Done Collectively Gitbook Integrati

Connect DC with best-available open source docs tools (Gitbook) enabling openness and transparency for any DAO - no github experience needed

25+ years software development, Catalyst Community members, active ongoing collaborator: ADAO, Gimabalabs, DEMU, Web3:4Life, more

[IMPACT]

Audience: any decentralized organization, and people who want to be gainfully employed as web3 workers.  People who want to be getting organized as a result of the conversations they're having together.

About the Done Collectively Platform: DAOs on Cardano (and EVM?) want to have a place they can go to be organized together.  Organizing into groups, getting those groups commissioned (with tokens or spendable coin), forming project plans, writing project Bounties, and engaging with communities are all on-mission.  The present version of the application also facilitates transparency around mission, vision, values and other cultural and execution-oriented details.  

James at Gimbalabs said,  "Navigating all of my multiple DAOs and feeling organized about the experience? … aw, f*** yeah!".  Dan Mercurius said "it's like a more clear / coherent version of what I tried to do with Zenhub".  George Lovegrove said "make[s] it nice and easy for people to move their way inwards toward full time contribution".  Tom (TCT) of ADAO said, "It is the platform that is going to make Cardano THE blockchain for DAOs.  [it] will allow ADAO to onboard new members and contributors efficiently and effectively."

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Please see our intro paper and find project updates at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1ASarfs9YaJYbORxMIDSC3I38nTrQc8IA

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THIS PROJECT PROPOSAL:

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We will add functional hooks into the Done Collectively platform, enabling collaborators in a DAO to easily engage in change-management process using Github tooling "under the hood", and see suggested changes coming from others - without people needing to touch Github.   

We will also include preference-signaling into the in-app workflows, so that pending proposals (or suggested changes) are easily reviewed for possible momentum or objection, WITHOUT Github's more technical tools for code review. 

When changes are adopted, the updated versions can be committed to the DAO's data channels within the DC platform and also directly to Github/Gitbook.  As a result, DAOs will be able to develop their charters and other essential documents and have those changes flow directly to their open-source governance repositories without having any knowledge or expertise with Github.

Beyond the github integration, we'll set up application workflows so people can see on screen when pending changes are proposed, and give them easy access to reviewing the effect of those changes, so that they can be processed easily, while preserving transparency, versioning and traceability attributes of the git-based processes.

—----  More about upcoming integrations with Done Collectively —---

Also on our roadmap are such projects as: 

We're ready to build in Discord integrations, so that Groups, Projects, Bounties, or just about anything else in the platform can come with side-chat in our communities (with backup/snapshots of those chats imported into the DC platform as a bonus). 

Perhaps our most exciting product plan is the integration of token-based signaling directly into the governance workflows in the application, enabling hundreds and thousands of DAOs to start moving more quickly together while integrating feedback from community and contributors, and including tokenomic results to create financial ecologies for any of our DAOs who would want that.

By providing easy tooling for DAO collaborators to be engaging in open-source building of their community-governance, we will enable more communities to share together in governance processes and development of material that will be documented in Gitbook, and at the same time reduce the technical barriers people find with git.

Meanwhile, we'll facilitate DAOs on Done Collectively to connect with some of their favorite tools for decentralization.

All these people will have access to in-app workflows so that many of them will only ever need to look at Github one time: during their first-time setup.  And others will be able to signal their preferences around proposed content without ever having to know that Github may be involved - they'll just be making progress together.

[aside: those of us who already understand git and github may significantly underestimate the barrier to entry, so please don't downvote based on "git is easy", okay?  thank you : ]

Complexity of creating effective integration with multi-version documents would probably be our #1 candidate for risk on this project.  Main proposer is an experienced application architect and is ready to take on this design because of the major benefits seen for our ecosystem.  Keeping track of the various "forks" of any given proposal, and facilitating some useful presentation of their presence and their meaning (the diffs) is a big part of that.  

A second area of risk, not to this project's execution but to the effectiveness of it as applied in the real-world is: by making it super easy for non-technical people to propose changes, that many "junk" changes not relevant/important may pollute the space for actual contributing DAO members.  To mitigate this, we are considering gating factors that DAOs can choose to apply, such as requiring a certain level of engagement or in-app Role assignment.  We think it may also be appropriate to include evaluative workflows on proposed changes, so that people can quickly gauge importance and relevance and other factors, downvoting spam and ensuring overall quality of contributors' behaviors.

Scope risk would normally be a critical consideration for a project such as Done Collectively (our platform mitigates that very effectively; see also technical risk below).  We've been able to scope all of our Catalyst proposals to be narrow, building directly on product functions already present, so that when our moment is right, we can dig in with laser focus and do just this one thing.  

Staffing is probably our greatest general risk.  We're relying on existing partnerships and relationships (Gimbalabs, ADAO, Web3:4Life) to assist with the project in any areas of graphic design, market research, technical collaboration or anything else that comes up.  If many of our proposals are funded, we may distribute some of the efforts over a longer time interval, with highest-value work queued first.  With that funding, we'll also be positioned to hire trusted developers and other contributors from our existing networks.

Technical risk is naturally a key consideration for such a project as this.  That said, our application framework has been under continuous development for some years, in the context of developing a software-requirements-management product and a relationship-management SaaS product for churches.  New features are typically quick to create and work very reliably.

Our approach on the design and implementation of our platform has always been to enable the highest quality and production-grade results even from projects executed on prototype-like timelines.  Our current product, still in late-alpha after just a few weeks of part-time development effort, is being urgently requested from teams who see its workflows, even as those workflows are still in active design & evolution.  This speaks to the effectiveness of the platform, and also our collaborative process of finding shared meaning and reflecting it in useful application workflows.

Our platform includes facets of deployment-management, system-operations, lightweight virtual private networking, decentralized system operations, and SaaS infrastructure.  These details mitigate operational risk, helping to ensure we have good support for production-time practicalities.

[FEASIBILITY]

In general, the Done Collectively platform is well underway.  Building out additional components such as proposed in this project will leverage everything already in the platform, and we'll build this increment according to this ROADMAP:

Month 1

    Co-design: review use-cases; verify needs assessment, validate mechanisms of branching & pull-requests and the git integrations needed to reduce the UX burden down near zero.  Implement proofs of concept.

   … together with at least 3 Cardano-centric organizations such as Audit Circle, QA DAO, ADAO, Gimbalabs

Month 2

    user-onboarding integration: Design and implement workflows for onboarding new/existing users to Github, authentication and oAuth permissioning so we can fork repos, create & maintain branches, and send pull requests to the main project repo

    technical integration: DAO administrators set up main project repo by connecting to github; proofs of concept for technical interaction to find relevant pull requests

    UX design & prototyping: design interactions for presenting proposed changes in the Done Collectively platform and allowing for in-app evaluation of the importance / relevance of any proposed changes, and for alignment with present organizational vision/mission/values

Month 3-6 

    implementation, iteration, feedback.  In this phase, we'll be working hard on issues like formatting markdown diffs for clear onscreen presentations, integrating a  javascript library for interacting with git repos, fetching lists of PRs, pushing proposed changes as PRs and maintaining git branches to keep things tidy in our users' github forks.  

Project milestones will include:

• Proof of concept: github account-creation (assistance) workflow
• Proof of concept: connect to github
• Proof of concept: fork a repo just-in-time to propose a change, submit a PR
• Proof of concept: picking up PRs that might not be submitted through Done Collectively
• UX / market validation of change-review process & workflow
• Basic implementation of essential "propose a change" works in the application
• Essential "see proposed changes" workflow works in the app
• Fundamental preference-signaling for proposed changes, so that anyone with appropriate permissions can signal their preference for some changes suggested
• Advanced workflow working in app, for more detailed evaluation of proposals / changes to existing content, aligned to mission / values / etc
• Identifying any practical blockages in the process based on beta-phase usage by current users of the product
• Validating through metrics and interviews that the features are working according to the needs of real people

Using a standard rate of $100/hr for skilled contributors.

$2100 - Product objectives and user-outcome validation

    3 people x 4h each = $1200 - independent research

    3 people x 3h = $900 - review, sense-making, prioritization

$1650 - Technical design 

    12h = $1200 - initial design based on vetted objectives

    4 people x 1.5h = $450 -  group design review / feedback / iteration

$3400 - UX design and research

    20h = $2000 - Initial design / prototyping

    4  x 1.5h = $600 - 4 user feedback sessions (two users each)

    8 x $100 = $800 rewards for user feedback

$28800 - Software development

    24h/w x 4 weeks = $9600 - UI development

24h/w x 6 weeks = $14400 - module development

8h/w x 6 weeks = $4800 - app integration (server)

$3200 - Project management

    6h/w x 6 weeks = $3200

Total = $39,150

Randall Harmon - software developer, application architect, Swarm Veteran, Gimbalabs core contributor, facilitator.  Will manage the project, implement most of the UI, and provide guidance and any needed technical mentorship to other contributors.   https://www.linkedin.com/in/randall-harmon-aa52765/

George Lovegrove - active Catalyst member since fund 3, funded proposer, developer, regular contributor to analysis documents focussed on improving Catalyst; open source and gitbook advocate.  Will advise on best use of git and gitbook to integrate with present practices in Catalyst community

TCT (Tom) of ADAO - a great practical collaborator, he'll help with identification of market-fit and UX workflow issues in these product features.

Gimbalabs Tokenomics PBL team: they're focused on tokenomics for the Gimbalabs DAO, plus all the stuff that goes along with it.  They'll also help with market-fit and UX evaluation

Javascript developer (TBD): integrate with git and github.  Understands how to create NPM modules and maintain them effectively.  Familiar with essentials of git; ideally, has experience with the "Isomorphic Git" module on github, or is deeply interested in it.  Can be both strongly collaborative and able to work independently with light mentorship as befits the moment.  Gets things done.

[AUDITABILITY]

We plan to create an open-source module implementing the essential integration with Github, and use that module.  Accordingly, github commits will be a key indicator of coding progress.

We will also use Gitbook to show transparent progress as we do the work connected to the milestones.

Because we have a number of discrete milestones, those milestones themselves can serve as another quantitative measure of progress (count of milestones completed).

The key success criteria for Done Collectively is that we're delivering the things most important for decentralized organizations to get things done together.  That includes many or all of: getting and being organized, reflecting to each other transparently what plans we figured out together, creating good incentives for that work to be done, mustering resources to ensure those incentives have meaningful backing, and showing clear credibility signals to support both trustability and due caution to would-be DAO members.

For THIS PROJECT: 

Overall, our success for this project is rolled up into the milestones described in the earlier section, with the key results being:

• People can connect their governance documents, proposals and other materials in Done Collectively with Gitbook
• Content from a Done Collective DAO flows into their connected Gitbook
• Gitbook pull requests found in Github are displayed inside Done Collectively as proposals and/or change-proposals 
• People working in a Done Collectively DAO can engage with proposed changes, signaling to others their preferences around approving those changes.

New proposal