littlefish - Ikigai in Community

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

An Ikigai based visual onboarding/member profile tool, charting what each member loves, is good at, can be paid for, and thinks the community needs.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

A community of Ikigai enthusiasts numbering 100+, started in Dec 2021, a core team of 10+ and growing, 20+ years of experience in software development, plutus developers, designers, entrepreneurship and startup experience, and active Catalyst community members.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

We are the Littlefish Foundation (LFF), a decentralized, global organization, building technologies that align individual actions towards common goals, enabling collective intelligences.

We use blockchain technology to redefine earning relationships between people, work, and organizations, enabling a new model of operation that grants more freedom to participants, while making sure that freedom results in progress towards the goals of the whole. 

Our proposals are best experienced in the Littlefish Vault. There will be multiple links to it throughout the proposal with background information necessary to fully understand the concepts.

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PAs, you will need this information to understand LFF. This is a standalone proposal, but these are recommended reading to understand LFF. 

• The Bleeding Edge of Organizations and the Big Problem
• The Basics - littlefish, colonies and Action
• The Big Picture
• Littlefish Action Model

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The Problem

Decentralized work in digital communities enables much, but there are issues with visibility. In office environments, peers chat and communicate throughout the day, learning about each other, what they enjoy, what they are good at. This doesn’t happen to such an extent in online work. Individuals don’t know about each other as well, and this hampers collaboration. 

This is part of a more general problem that Littlefish Foundation (LFF) is attempting to solve. You can read about it here.

Ikigai in LFF

Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning “a reason for being”. We first came across it in April, as we were hard at work writing our whitepaper. 

At the time, we have been experiencing an immense joy for work, ideating and developing the foundations of LFF. Ikigai captured this feeling immediately. We put it in the whitepaper to explain the journey each littlefish(individual) takes. It has become a guiding philosophy for us, to build technology that enables individuals to find their Ikigai.

Early experiments with Ikigai

Our approach to problem solving in this space is experimentation. Trying out new methods of doing business, creating new processes fit for a decentralized organization built from the ground floor. 

Before we found Ikigai, we were working on a visual method to understand our organization better. What are our needs? What skills do we have to match those needs? What skills are we missing? Those were the questions when we created the work on the left. Each bubble represents different things we want to build, functions we need, things we are doing. It is a high level overview of our organization. 

Then we found this Miro template. We put a littlefish badge in the middle and it turned into the image on the right. Then we realized why not join them? Each individual can fill it up as they please, displaying a wealth of information at a glance to every other member of LFF.

The initial result was this:

Ikigai as an onboarding process

It is early in our experimentation with this tool but it has already garnered a lot of attention from newcomers and community members. So we made it into an onboarding process. Also, it is just fun to play with bubbles :)

This tool has some great properties. Let’s walk through the process to observe them. 

1- We start with the work groups at the top made out of post-it notes. At one glance we can see what this work group is doing, what their responsibilities are, and who is in the working group.

2 - Next we have the bubbles for each working group. Each represents a more specific function, a project, something that needs attention. With these we now know what is needed by the community.

3 - Once we go through the bubbles and the working groups, we now have a general understanding of the types of work that are going on in the community. Next step is to just fill out the empty Ikigai board with the bubbles, adding new ones, personalizing it to taste. 

And with that, the onboarded member has a general understanding of the community and the community has an in-depth understanding of the newcomer. Visibility expanded!

Our Solution

We have this great tool. We want to make it into a web application that anyone can use in their communities, starting with internal use. Our approach is building for us first, solving our own problems, and working with others to generalize the tools so others can benefit as well. We’re already in communications with several other communities who have shown interest.

We will build this as a free web service. Communities will create their own page and community members will fill out their Ikigai with community specific “bubbles”. These will be shareable externally and displayable on the community page.

Such a system will grant much needed visibility to who we are working with, helping all of us understand each other better, forge better work relationships that help us all move towards our Ikigai.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

As Vitalik Buterin highlighted in 2014:

DAOs == automation at the center, humans at the edges

Automation is being built, yet it is not the only thing needed to make DAOs work. It needs humans at the edges to collaborate effectively. 

As the challenge states, DAOs need tools for community collaboration. Most DAOs getting started with digital collaboration are finding it difficult to organize, to coordinate their efforts effectively in the digital, global, decentralized setting. Visibility of other members is one crucial need that is missing from the work stack.

This proposal ticks all the boxes on the specified Key Metrics:

• It will increase the number of communities engaged in collaboration using the LFF platform, a tool for DAOs. 
• Greater visibility will mean more effective collaboration in DAOs, increasing ADA from DAO transactions.
• Great, fun to use tools like this will draw more DAOs to Cardano to use as the governance/management chain.
• This is a DAO tool, thus increasing the number of tools for DAO Ops by one.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

LFF General - Funding

Littlefish Foundation is a complex organization driven by individual efforts. It only moves forward if individuals drive it forward. The single biggest risk in front of that is financial. A large percentage of the team is based in Turkey, which has been experiencing hyperinflation for the past year. 

Funding is the number one challenge we face. With funding we can pay the team to work on Littlefish Foundation and make their financial burden lighter. This all puts us closer to achieving the LFF vision. We are a global community with contributors from all over the world. Without funding, we will still build the LFF, but it will be more challenging and slower. 

We are mitigating risk through diversification in multiple proposals, increasing the chance of receiving funding. We’re also budgeting for the Action Fund, partly to serve as a contingency.

LFF General - Technology Risk

LFF is developing a strong infrastructure to be able to scale, for that we need the support of a strong development community. The current team is very strong on tech development, with extensive experience. and we are welcoming more developers to join. We are already engaged with the Gimbalabs development community and have their support. 

This proposal - Interest on Using the Tool

To understand the problem at a deeper level, the needs of users, how they approach a tool like this etc. we will use the manual version on Miro. Through this we will collect information. This information is important for us to solve the problem effectively. If we don’t get enough people using the tool, our information won’t be as useful. To mitigate the problem we will be sharing the tool with other communities, getting completely different perspectives on how it can be used.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Workload Management at LFF

How we make work visible - LFF Modules 

Module 1: Internal Use 

Stakeholders: LFF

Primary Work Group: Organization Labs

Duration: September - December

Resources: 100 hrs of work 

Activities:

• Keep using and experimenting with Ikigai on Miro. 
• Internal workshops to complete personal Ikigai for community members,
• Experimenting with the contents of bubbles, 
• Discussing possible use cases/methods.

Key milestones

• 10 Ikigai completed on LFF Miro
• 20 Ikigai completed on LFF Miro

Module 2: Educate, Share, and Collect Information

Stakeholders: LFF, Pilot Communities (c4c, Sustainable Ada, and others) 

Primary Work Group: Organization Labs

Duration: July - December

Resources: 150 hrs of work + module operations budget

Activities:

• Create a workshop to teach other communities how to use Ikigai on Miro,
• Run workshops (3 planned), teach, and discuss with other communities,
• Collect information from other communities,
• Document findings,
• Once development goes into Beta, the same activities are repeated with the full tool.

Key milestones:

• 20 Ikigai completed on other communities’ Miro
• 3 other communities using LFF Miro
• Information collected from other communities’ use cases/findings. Documented in a google doc or sheet

Module 3: Design UI/UX, Technical Specification

Stakeholders: LFF, Pilot communities

Primary Work Group: The Forge

Duration: September - October

Resources: 125 hrs of work + module operations budget

For design, we are working with Niels from Social Design Academy, who has extensive experience in using Ikigai in workshops, to incorporate Social Design principles into the product.

Activities:

• Design UI/UX according to previous learning, social design principles
• Specify the software system we will build: Features, database tables, software stack.

*Features will be determined through findings from previous stages.

Key milestones:

• UI/UX designs ready
• Technical specifications ready

Module 4: Development

Stakeholders: LFF, Pilot communities, Catalyst/Cardano community

Primary Work Group: The Forge

Duration: October - December

Resources: 300 hrs of work + module operations budget

Activities: 

• Development with a traditional frontend and a backend server. 
• It will go through the tried and tested software development cycle of small incremental steps and quick iterations,
• Internal use early on to provide feedback to the developers.,
• Beta version for other communities,
• Documentation of product.

Key milestones:

• MVP ready to use by LFF
• Beta started with other communities
• Full product ready to be used by everyone

Module 5: Marketing Ikigai

Stakeholders: LFF, Catalyst and Cardano community

Primary Work Group: Love House

Duration: November - December

Resources: 50 hrs of work + module operations budget

Introducing Ikigai is all about showing off the tool we’re building to communities around Catalyst. We want others to use the tool, so that it provides the largest benefit possible. 

Activities:

• Demo the product in LFF, c4c, Sustainable ADA, and other pilot communities
• Presentations/demos of Ikigai software in other Catalyst communities
• Twitter posts about Ikigai

Key Milestones and expected deliveries:

• December
• 10 demos/presentations held on the product

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

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All LFF proposals follow the same budget structure. They are made up of the module budgets and the Action Fund allocation.

Module budgets

Each proposal is made up of modules. Each module has a specified budget. The sum of module budgets makes up the first part of the overall budget.

1 - Personnel budget

Each module has a personnel budget and an operations budget. The personnel budget is the total estimated hours * the hourly rate for the module.

The base hourly rate for LFF proposals is 50 USD. This is a living wage in most parts of the world. It will bring financial stability to participants.

The hourly rate for a module may change from this default, based on the expertise needed. 

2- Module operations budget

Each module is allocated an extra budget sized at 1/5th of the personnel budget to enable operations.

This budget is a pooled organization wide resource used to cover expenses. It will be used to purchase digital work tools like Zoom to be used by all members of LFF.

A part of it will be spent with the discretion of the module team. For example, it can be used to pay for transportation, buy personal digital tools, purchase other teams’ Actions, etc.

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LFF Action Fund

LFF Action Fund has two purposes.

1 - Contingency

Proposals may not be funded. The activities in the proposals will still take place if we can account for this with additional funding. Action Fund will provide that funding if and when it is necessary.

The Action Fund can be used to extend a module budget, fund an unfunded proposals’ module, or fund new modules as need arises.

2 - Incentivizing further Action

We are creating a new economy. LFF is the first colony in this economy. Its members are producing Actions, the supply. But who will buy them?

There is a need for stable demand for Actions to bootstrap this new digital economy. Action Fund provides this stable demand.

3 - Admin and other work

There is a lot of unmentioned work that goes into building the Littlefish Foundation. This includes general admin work like setting up meetings, scheduling, scribework, as well as other activities like community building.

The Action Fund will prioritize buying those Actions that aren’t covered by the proposals.

Action Fund Sizing

The Action Fund allocation is sized at 1/4th of the total budget. This is common across all LFF proposals to provide financial safety to the project for the next 12 months, allowing us a healthy runway to create the new earning economy.

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All modules in this proposal have an hourly personnel rate of 50 USD/hr. Module operations budgets are 1/5th the personnel budgets.

• Module 1: Internal Use - 0 USD
• Not costed. We would do it even without the proposal.

• Module 2: Educate, Share, and Collect Information 
• Personnel budget: 7500 USD
• 50USD/hr * 150hrs
• 50 hrs: Preparing, and running workshops/meetings
• 50 hrs: Information collection and sharing activities
• 50 hrs: Documentation of findings
• Operations budget: 1500 USD
• Total: 9000 USD

• Module 3: Design, UI/UX, Technical Specification 
• Personnel budget: 6250 USD
• 50USD/hr * 125hrs 
• 100 hrs: UI/UX design
• 25 hrs: Technical specification
• Operations budget: 1250 USD
• Total: 7500 USD

• Module 4: Development 
• Personnel budget: 15000 USD
• 50USD/hr * 300hrs
• 150 hrs: Frontend development
• 125 hrs: Backend development, testing
• 25 hrs: Documentation
• Operations Budget: 2000 USD
• Total: 18000 USD

• Module 5: Marketing Ikigai 
• Personnel budget: 2500 USD
• 50USD/hr * 50hrs
• 25 hrs: Demos/presentations
• 25 hrs: Marketing activities
• Operations budget: 500 USD
• Total: 3000 USD

Module Total = 37500 USD

Action Fund Total = 12500 USD

Total = 50000 USD

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

This proposal is a joint venture from The Forge and Organization Labs work groups of LFF. 

Yoram Ben-Zvi - 20+ years of business experience working with technology companies (strategy, partnerships, investors). In recent years, Yoram is focused on combining impact and business. 4 years ago he left his comfort zone and worked for 2 years for an NGO Earthworm.org focusing on sustainable business models across agriculture supply chains. Yoram is very active in Catalyst as a CA, successful proposer, and at Cardano4Climate. Yoram is part of the AIM team and is involved with the Catalyst SDG tool cardanocataly.st/proposer-tool-sdg/#/ (which is included in the proposal process) and the Catalyst alignment to SDG research. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoram-ben-zvi-446836/

Proposal Focus: Modules 1 and 2. Using, teaching, collecting data on Ikigai.

Nori Nishigaya - Founder of the Salmon Nation Decentralized Alliance (SANADA), and co founder of Bridge Builders, and SAMON pool. Member of the Catalyst Circle Admin Team, Cardano4Climate, and Littlefish Foundation. Cardano Ambassador, CA, and Funded proposer. Passionate about radical inclusivity and community, and devoted to making Cardano the best community on the planet. Nori brings over 30 years of experience in software development, agile methodologies, leadership and managing teams, and founding and running technology startups.

Proposal Focus: Modules 1, and 2. 

Murat Kasar - 5 years of experience as a System Administrator, mainly in PCI DSS and high security environments. Fan of maps, thanks to my background in geology and GIS. Interested in technical aspects of Blockchain technologies. Constantly searching for a subject to focus with passion.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/murat-kasar-8b4157163

Proposal Focus: Modules 1 and 2. Using, teaching, collecting data on Ikigai. 

Ural Yalcin - Former Offshore Engineer, current System Administrator. 8 years of total experience in the industry.

As System Administrator: skilled in preventive maintenance, secure network and virtualization architecture both in Unix and Windows systems.

As Littlefish: Research enthusiast, Blockchain technology documentor, community member.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ural-yalcin/

Proposal Focus: Modules 1 and 2. Using, teaching, collecting data on Ikigai. 

Cem Karaca - I completed a Master's degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering. My thesis was about to creating a complete Video on Demand system with client-server architecture with its own network protocol called Reliable UDP. After graduating, I set up a high-security financial data center in 2004. Then, in 2019, I started a new cyber security startup with three of my staff. The same year, the startup was funded by the largest bank in Turkey. 

I started programming when I was 12 years old, and about 6 years later, I met the Internet, which introduced so many things to me. Open source was the biggest among them. Later on, I wrote a book about Linux and open-source systems. For me, open-source philosophy was the key to real human potential. It was making the secrets of the institutions public. 

In the corrupt financial system we are used to living in, a person or group named Satoshi designed the decentralized digital currency called Bitcoin. And afterward, new techniques that were not part of our current order began to develop. Then, in 2021, I met Cardano, where like-minded people find each other. So when I dig deeper into Cardano, I suddenly found myself in the Cardano4Climate community trying to do things to stop climate change with a bunch of people all around the world. 

With friends from Cardano4Climate, we formed up littlefish Foundation. It is a system, a reason for being. Encourage people to do anything for the good of the common. It is an experiment to build collective intelligence. 

Now, I decided to retire from all of my real-world business to solely think, dream and work for the littlefish Foundation.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ckaraca/

https://github.com/ckaraca

Proposal Focus: Module 3. Design and Technical Specs. Module 4. Project Management.

Niels Kijf - Social UX Advisor

Niels (Master Digital Media Design, Oxford) is a digital design innovator . He started the Social Design Academy to deliver UX 3.0 education. Our current software design is still targeting the individual, yet web3 is designing shared experiences for groups, a fresh new field that needs a new educational program. Levelling up UX into Social UX is one of the SDA missions for 2022.

Proposal Focus: Modules 1, 2, and 3. Advisor in Ikigai use cases and product design.

Proposal Focus: Modules 1, 2, and 3. Advisor in Ikigai use cases and product design.

David Luke Baxter - David is the Founder of the Blockchain Learning Center and the Beanchain Coffee shop. He's passionate about finding ways to use technology to change our business community and world for the better. He believes that this can be accomplished by making sure that those in poverty, workers, and communities can use blockchain tools to enhance their own efforts. He has experience as a front end web developer and a community leader.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/baxweb

Proposal Focus: Module 4. Frontend Development.

Donald Isufi - Electrical and Electronics Engineering Major Senior Year, Self-taught programmer, JavaScript, React, Python, HTML and CSS, 1 year experience as Front-End Developer. Recipient of MITx Certificate for Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science. Blockchain enthusiast and participant of Little Fish Foundation for 1+ month. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/donaldisufi/

https://courses.edx.org/certificates/39a936e9f5454dac823297795d81b9c1

Proposal Focus: Module 4. Backend Development.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Yes, we will return to Catalyst for further funding, until we build sustainable business models around Action. Catalyst allows us to take our time, engineer systems well without rushing to market, potentially risking an event similar to what happened to Luna.

We are an evolving decentralized organization. We expect solid community and contributor growth in the near future. These individuals, along with existing ones who have time from existing commitments, will be starting new initiatives. Until we get to a sustainable business model using Actions, Catalyst will be the place where we come for funding. This allows us to experiment until we can figure our way. Thanks Catalyst!

We aim to become sustainable with the launch of our token on mainnet, which we tentatively aim to deliver by Q3 2023. 

Meanwhile, we will be providing Catalyst and the broader community with ongoing services. We will be publishing all our research (DAOs, governance, economic, technology, tools, ...) on the Littlefish Vault. These will be made sustainable through experiments in Action, in due time.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Where to check our progress?

At Littlefish Foundation, everything we do is public, and we like documentation. We will publish major progress updates on Obsidian, sharing our learning with the Catalyst community. Our Miro boards are open to the community, there they can see our progress, comment, and contribute. Discord will be the best place to find daily updates, and Actions.

All LFF proposals produce Action, work done by individuals to achieve a goal. Until we have a working system with NFTs, we will use Discord to broadcast our Actions. There are many examples already on the #action channel, showing our early work. As our community grows, it will contain Actions taken by many different littlefish who are building the LFF.

We will track these posts specifically and incentivize team members and contributors to share their Actions, preparing them for real Actions on mainnet.

LFF General - Community Tracking

The general success of LFF is dependent on a strong community. We will track it from several sources:

• on Obsidian using Google Analytics: number of visitors, average time spent, and multiple other metrics
• by activity on Discord using server statistics bot: number of members, unique posters on discord per month, Action per month, Action per unique user

We’ll review this data monthly and share updates through our communication channels.

This proposal - Ikigai use case tracking

As highlighted in the plan section of this proposal, we will collect information from internal and external use of the Ikigai tool, both pre-development and post-development stages. We will publish our findings, conclusions from discussions in public documents. 

This proposal - Design and development progress tracking

These are the more tangible parts of the proposal. Designs will be shared with the community as progress is made through the Action channel on Discord. Development already has the best indicator possible, git commits and working software. These will be public on our repository. We will also share development progress on the Action channel.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

LFF General - Solving our own problems through experimentation, building applications the community loves

Our approach to problem solving in this space is experimentation. Trying out new methods of doing business, creating new processes fit for a decentralized organization built from the ground floor.

One example is this proposal itself. We found a great tool idea while playing with our bubbles and now we’re turning it into software. 

We create such systems with the aim of turning them into software. First we practice with existing tools, learn, iterate, and experiment, then we'll build it into software that others can use.

Some other experiments relating to publishing Actions by:

• Financial tracking of rewards
• Actions published on #action Discord channel,
• Older Actions published on the Adventures of Littlefish

Success means these experiments turn into learning which turn into applications loved by the community.

LFF General - A strong community of creators and builders

We are a growing community of 100+. Yet pure numbers aren't enough. Growing the number of meaningful contributors is the key to long term success. Since the F8 proposal, the number of consistent contributors has grown from 2 to 15 and is growing fast. Newcomer numbers are also ticking up. Maintaining a sustainable, healthy growth in these numbers is critical. 

A successful LFF is one that has hundreds of contributors who take part in it, want to see it grow, and share ownership of it. 

This Proposal - Ikigai unleashed

Success for this proposal is Ikigai being used by many decentralized communities. By the end of development, we will at least have 3 communities including LFF using this tool. But real success would be a lot more communities using the tool for their needs. 10 communities using it is our immediate goal after launch with the 100 Ikigai filled on the platform.

We want our users to enjoy using the Ikigai tool and find it helpful to communicate and collaborate more effectively within and outside their communities. We want it to be something they’d like to share with others. Seeing that happen outside of the immediate circle of LFF would be success for this proposal.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

Littlefish Foundation Kiva-like DAO - Unfunded F7 Proposal

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384063

Littlefish Foundation was born with this proposal from the Cardano4Climate community [2]. The aim was to create a DAO and build a Kiva like product that would allow the funding of on the ground SDG activities. 

The proposal wasn’t funded, but we kept working. We held weekly meetings, brought in experts for discussions, and worked hard to understand the domain of problems. Through that we’ve developed the idea further and generalized it to what it is today.

Littlefish: Coordinating Action - Funded F8 Proposal

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/404668

In F8 we came up with a new vision for the Littlefish Foundation: littlefish, colonies and Actions. We got to work before it was even funded.

We were relatively new to developing on Cardano and found a steep learning curve. Weak documentation slowed development down, and we realized there was more to building a successful Littlefish Foundation. 

During this time we have completed many important steps:

• Finished the whitepaper
• Built a strong core of contributors from our community
• Created an organizational model to fit our needs
• A Radical Method of Organization
• Why Cardano > Proposals Experiments and Teams
• Formed work groups and started to produce on all of them. See these on the Action Board
• Tech Help Collective - Working on wallet research&documentation, preliminary DAO tools research on Ethereum and Cardano, reworking Littlefish Discord
• Love House - the littlefish AI art collection
• Organization Labs - Research on Teal organizations, determined necessary business functions, created organizational model
• The Forge - Tested out serialization library, lucid, and multiplatform library, created early UI/UX designs
• Dream Engine - Created Littlefish Action Model, User Flow Models, Detailed Action Flow, Organization Funding Model, and more

Here's a shot of that board as of the 10th June:

Our proposals in Fund 9 aim to supercharge this holistic vision of the Littlefish Foundation.