): $180.00

Platform Development (functionality configuration): $2,137.28

Translations (human translations for landing pages): $2,210.49

Research & Data Entry (identifying & onboarding): $5,109.00

Total $9,636.77

To see the complete Cashflow forecast, personnel & task listing click this link:

https://gerolamo.org/about-us/catalyst-fund-7-figures/

** UPDATES **

One this proposal is "Locked" you can find updates to this proposal on the following link:

Update Link: https://gerolamo.org/catalyst/catalyst-f7-updates/

-