Wolfram Catalyst Impact Dashboard

[IMPACT]

I. Introduction

Our goal is impactful dashboards for Project Catalyst users and there are several phases to do this project: 

1. Research and Planning – Align with stakeholders
2. Initial Data Sources – Onboard data sources
3. Share Results – Empower the community

Link to Supplemental Information (Text & Visuals): https://wolfr.am/Impact-Dashboard

Wolfram Blockchain Labs is working to provide analytics reports to different Cardano stakeholders. A useful tool for analytical information is viewing it through dynamic dashboards. 

Dashboards allow for a visual exploration of metrics in an efficient manner that is a useful paradigm for many users – especially when initially onboarding into the community and when meeting virtually.  

The “Catalyst Impact Dashboard” as a visual tool will become a vital community service for collaboration, given that Project Catalyst is a distributed community around the world, speaking many languages and sharing a variety of desired outcomes. 

II. Research and Planning

Data exploration is an essential method for stakeholders to learn and examine the Cardano ecosystem. An important aspect of exploration is creating visuals that align with the broader Catalyst ecosystem, these visuals will allow new entrants to the community to on-board as quickly as possible. There are various potential data sources, so part of the research and planning phase is to prioritize which sources and tools should be integrated. 

Research and planning starts with cataloging existing dashboard solutions. Wolfram will review existing presentation layer (jscript) libraries – leaning heavily on work previously done within Wolfram Research efforts – also reviewing community dashboard tools (and the libraries used in those efforts). Next, we will work on compiling community questions to understand common issues that new users have (and if those questions can be solved with updated visuals given the data that is available). 

After that process, there will be a shift from internal discovery (Wolfram) to external discovery (Cardano Community). We will solicit feedback via community Cardano Catalyst Town Halls, Cardano-focused messaging apps (Discord, Slack and Telegram) and Cardano Ideascale comments. This will help Wolfram create a dashboard framework that can handle the unique requirements of the Cardano Community focused Impact Dashboard. 

After receiving feedback from both the Cardano Community and Wolfram, the next step is synthesizing this information. This process is well established within Wolfram – in many cases you can actually watch on our live streams where you can ask questions in real time. 

A. Purpose 

The initial purpose of the Catalyst dashboard is providing Cardano community members with audit related data and general Cardano on-chain data. The data will range anywhere from new user onboarding information to treasury deployments and monetary snapshots to a historical view of funds 1 – 8 and their respective voting outcomes.

B. Design

Clear and well-defined, visually striking communication. 

C. Data Connections 

Create a clear separation between the visual display of data using the Impact Dashboard and the Wolfram APIs that will provide information to users. 

Wolfram will take the selected data, clean the data, and make it partially computable. We do this while ensuring that we allow for a framework that can function well with RESTful APIs and streaming data. Ultimately the data will be from different digital locations (Ideascale, Cardano, Discord Telegram, Zoom, Google Docs, Excel, etc.); however, we will aggregate the data.

D. Share Results

As part of Wolfram’s history, we’ve presented our findings to communities across the entire academic spectrum. We recognize the importance of this step and will implement a phase to relate the results and empower the users with the data so they can reach their own conclusions. 

III. Framework

Creating the framework for dashboards which will answer the following questions: 

• What are the data sources?
• How are the data sources organized?
• Once organized, what are the right questions to ask?
• What will the community find useful?
• How will the community share new ideas with Wolfram to create new dashboards?

IV. Initial Data

Initial connection will be through our currently submitted Wolfram Governance Analytics proposal. If this proposal is declined, we will revert to existing on-chain data from the Cardano Blockchain. 

This project is the initial entrance to dashboards and visualizations for Wolfram.

 It is taking the initial data aggregation process. This data aggregation process could best be described as selecting the appropriate data, cleaning the data, organizing the data to make it somewhat computable. To learn more about this process, please read the following blog post: 

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2017/04/launching-the-wolfram-data-repository-data-publishing-that-really-works/

Critical to building a user and developer community within Cardano is the ability to understand the vital signs of the Cardano Community.

In many ways, Catalyst community is a harbinger of the state Cardano. 

The developer ecosystem (both technical and non-technical developers) needs to understand how and where to approach the community to affect change. 

These dashboards will simply enable those participants in a quicker and more convenient way.

The main challenges that we foresee within this proposal are typical to most data science projects. 

One is the gatekeeping of data. A few of the main sources of data exist inside Ideascale, messaging applications, and IOG’s Catalyst Voting application. We have several ways to access this data so that it can be turned into a computable format, but we must have access to the data first. We will require some access requirements from the current gatekeepers of these chatrooms, website admins, and other key stakeholders.

Another challenge is to get stakeholder participation beyond Project Catalyst, to touch the broader Cardano community so that these tools can be used by the wider audience. This challenge is more about outreach than anything else, so that’s a key mission from the Wolfram perspective.

[FEASIBILITY]

We have created a six-month timeline for the execution of all items in the plan, assuming a start on Monday, May 16, 2022.

We have started this project in advance of the funding; if the project isn’t funded, we will taper the resource put into the project and close it in May during the Discovery Phase. 

Regardless of the funding outcome here, we plan to move this project forwards on an appropriate timeline. 

We will resubmit a proposal at a later date because we know this is an area of real value.

1. Research and Planning
2. Month 0 - 1.5
3. Collecting data sources
4. Explore potential API with Ideascale
5. Collecting historical votes through Catalyst Voting Application
6. Connecting disparate data sources
7. Initialize Data Sources (if funded)
8. Month 1.5 - 4
9. Organizing data into databases
10. Cleaning data for computations
11. Detailing the work to be completed by our data science team
12. Create Dashboards
13. Month 4-6
14. Create dashboards initially established in phase I
15. Create new dashboards from community feedback
16. Use dashboards for Fund 9 understanding
17. Share Results
18. Month 6
19. Town hall break out rooms
20. Results via Twitter
21. Results in Zoom meetings
22. Databases made available for querying to Catalyst Community

We’re requesting $50,000. 

Team Costs - $40,000 USD (labor)

1. Technical Team

• A technical team of 6, lead by CTO Johan Veerman and Director of Connectivity Christian Pasquel, have already begun with experimentations. We will also add in our Technical Consulting team led by Anshu Manik for additional AI/ML and dashboard experience.
• We're considering the costs of data collection, cleaning, organizing and making partially computatable in Wolfram Language. This includes the creation of the dashboards that will complete the project.

1. Research Team

• A research and outreach team of 4, led by CEO Jon Woodard and Blockchain Analyst Steph Macurdy, who have already begun research and are joined by Economist, Leanne Ussher and Technical Lead, Jesus Hernandez. This team is in charge of deciding which dashboards to create, via research and feedback.

Hardware Costs - $5,000 USD

1. Running the nodes to build a computable and queryable format requires a backend architecture team to purchase the equipment and maintain it. It requires upgrading and storage costs. We are addressing those costs here, based on what we've experienced running a variety of nodes for the past four years, assuming at least a 6 month time frame.

Outreach (Marketing & Communications) - $5,000 USD 

1. Marketing Budget

• How can we promote surveys and feedback opportunities within the Cardano and larger decentralized community? Here we address the cost of promoting survey/feedback systems on social media and other avenues such as panels/conferences (SXSW)/Awards shows (CNFT Awards), etc.
• Engaging inside the community requires attention and energy and that’s represented as a labor cost.

 Jon Woodard – CEO

Jon Woodard is the CEO at Wolfram Blockchain Labs, where Jon coordinates the decentralized projects that connect the Wolfram Technology ecosystem to different DLT ecosystems. Previously at Wolfram Research Jon worked on projects at the direction of Wolfram Research CEO Stephen Wolfram and prior to that was a member of the team who worked on the monetization strategies and execution for Wolfram|Alpha. Jon has a background in economics and computational neuroscience. He enjoys cycling in his spare time.

Johan Veerman – CTO

Johan Veerman is General Manager at Wolfram Research South America and CTO at Wolfram Blockchain Labs. Previously he has been Science Advisor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Peru and Chief Scientist on two Antarctic expeditions. Johan's background is on physics and business management. He enjoys playing soccer and is a certified cave diver.

Christian Pasquel - VP Connectivity

Christian Pasquel works as Connectivity Manager at Wolfram Research. He manages a group focusing on connecting the Wolfram Language to external services and technologies and has been an instructor at the Wolfram Summer programs since 2016. Christian has a background in physics and has done and published peer reviewed research related to computational molecular biology. He enjoys coding generative art and recently worked on an interactive art installation commissioned by the Contemporary Arts Museum in Lima, Peru. He is a cat lover and had the main part in an official music video available online.

Dr. Leanne Ussher – Economist

Dr. Leanne Ussher is Blockchain Research Fellow at Wolfram Blockchain Labs. Leanne is an economist that specializes in monetary theory, complementary currencies, and the history of economic thought. She is a Researcher at the Copenhagen Business School, a Center for Civic Engagement Fellow at Bard College, and an Associate Editor of Frontiers Blockchain. Leanne has spent 17 years in academia as a professor in economics and finance. She has peer reviewed publications in agent based modeling, network analysis of local currencies, and international monetary system. Outside of academia Leanne was a Senior Researcher on blockchain ecosystems at Consensys, consultant to the CFA Institute on international monetary reform, and Securities Analyst at the Reserve Bank of Australia. She is an advisor to start up crypto collaborative entrepreneurs like the Economic Space Agency (ECSA), Open Farming , the Hudson Valley Current and the Thrive On Network in the Hudson Valley. In her spare time Leanne likes to bake bread, compost, and nurture a garden for butterflies, bees and humming birds.

Dr. Michael Kelly - Financial Engineer

Dr Michael Kelly is currently a senior technology consultant for Wolfram Research Inc. He has a B.Sc(Hons) in pure mathematics from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of New South Wales, the two foremost universities in Australia. He was formerly a tenured senior lecturer in mathematics and economics at the University of Western Sydney and an associate professor of finance at the Stuart Graduate School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago before designing automated trading systems at the Chicago Board of Trade.

Steph Macurdy - Blockchain Analyst

Steph Macurdy is a Blockchain Analyst at Wolfram Blockchain Labs and has a background in economics, with a focus on complex systems. He attended the Real World Risk Institute in 2019, lead by Nassim Taleb, and has been investing in the crypto asset space since 2015. He previously worked for Tesla as an energy advisor and Cambridge Associates as an investment analyst. Steph is a youth soccer coach in the Philadelphia area and is interested in permaculture.

Karla Santana

Karla Santana is a Technical Project Manager at Wolfram Research. She manages projects at Wolfram Research South America and has been with the company for 6 years. Karla has a background in computer science and has worked in the blockchain initiative since she joined the company. She is a certified aerial arts instructor and enjoys crocheting and spending time with her many pets.

Jesús Hernández

Jesús Hernández is Senior Technologist at Wolfram Research where he helps various business units explore new opportunities and partnerships. He has been with the company for ten years and is continually learning how Wolfram technology can be applied in new areas. He has a background in theoretical atomic physics. Jesús enjoys cooking, listening to almost all forms of music, and watching his favorite sports teams inevitably lose.

[AUDITABILITY]

We will consider this project complete when the dashboards are live. To measure progress along the way, we will consider these in three steps:

1. Research/Planning
2. # of dashboard metric ideas (internally generated)
3. # of dashboard metric ideas (externally generated)
4. # of data sources identified
5. # of data sources confirmed
6. Initialize Data
7. # of data sources received
8. # of data sources cleaned
9. # of data sources connected
10. Create Dashboards
11. # of dashboard metrics completed

Success for this project will depend upon the number of processes established. 

A process can be defined as a framework which has a clear set of instructions from beginning to completion.

For example, receiving input from the Catalyst community via surveys and communication and turning it into a clearly defined metric demonstrates an output, input, and completed task. 

Several other processes are listed below, completion of which would demonstrate success of the project:

• Dashboard Research (internal/external)
• Outreach, engage in conversations, receive inputs (internally/externally)
• Identifying and Implementing Metrics
• Community feedback turned into implementable metrics
• Collecting and Computing Databases
• Data sources turned into computable data inside Wolfram Language
• Creation of Dashboards
• Taking data sources and proposed metrics, completing dashboards
• Sharing Results
• Sharing the process from start to finish is a learning endeavor, what we learned and what we can demonstrate as results.

Each of these processes represents a step towards completing the overall project. Each step has a beginning and completion task which we can clearly identify. 

No. This is a new proposal for Project Catalyst initially debuting in Fund 8.