Wolfram Governance Analytics

Create analytics that help improve a user’s ability to audit Project Catalyst proposals and results with greater transparency.

Wolfram Language has been used by millions of people over the past 35 years for the exploration of data. As the leader in computational knowledge, we'll capture the entire history of Catalyst’s voting results, explore it and share it with the world.

[IMPACT]

Key Points

• Programmatic tools for researching and evaluating Catalyst Projects that will save tens of hours of user research
• Governance is a massive area within the blockchain space. We will provide leadership for auditing votes, adding transparency, and creating equitable accessibility to data for all users.
• The Wolfram Governance Analytics proposal will help improve and grow auditability by automating parts of the time-consuming process of reviewing Catalyst funding. 

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

We believe another layer of transparency is required to automate parts of the auditing process so that participants can understand metrics such as the ROI from grants. 

We will help to solve the auditing problem through the completion of four phases: Discovery, Working, Presentation and Communication.

I. Discovery Phase

We plan on executing a discovery phase from present until April.

The discovery phase will be a community-based process starting with a meeting in late March to go through the data and analytics that we have already assembled and solicit questions from the Cardano community. 

Current questions we can answer will be based on data we found from our initial discovery process here: (https://wolfr.am/Governance-Analytics) which looks at proposals that were funded or not over several cycles. We can explain how one could answer high-level questions like: "is there a correlation between overall score?, the requested amount of funds, and if the proposal was successful in winning funds?" among others.

We will follow-up this initial session with two more virtual seminars during the month of April. These sessions will help ensure that we include a significant amount of open brainstorming about how analytics can help inform individuals and other projects within the Cardano Community. 

If this proposal is funded, then we will extend this into the additional portions of the solution.

A. Data Assembly 

Create curated data sets from Fund1 - Fund7. 

This curation will be done partially by hand as initial funds (1 and 2) do not have machine readable formats available. This takes time because the data exists in different formats and needs to be highly structured. In addition, some of the data is in several different locations. 

At the moment, there is an important class of questions related to entities/people who have submitted proposals over time that we cannot investigate because the data exists behind a website or is separated from Ideascale completely. While we are still sifting through the data, we will uncover more problems and solutions to our current questions. We believe this is a community effort for uncovering data sources.

We can also investigate the quantitative and qualitative data contained in existing surveys. 

B. Future Discussions

In the future, we plan to add access to APIs that would help contextualize performance of projects. We'd like to note that this is probably a stretch goal for this project; however, it is useful to note the questions that this data might help solve from an auditing perspective. 

The APIs we'd like to investigate adding are the following: 

1. Create access to IdeaScale's API

Access to Ideascale's API opens up the ability for us to ask questions related to the entities/people who have submitted proposals over time. 

• Ideascale API (https://a.ideascale.com/api-docs/index.html) 
• The Ideascale service contains personal information so it has limited access; however, it may be possible for Ideascale to create a custom API that limits access to only publicly accessible information. 

2.Create access to code commit APIs:  

Access to the number of commits in funded proposal repositories, with this data we can audit projects with the number of commits and unique participants in a project's repository to understand the general sense of a project’s scope and scale. This would also be useful to potentially measure the impact of developer libraries. 

• Github API (https://docs.github.com/en/rest ) 
• Gitlab API (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/)
• Other public “git” based services. 

3. Social Media Services

Access to a number of social media services that could provide insight into the usage of services and how often those services are mentioned. 

• Reddit API (https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/)
• Twitter (https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api)
• Etc.

II. Working Phase

A. Quantitative & Qualitative Check-ins

Create a survey (Survey Monkey) with quantitative elements and subjective questions (e.g. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/CJBWSPZ - NFT Marketplace Survey). This could help provide a framework for programmatic checking, comparisons etc.  

B. Create Notebook Reports

Reporting notebooks will provide an interface for community members to see our work and begin formulating their own questions and analysis directions. These notebooks will be the basis for our educational events where catalyst participants come to learn more about what can be known from the data and help direct our future insights. Reporting notebooks will work as a second function as well, for the community to give feedback in a quantitative, structured survey form and in a qualitative, collaborative discussion form (most likely Zoom call and breakout rooms). 

We hope community members will feel empowered to pursue this opportunity to work with the data they've structured.

III. Presentation

Periodic virtual seminars to review the work and brainstorm things that can be answered with Governance Analytics. These presentations will help to engage the Cardano Community and help to answer questions directly.

IV. Communications

Create summarized reports to send via communication channels. This represents a consistent touch point for updates regarding events in the Cardano space and updates on the governance analytics from Wolfram Blockchain Labs.

One of the largest challenges of humanity is trying to separate out how we can become more efficient with the use of automation. 

In the "Improve and Grow Auditability" Challenge our goal is to help the field of blockchain analytics by expanding what can be done with governance analytics.

By providing governance analytics, humans will be more efficient in their reporting of their challenge progress and more efficient in their analysis of that progress as well. 

The Cardano Catalyst program grants tens of millions of Ada to projects, serving as the inception point for some of the most important projects that Cardano will see. At present, however, one organization is responsible for auditing all of the data and progress of the projects to ensure there is a reasonable return on investment for the Cardano Community. 

This auditing is a daunting task and the burden should not fall on just one of us or IOG alone. 

Not only is there a tremendous amount of data available from the individual Fund series 1-7, but when investigated collectively there exists a multitude of time series based data analysis which has yet to be done. This knowledge about Project Catalyst needs to be made computable so that there is an equal opportunity for everyone, veterans and newcomers, to understand what the data can tell us.

It would be incredibly difficult to audit all of these projects solely through subjective analysis. In fact, this has given rise to the importance of the Community Assessor role and Veteran Community Assessor role - both play an important part for helping voters evaluate key metrics determined by the community. Even so, the vastness of materials to consume, digest and validate across funds represent an increasing problem over time. 

The current growth rate of proposals is 33% per fund, which means there might be thousands of proposals eventually.

The data cannot live in spreadsheets. We must liberate this data so the community can improve and grow the auditability of Project Catalyst. 

We created "Governance Analytics" to help automate this process by making the data computable and we'd like support for this effort from the Cardano Catalyst community -- both in terms of questions to potentially solve as well as financial support.

We have already started the initial discovery phase of this project. The largest risks are lack of community engagement and lack of current data that is available/captured.

[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.

1. Discovery Phase
2. Month 0 - 1.5
3. Community feedback gathering
4. Idea generation
5. Internal/External research
6. Data sources

1. Working Phase (if funded)
2. Month 1.5 - 4
3. Organizing data into databases
4. Cleaning data for computations
5. Detailing the work to be completed by our data science team

1. Presentation Phase
2. Month 4-6
3. Create research reports
4. Create visualizations of data
5. Understand the narrative over the past 7 funds

1. Communications Phase
2. Month 6
3. Town hall break out rooms
4. Results via Twitter
5. Results in Zoom meetings
6. Data repositories made available for user participation

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're considering the costs of data collection, cleaning, organizing and making computatable in Wolfram Language. This includes the creation of the dashboards that will complete the project.

2.) 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, and 

Hardware Costs (Storage/Maintenance) - $5,000 USD

1. Data Repository Creation

• Although we already have hardware, we may likely require additional hardware.
• We use our Wolfram Cloud architecture for sharing/querying results, which includes costs of its own.

Communications - $5,000 USD 

1. Marketing Budget

• Engaging inside the community requires attention and energy and that’s represented as a labor cost.
• Users will have questions about the data, labor cost included to field those questions and offer guidance/feedback

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.

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]

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

1. The number of attendees at virtual seminars

2. The number of community advisors educated on tools (for reference, about four hundred or so community advisors were active in Fund 7)

3. The number of community ideas generated

The completion of the project as measured in the following deliverables: 

1. Discovery Seminars
2. Clean data sets
3. Data collection (finding and collecting data that can assist in programmatic evaluation) 
4. Reporting Notebooks 
5. Communication of information
6. Presentation Seminars 

This is a new proposal that we have written specifically for the "Improve and Grow Auditability" Challenge that extended from our own research.