e-Learning DAO,Revenue share policy

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

PREFACE

THIS PROPOSAL IS NOT ABOUT BUILDING THE E-LEARNING PLATFORM (here https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/415748)

In THIS proposal, we are looking for economic support for:

1. detailed definition of revenue stream between stakeholders in the case of learning material created and/or updated. Fixed % per verified and publisher
2. definition of "fluctuant" % of ownership, due to the growth of the platform, for new functionalities coming from new developers
3. spread the word and create awareness of this e-Learning DAO and its potential social impact in the specific contest of fair revenue distribution and fair share ownership

SUMMARY OF THE PROBLEM

In this decentralised e-Learning platform, the rules to share revenue streams are very complicated because:

• there are lots of stakeholders involved with different roles (like content creator, developer, publisher, evaluator, etc)
• the revenue differs sensibly depending on the contribution and the ownership.
• These parameters change with the growth of the content (in terms of courses) and the growth of the platform itself (in terms of features).

EXAMPLE OF THIS PROBLEM

Imagine Bob, the first developer who builds two platform features. Bob starts receiving revenue for his work every month. However, Bob is no longer contributing. After a few months, Bob's code is fixed, evolved and the platform has 100 more features.

How unfair the revenue-sharing policy is if allows Bob to continue to take the same revenue from day one, not taking into account how the platform has evolved?

Bob cannot be allowed to take passive revenue forever if he stops contributing. 

THE REASON WHY WE NEED SUPPORT

We are building an e-Learning platform managed entirely through its e-Learning DAO that has already a growing treasury.

The DAO currently doesn't have a proper policy of revenue distribution, so a deep thought (made by a functional analyst) has to be done in order to analyse and design a detailed solution. There is a possible evolution of revenue stream and value distribution, adopting a tokenization approach (instead of simple ADA transactions). It is something we don't have enough expertise in, where we need support.

EXAMPLE OF A POTENTIAL OUTPUT OF THE SOLUTION FROM THIS PROPOSAL

Today => A Coursera course of $100 is (on average) distribute like this:

$25 to the content creator

$0 to the knowledge evaluator (because it doesn't exist)

$75 to content distributor and marketer (Coursera)

Tomorrow => A $100 course published by this decentralised e-Learning platform:

$10 to developers (for this and any other course transited)

$40 to content creators

$30 to the knowledge evaluators

$5 for marketing

$5 for publishing

$10 DAO treasury

Why a DAO?

Because it has a social impact when contributors own what they have built. This has an even greater impact in developing countries where incomes are low. Contributors and developers receive not just salaries from their activities but also platform ownership and revenue.

What does ownership mean? 

It means that developers own a certain % of the platform because of the code they build and maintain.

What does contribution mean?

It means everyone who creates learning or assessment materials, receives a revenue stream every time students land on content. 

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

Today centralised e-Learning platforms monopoly the market, but this new e-learning decentralized platform has monetizing impact by an entirely new ecosystem because of:

• 1) Impact on education, not limiting the choices of learning to only web2 centralised providers.

The current EdTech global market projection by 2025 is $181.3 Billion

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/educational-technology-ed-tech-market-1066.html

and $377.85 Billion by 2028

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-education-technology-market

This is only the web2 market, Web 3 solutions in this field are not mentioned. Having more choice from fair competition increases quality.

• 2) Content experts and certifiers, review (and receive revenue for that activities) the student knowledge in a peer-to-peer way
• 3) Financial value across activities of each contributor

This is an overall schema of the revenue share distribution across content creators (using POCRE) and reviewers (using BOUNDER), component part of the decentralised e-Learning platform we are building.

• 4) On-chain learning data that proves the learning process and verification more transparency and traceability

This is the overall schema of how the learning data are stored on-chain providing transparency and traceability (off-chain components are also needed), using PoLiL (another component of the decentralised e-Learning platform).

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

Like every project in the Cardano ecosystem, the risk is always in finding the human resources who write the code.

One of the reasons why we created "e-Learning DAO" is to offer not only remuneration for the developers but also ownership of what he/she created.

In the future, less and less developers will work for the "boss" (unless super paid). Many others will receive income from shared ownership of the platforms.

WEB 3 is also this.

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

ACTION PLAN

• Milestone 1 (2 months):

1. Define detailed workflows of the revenue stream
2. Define how and in what percentage the "cake" is fairly split for every single course, across content creators
3. Calculate fixed costs of publishing
4. Define how the ownership % of the platform change based on growing functionalities coming from new developers
5. Investigate a tokenization approach

• Milestone 2 (1 month):

1. Create a simple video explanation for marketing purpose
2. Create a website for publishing and tracking progress
3. Create and maintain social "awareness" across social media
4. Basic marketing campaign

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

BUDGET BREAKDOWN

Requested fund: $10000

Number of functional analysts: 1 - Monthly salary average: $2500

Number of web designers/video creators: 1 - Monthly salary average: $2500

Number of marketing/social media experts: 1 - Monthly salary average: $2500

Estimated length of the project: 3 months

TOT COST PER HUMAN RESOURCE

Functional analysts, 2 months of work, tot cost $5000

Designer/website/video, 1 month of work, tot cost $2500

Marketing/social media/coordinator, 1 month of work, tot cost $2500

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

My name is Mario Altimari (https://www.linkedin.com/in/altimario) and I'm working full-time for the Cardano ecosystem in the e-Learning space, which I believe is one of the most important for the people's good.

The last May I quit my job where I was CTO of a successful international e-learning AI company, with several patents. I have 22+ years of experience in IT, I started my career as a software developer in the far 1999. I was a forerunner in 2006 of distance learning solution, participating in building the Italian Government e-learning platform “FAD” (Formazione A Distanza). I'm passionate about open source and data stream processing on distributed systems, that's why I built “Data Cruncher” https://github.com/AltiMario/DataCruncher the 1st data quality firewall on the market.

I love functional programming and am proficient in it with Clojure, I'm currently converting to Haskell.

I'm hands-on with everything, from architecture design to project management and coding.

• Alfredo, https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredo-gemma

Researcher in Cybernetics and Deep Learning, currently CTO of AI company with several patents and published papers on the field of data compression and speech recognition. Alfredo wrote the paper “Measuring Conversational Fluidity in Automated Dialogue Agents” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.11790.pdf and “Fine-Grained Named Entity Recognition using ELMo and Wikidata” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.10503.pdf. He has more than 20 years of experience in the design and development of AI, including Distributed, Concurrent and Iterative Computing, Fuzzy Logic systems, Inferential Systems, Neural Networks, Evolutionary Computing, Network Security, Cryptographic Systems, Intrusion Detection and Hack-Proofing techniques.

Alfredo is our technical advisor.

• Bruno, https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunobonacci

Ex Apple, ex Cisco. Data Architect, High Volume Distributed Systems engineer, low-latency, Machine Learning. Tireless Open-source contributors. Functional programming guru using Clojure. 20+ years of commercial experience in IT.

Bruno is our technical advisor.

• Tasnia, https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~01f50ad6cae904ee2b is a Social Media Marketer with 6 years of experience in Twitter Marketing, Discord Marketing, NFT Marketing. Currently, she is involved in our Twitter campaign for @eLearningDAO

This is the main list of the hands-on contributors of e-Learning DAO who will develop this proposal:

https://github.com/ing-Hugo : Hugo is a junior Haskell/Plutus developer

https://github.com/kritical0613 : Dennis is a senior full-stack developer with some blockchain exposition

https://github.com/GruDev325 : Jax is a senior full-stack developer expert in blockchain

https://github.com/mrron313 : Arif is a front-end developer

https://vimeo.com/catchyanimations : Vinail is a web designer, animator and video creator

A growing list of code contributors is here:

https://github.com/orgs/e-Learning-DAO/people

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

This proposal has to be seen as an important component of a bigger picture that aims to build a decentralised e-Learning platform entirely managed by the DAO.

The plan is NOT to return to Catalyst for further funding for this specific requirement.

[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?

This decentralised e-Learning platform is an open-source solution, which means the audibility is guaranteed by definition through open commits, pull requests, and bug tracking (we use GitHub).

However, we will also create a website containing information about the progress and the status of the development.

As part of the open development process, we are managing the development via GitHub projects, like we are doing with POCRE

We will use gitcoin (and/or snapbrillia as bounties when they are ready) to engage other developers outside of our network.

In order to coordinate the development activities, we have created e-Learning DAO Discord Server, open to anyone interested in participating and/or just monitoring

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

When the e-learning platform is completed these are the goals:

• Teachers receive passive income from the content created, every time a student land on it
• Publishers receive passive income from the content hosted and displayed
• Software developers receive passive income from the portion of the code create and maintained, in relation to a feature/function the student used

The specific goal of this proposal (as part of the overall platform) is achieving a complete structure, defined rules, formulas and exact percentages of how :

• Teacher
• Publisher
• Software developers
• DAO treasury

will receive revenue and ownership.

Everything will be shared in documents available to everyone.

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

It is an entirely new proposal.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

SDG goals:

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

SDG subgoals:

4.4 By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

4.4.1 Proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill

#proposertoolsdg