GIMBALABS TREASURY FOR TUTORS

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Gimbalabs is a non-profit organization. The creation of a treasury funded by Catalyst to cover the tutors' working hours will give continuity to the students training process.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Gimbalabs team. Gimbalabs builds technical, educational, and community infrastructure for people who want to show the world what Cardano can do. We believe that people learn best by doing things. More info: https://gimbalabs.com/team

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

In the educational area, since its founding, Gimbalabs has been characterized as a teaching center that has always had an open door to student developers and non-developers who wish to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to build in Cardano. Quality educational content with a pedagogical approach that prioritizes hands-on, project-based development connected to real-world problems, and a talented and experienced team that collaboratively assists new students and guides them through their learning path, have allowed us to forge an outstanding record of results that speaks for itself of our work. Some of the projects we have supported:

• Loxe Inc (https://loxeinc.com/)
• Martify (https://martify.io/)
• jpg.store (https://www.jpg.store/)
• Rarety (https://rarety.io/)
• Gods of Block NFT (https://www.godsofblock.art/)

Our teaching programs focused on the development of practical skills at Plutus tend to attract new students whose purpose is to acquire these skills. They tend to attend our Live Coding sessions on Wednesdays and Thursdays and our working group sessions that allow them to integrate into the educational and technological development work we do at Gimbalabs, on different topics that may be connected to their personal and professional interests. Recently, the volume of students has been increasing with the upcoming launch of the second version of our Plutus PBL program, new study groups have started to form, coming from the following organizations: 

• Oxford University,
• EMURGO Academy,
• Konma (https://www.konma.community/ - project funded by Project Catalyst)
• among others.

In addition, other blockchains have begun to show interest in how our Plutus PBL can guide their engineers in acquiring Cardano development skills. This is the case of Everscale (https://everscale.network/).

Gimbalabs members, talented programmers and development enthusiasts at Cardano, are always willing to assist students in their journey, in the name of financially selfless collaboration where knowledge transfer and the growth of Cardano as an ecosystem are paramount.  However, with the increased volume of students that will ultimately positively impact the level of activity in the Cardano ecosystem (as our work as a non-profit organization serving Cardano has done so far), comes the inevitable need for greater assistance to students in the various study groups, which leads to the inevitable need to provide financial incentive to the individuals providing such assistance. They have fully demonstrated their ability, so we are confident of the value of their contribution to the free, open-source, hands-on skills-focused education system that we have created and put at the service of the Cardano ecosystem.    

To this end, we have found as the most convenient solution the creation of a treasury that will remain entirely under the control of Gimbalabs and that will progressively pay out its value as our tutors provide their service. This service will be provided to Gimbalabs students under the guidelines described in the Feasability section of this document. 

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

Guiding questions to which our proposal offers answers:

• How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst: Cardano's security and reliability features are themselves attracting developers from other blockchains. The outstanding contribution we make is to remove the bottleneck that newcomers encounter when they want to integrate into the Cardano ecosystem and acquire the practical skills needed to deploy their projects on our blockchain.

• What do developers want, and how do they get it from the Cardano dev ecosystem?: Our experience, the basis for the creation and permanent updating of our educational programs, has led us to the direct knowledge of what developers want: to build on Cardano. Having identified that fundamental need, we created the appropriate means to cultivate the skills that the task requires.

• What would make it a developer motivated to grind through the docs and code no matter how hard it is to create an app: The hunger for more knowledge and more skills is fueled by the progress the learner experiences on a personal level during their learning process. Our practical approach to learning can be described as an accumulation of small steps that encourage the student to go deeper beyond the difficulty.

Key Metrics to measure that our proposal supports:

• Number of developers actively building on top of Cardano: our teaching process is based on learning through project development. At the end of the process, the student ends up with a project in an advanced stage of development.  

• Number of repos on Github using the tooling (Month over month increase): the number of projects developed in our learning programs undoubtedly impacts the number of repos on Github as a consequence of our educational work. 

• A sense of community and conversations: the study groups that are formed tend to form a communication network that enables extensive communication among members of a group, among other groups, and with the ecosystem in general.

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

Insufficient tutor treasury to cover tutor hours: we will do our best to accommodate our students within the scope of the number of hours per week identified in this proposal to be covered by the treasury created for tutors. However, our policy has never been to leave our students behind. Therefore, should we run out of budget, we will turn to one of our most curated strengths: volunteerism.  

Unspent tutoring treasure due to the non-occurrence of the tutoring hours initially planned: in case there is any unspent treasure left, it will be returned to the Catalyst community, according to the procedure indicated by IOG.

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

Currently, we conduct live coding sessions on Wednesdays and Thursdays every week, each lasting up to 3 hours (see calendar at https://gimbalabs.com/gimbalgrid/3). These sessions have no access restrictions; students from all backgrounds are welcome to attend and experience the benefits. With an increased volume of students due to the release of the second version of Plutus PBL we foresee an increased need for additional live sessions.  

Month 1 

Projected days of live sessions/week : Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday

Duration of each session: 2 hours

Number of tutors needed per session: 2

Number of weeks/month: 4

Month 2

Days of live sessions/week projected : Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday

Duration of each session: 2 hours

Number of tutors needed per session: 2

Number of weeks/month : 4

Month 3

Days of live sessions/week projected: Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Saturday

Duration of each session: 2 hours

Number of tutors needed per session: 2

Number of weeks/month : 4

Note: the above information is based on the time pattern that we expect to be presented with greater consistency. However, slight modifications may occur, due to contingencies in which student attendance is a priority (e.g., moving some sessions to weekends). In any case, we hope to keep our academic activity performance within the parameters outlined in this section.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Number of tutors required per week = 2 tutors

Number of sessions per week = 6 days

Duration of each session = 2 hours

Number of weeks per month = 4 weeks

Project duration = 3 months

Cost per tutor hour = $30 usd

Budget Month 1 

Total tutoring hours = (6 days/week) x (2 hours/session) x (2 tutors/session) x (4 weeks/month) = 96 hours/month

Total budget Month 1 = (96 hours/month) * $30usd/hour = $2880 usd

Budget Month 2

Total tutoring hours = (6 days/week) x (2 hours/session) x (2 tutors/session) x (4 weeks/month) = 96 hours/month

Total budget Month 2 = (96 hours/month) * $30usd/hour = $2880 usd

Budget Month 3

Total tutoring hours = (6 days/week) x (2 hours/session) x (2 tutors/session) x (4 weeks/month) = 96 hours/month

Total budget Month 3 = (96 hours/month) * $30usd/hour = $2880 usd

Total Budget = $8640 usd

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

Gimbalabs. Gimbalabs builds technical, educational, and community infrastructure for people who want to show the world what Cardano can do. We believe that people learn best by doing things. If you've been looking for an entry point into how you can participate in Cardano, we think you might find it here. We are piloting a "Plutus Project-Based Learning" (PPBL) team that gives developers a chance to gain hands on experience with Plutus by working on real projects. One outcome of PPBL is that we are creating documentation and task suggestions for additional developers to learn Plutus by using it. Another is that we will apply what we are learning about Project-Based Learning to other tools, like Atala Prism and Dandelion. https://gimbalabs.com/gimbalgrid

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

Yes. We would like to remain engaged with the Cardano community, being a bridge between the developer community outside Cardano and our ecosystem. Giving people the necessary skills to create, to build things, is one of the tools of integration at the level of multi-ecosystems, multi-blockchains, multi-cultures, multi-problematics, multi-solutions. Our track record demonstrates the great effectiveness of our work and the great benefit we have generated to the Cardano ecosystem. We are a productive cell of knowledge and skills acquisition, part of Cardano's gear, therefore, we certainly require your funding to keep us active, at Cardano's service. We therefore expect to return to Catalyst for further funding that will be used to a) give our team of tutors a fair compensation for their work, b) increase our tutor base by increasing the volume of students, c) improve the quality and scope of our teaching work through the implementation of a tutoring program: a tutor corps prepared to fulfill the mission of bringing Cardano's technical knowledge to outsiders.

[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?

We will keep track of the tutoring hours provided by our tutors in the accomplishment of their service, through a system of Bounties: the budget provided by Catalyst will be paid directly to the general treasury of Gimbalabs (in the Gimbalabs wallet), bounties will be created corresponding to the tutoring service, consequently, the tutoring hours assigned per tutor and the corresponding payment made will be properly recorded. 

Our main goal is to be at the service of our students while providing our tutors with a fair payment for their work.

We can track the proposal through the following KPIs: 

• Number of tutoring hours provided in the month (based on assigned and released bounties) / Number of tutoring hours projected in the timeline

• Budget spent per month (based on assigned and released bounties) / Budget allocated per month

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

• Our tutors will see a fair financial reward for a job they are currently doing without remuneration. 

• Our students in the second version of Plutus PBL will enjoy the support they need to assimilate the practical knowledge of the program and progressively improve their development skills. 

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

No. this proposal is completely new.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

4 - Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

8 - Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all