Smart Contract Job Facilitation

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

This implementation will help align project creators with team members. Incentives, working and time requirements can all be managed through the direction of the smart contract.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Three total developers. 2 for front end work and 1 Plutus Smart Contract developer.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

• This solution will allow employers to post the requirements for a position or contract work

• People who meet those requirements will be able to apply and be accepted to the position. The funds (or any on-chain collateral) will then be sent to an escrow until said requirements are met.

• We chose this route because developers trust code not people :)

This problem impacts developers the most. There are countless stories of developers getting taken advantage of for their development work.

• This is a solution because this step is usually skipped all together during early communications between two parties.

• People usually assume things about requirements and compensation early on and then when the time comes expectation are misconstrued and progress is stifled.

• As a result, developers can focus on their task at hand and employers will see more productivity

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

• All blockchains want to be a safe haven for developers.
• There are many factors that dictate their decision when choosing where to spend their time from tooling, community support, documentation, and expressiveness.
• What about a safe environment for people that want to start writing code for compensation?
• Developers want to ensure that they will be taken care of so they can focus on their deliverables

A thought experiment:

Imagine you are a developer approaching a blockchain where you knew nobody but wanted to get involved and possibly join a team. There is very little to no trust at all between you and anyone you meet. Ask yourself, would having a smart contract to help facilitate any new engagements be a value add to you?

"Trust but verify"

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

Risk

A main risk is scope creep of the agreement between the parties that causes a dispute.

• If an employer has requirements that are too subjective or change midway through than this could cause one of the parties to not see their end of the agreement through.

Solution

This can be mitigated by keeping the terms and requirements very simple at the beginning. Using hard dates and deliverable action items will remove ambiguity. Given that, disputes will still happen and that is why coming up with a proper incentive model for community members to act as 'jury' is something that will be pursued.

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

Milestone 1 (Wireframe complete)

1 month

• This is an important step to make sure the process is intuitive for the users

Milestone 2 (MVP Escrow Smart Contract)

3 months

• This will allow for employers to accept a participant for the work that needs to be done and send funds to an escrow account
• Once requirements are sent and deadline is met funds will be sent to the respected party

Milestone 3 (Governance)

2 months

• Putting a system in place that can effectively handle disputes between parties

*note this timeline will begin once job center development has begun on Woolly Map site.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

2k - design and wireframe (1 month)

7k - frontend work (3 months)

14k - smart contract development (3 months)

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

Keith Hedges - a software engineer for four years at fortune 500 company before shifting to work on Cardano full-time. He has worked on a music NFT platform called https://artistdrop.io/, is a core contributor to Freeloaderz, and has been running the Hedges Stake Pool since epoch 254.

(https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-hedges-396548a8/)

Vadiraj Kulkarni - multiple degrees and experience with many different languages. Although he does have experience with smart contracts on Ethereum is focus has shifted towards Plutus because of his interest in Cardano and prior experience in Haskell .

(https://www.linkedin.com/in/vadiraj-kulkarni/)

Erick Avalos - has many years of software engineering experience at a publicly traded company dealing with high integrity code. He is also a core developer of an NFT project on Cardano.

(https://www.linkedin.com/in/erick-avalos-13014012a/)

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

Yes, connecting people and helping them find job opportunities is already in our roadmap but our timeline for smart contract functionality will be lengthened

[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?

From a development stand point we will be following typical agile procedures to keep our work focused and value focused.

1. We will measure the ratio from amount of people that signed up for our job platform to the amount of people utilizing the smart contract job facilitation.
2. We will measure the amount of times the smart contract has been used to the amount of successful, disputed, or incomplete transactions. This will help us refine what is working and what is not when creating the rails of the system.

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

• Being able to pay out funds from project catalyst through this platform.

• Seeing this tool being used as a stepping stone to help people create better projects and teams to raise code quality and developer buy-in

• Having developer buy-in to the effectiveness of the tool

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

This is a new proposal