Plural Voting and Identity for DAOs

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

In a collaboration with Cardano's best DAO tooling teams, Clear Contracts and ADAO, Snapbrillia will help accelerate the research and development of a refined Open-Source Plug-n-Play Quadratic Pural Voting DAO tooling.

DAOs need to have the ability to orchestrate accessible and fair elections to make critical governance decisions, fundraise, allocate resources, and scale effectively. Voting systems are generally available in 3 forms:

• Democratic: 1 person = 1 vote
• Plutocratic: 1 coin = 1 vote
• Meritocratic: 1 reputation point = 1 vote

Per each of these forms, there 3 lenses through which we plan to view, assess, and design our Plug-and-Play solutions:

• Reputation
• Identity
• Technical Systems Design (focusing around Haskell/Plutus on-chain logic for facilitating voting processes and record-keeping)

Reputation:

Snapbrillia is implementing both Hyperledger Aries and ATALA Prism DID solutions for users to facilitate Verified Credentialing, to lay the foundation for users to build up their Proofs of Reputation through Snapbrillia Mentor-Mentee Bounties & eLearning network, and beyond. With DAO tooling, Snapbrillia will combine these technologies with Quadratic Plural Voting logic to enable DAOs to invite their users to begin to build an organization-specific Proof of Reputation from within. This Organizational Proof of Reputation (OPOR) can be utilized to inform DAO-specific rules around ‘Voting Power’ allocations in any given election.

Snapbrillia cares deeply about both non-crypto-native and crypto-native users being able to easily onboard and participate in such systems, especially in a future where users may belong to multiple DAOs. For users who have an existing DID wallet, we will strive for interoperability by adhering to the W3C Credential Community Group's OBv3 Badge Specifications for all Organizational Credentials issued so that they can participate in Quadratic Plural Voting systems with minimal onboarding and without being required to create a duplicate or additional DID wallet that is use-case specific.

Likewise, for users who are not familiar with DID technology or who may be intimidated by the idea of creating and maintaining a new DID wallet, we can provide a custodial Reputation store solution that allows DAOs to provide a secure, on-chain custodial wallet and DID to new users with an ability to issue Verified Credentials relevant to organizational and DAO use cases. This is utilized for the sole purpose of allowing users to build a Proof of Reputation respective to nuanced governance and culture structures within a variety of DAOs. The end-users are holders who own the private key(s) of their custodial DID wallets and are able to export wallets at any moment to a private edge mobile DID wallet or a local Credential store.

Identity:

DAOs may prefer a custom form of KYC or non-KYC authentication. As part of this DAO Tooling Plug-and-Play tooling, DAO operators should be able to efficiently configure the rules of Identity verification to their liking. With our multi-framework DID integration, DAOs are able to issue custom Proof of Identity Badges and Credentials upon users satisfying their specific authentication (and KYC requirements if any).

Another approach to facilitating Proof of Identity tooling during an onboarding process is to partner with existing SSI, Web3, and Web2 OAuth or Single sign-on (SSO) or KYC authentication providers for custom integration. The research and development are included in the scope of this proposal. We will identify potential reputable 3rd-party partners such as for example OpenID, a decentralized open-source identity solution, and others for both non-KYC and KYC authentication. Together with ATALA Prism and other partners, we will orchestrate strategic partnerships to support any DAOs who seek deeper forms of Proof of Identity for their users either prior to participating in a voting process or prior to any organization-specific activities which are up to the discretion of specific DAO operators and communities.

Identity and behavioral risk modeling built on top of identity data partnerships, Reputation, and Decentralized Identity IDs will eventually enable DAOs to govern, operate, and collaborate without the need for full or any KYC to avoid requiring every identity and financial documentation from users. This should be a possible mid to long-term result for wallets where an email or a social profile or other details of the users are known.

Sybil Resistant Probabilistic Quadratic Plural Voting "Governor Charlie"

Governor Charlie is a fully decentralized Sybil-resistant Quadratic Plural Voting system and a smart contract built as a scalable open-source for the further DAO ecosystem activation. However, it is built on Chainlink VRF. We plan to implement its core Probabilistic Quadratic Voting (PQV) logic with Haskell and Plutus on Cardano natively. This adds further quadratic resistance to any Quadratic Plural voting system because splitting one's voting power makes the expected value of voting power lower than executing one voting power. The contract receives a random number every time the user cast a vote and this will make the contract more decentralized and cost-efficient.

Technical Systems Design:

Snapbrillia, Clear Contracts, ADAO, and our partners (MLabs, GimbaLabs, Emurgo, RootsID, ProofSpace, Charli3, and beyond) will strive for collaborative code review and systems architecture review at every step of this process together. Architecting on-chain logic with Haskell, Plutus, and any supplementary off-chain logic (preprocessing, GUIs) for the betterment of the community at large is a process that requires an open-source ethos and spirit of collaboration. Snapbrillia is preparing to launch V1 of its Quadratic Plural Voting and Funding logic in late July as part of its Mentor-Mentee Bounties & eLearning network public beta launch. The lessons learned from architecting, failing, improving, auditing, and fine-tuning a Cardano-native Quadratic Plural Voting and Funding system that's Open-Source will be applied here as well.

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

We are clearly addressing the challenge directly:

How can we make Cardano the go-to choice for building DAOs? What tools can we provide to enable effective DAO Creation & Operation?

Quadratic Plural Voting is not available on any other chain because it lacks the reputation and identity layer that we have built and are continually improving to power Quadratic Sybil resistance. There is a huge demand from communities in and out of Cardano who want to form their DAO or upgrade their DAO with a fairer DAO tooling that enables more collaborative community governance and operation.

Cardano needs:

• Similar tools that offer superior features to those offered on other chains.
• Effective Collaboration Management Platforms to Organize Community Intentions and Actions
• Additional not yet existing tools to give Cardano a distinct advantage
• Tools for prospective organizations to use in evaluating the features available in Cardano DAOs'
• DAO community collaboration
• DAO operation
• DAO governance.

This proposal provides just that natively on Cardano, making our blockchain of governance, the new best destination for DAOs and communities thinking of forming a DAO with a distinct advantage to fundraise, operate, govern, and attract new users.

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

The main risks to successfully delivering this project and our risk mitigation strategies are clear and sufficient:

Risk:

• Unforeseen technical blockers on the DAO tooling side.

Solution:

• Established technical partnership with Clear Contracts and ADAO dev team.

Risk:

• Unforeseen technical blockers on the decentralized identity side.

Solution:

• Established technical partnership with ATALA Prism, RootsID, and W3C OBv3 dev and leadership team.

Risk:

• Unforeseen technical blockers on Plutus side.

Solution:

• Established technical partnership with EMURGO, MLabs, Gimbalabs, and other Plutus dev teams.

Risk:

• Tight deadline.

Solution:

• Built-in one-month buffer to deploy the final product in March 2023.
• Hire more experienced devs via Snapbrillia dev bounties, quickly and efficiently as always.

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

Q3 2022 (Already part of our current product timeline)

• July
• Release Snapbrillia Quadratic Plural Voting v1.0 on Prod and Mainnet
• Research Identity Partner Solutions - SSI, Web3, Web 2 OAuth/SSO/KYC
• Deploy Hyperleldger Aries Decentralized Identity on Prod
• August
• Release Snapbrillia Quadratic Plural Voting v1.1 on Prod and Mainnet
• Outreach to Identity Partner Solutions - SSI, Web3, Web 2 OAuth/SSO/KYC
• Deploy ATALA Prism Decentralized Identity on Staging and Testnet
• September
• Release Snapbrillia Quadratic Plural Voting v1.2 on Prod and Mainnet
• Consume API docs and start integrating with Identity Partner Solutions
• Deploy ATALA Prism Decentralized Identity on Prod and Mainnet

Q4 2022

• October + November
• Implement Plural Voting & Decentralized IDs for DAOs on Dev
• Implement Identity Partner Solutions & Decentralized IDs for DAOs on Dev
• December
• Deploy Plural Voting & Decentralized Identity for DAOs on Staging and Testnet
• Deploy Identity Partner Solutions & Decentralized IDs for DAOs on Staging and Testnet

Q1 of 2023

• January + February
• Implement Plural Voting & Decentralized IDs for DAOs for Prod and Mainnet
• Implement Identity Partner Solutions & Decentralized IDs for DAOs for Prod and Mainnet
• March
• Deploy Plural Voting & Decentralized IDs for DAOs on Prod and Mainnet
• Deploy Identity Partner Solutions & Decentralized IDs for DAOs on Prod and Mainnet

A full detailed technical plan is available upon further request.

KPIs:

• Number of DAOs using this DAO tooling
• Number of Decentralized IDs generated on ATALA Prism or Hyperledger Aries
• Number of users using this DAO tooling
• Monthly voting volume through this DAO tooling
• Number of Communities engaged in collaboration using Cardano DAO creation tools.
• Amount of ADA coming from DAOs transaction fees
• Number of DAOs that use Cardano as governance or management chain

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Our current full-time dev team consists of:

• 5x Web3 Architects for Smart Contract, EVM-Plutus architecture
• 15x Web3 Developers for Haskell, Plutus, and EVM development
• 9x Data Scientist and SSI/DID developers
• 27x Full-Stack Developers for front-end, back-end, APIs, and other web2 development

We also have dedicated product, design, and growth teams that manage our product, web design, marketing, and branding. We have a committed team of full-timers who work six days a week, 12 hours a day, the support of other projects that could help us in case of any unforeseen event, and partnerships such as the IOG ATALA Prism, Clear Contracts, ADAO, Mlabs, Charli3, Emurgo, RootsID, GimbaLabs, Yoma Foundation, EBU, SANADA, Phoetrek World, Konma Labz, and HireEZ.

In addition to AWS/GCP cloud hosting fees and Cardano transaction fees, we will need to hire additional senior developers in Vietnam to upgrade our Decentralized IDs and integrate with Identity Partner Solutions. We also need to hire professional Cardano developers to help us build the Quadratic Plural Voting - Governor C smart contract and improve the Proof of Reputation on Snapbrillia. Salaries are market-rate.

• 3x Web2 Developers: $1,500.00/mo x6 months x6 days/week x12 hours/day = $27,000.00
• 3x Web3 or DID Developers: $3,000.00/mo x6 months x6 days/week x12 hours/day = $54,000.00
• Cloud Hosting & Transaction Fees: $10,000.00

Total Budget: $91,000.00

With that said, money as a resource without proper execution only goes so far. We are absolutely open to collaboration with other existing projects, teams, and individuals who want to contribute to any aspect of this platform. Together, we can create and share value with everyone.

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

Frank Albanese is the Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Snapbrillia and Y Combinator alumni. He is a Solidity, Rust, and Haskell researcher, Henry Ford Health System alum, and Co-founder of the Ucratic DAO, an organization founded to accelerate the innovation of interoperable Open Metaverse tools, to allow anyone to design, mint, transport, and own virtual space and avatar across multiple Metaverse ecosystems like Cryptovoxels, The Sandbox, Dreams, and Decentraland. Ucratic DAO combined Three.js with web3.js and Hardhat to mint composable ERC-721 NFTs of 3D models in virtual spaces to Polygon and IPFS. With Ucratic, Frank also helped research ways to bring self-hosted virtual spaces to the Internet Computer and Dfinity canisters. Frank admires Gitcoin’s utility in the Web3 space and feels this architecture could thrive in Cardano’s ecosystem along with an eLearning and immutable, composable Practical Resume standard that serves as Proof of Reputation. Frank is also interested in the applicability of zero-knowledge proofs, and their potential role in Proof of Reputation and Proof of Identity solutions. Reach Frank on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-albanese-a8b17885

James Willingham is the CIO and Co-founder of Snapbrillia and TechStars alumni. James brings his vast expertise in UX/UI design and full-stack development to the team. He is a seasoned leader in the startup space working within multiple industries ranging from FinTech, where he designed and built the first true peer-to-peer lending platform on both iOS and Android in hopes to minimize the predatory pay-day loan cycle. In Healthcare, he designed and built a platform that allows doctors, patients, caregivers, and researchers to easily collaborate and work toward better health outcomes for everyone. James thrives on the mission of helping others get the help they need when they need it, life can be hard and challenging so he works to make them easier and more positive for everyone. Reach James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-willingham-3704b824

Beatrice Thelisma is the CTO and Co-founder at Snapbrillia and TechFuturesGroup alumni. Beatrice has an amazing knack for leading engineering teams to execute web applications whether back-end, front-end, or DevOps. She has vast experience with nonprofits empowering women and children with critical survival funds and education for financial literacy. She is passionate about accelerating diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and empowering and promoting the social, economic, and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, economic, or another status. Reach Beatrice on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thelisma

Ninh Tran is the CEO and Co-founder of Snapbrillia and Google alumni. Ninh brings his expertise in product management, business development, and startup execution. As UC Berkeley alumni, Ninh founded Trucksome to empower emerging local food economies to thrive and create jobs for the previously incarcerated. After joining Google, Ninh co-founded an executive search firm HireTeamMate placing hundreds in a year while building HireEZ (formerly Hiretual), an AI recruiting platform used by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and thousands of others, to hire millions of people every year. Reach Ninh anywhere: https://www.linktr.ee/ninhtran

Other members of our Dev team:

• Cuong Tran - 10+ years Back-End Developer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trquoccuong
• Four Tran - 10+ years Full-Stack Developer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/four-tran-59b02310b
• Tasos Valtinos - PPP Grad, 10+ Years Full-Stack Developer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tasos-v-24572b112
• Curtis Myers - PPP Grad, 10+ years DevOps & IT: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-myers-1798239/
• Andy Sizer - 40+ years Functional Programming & DevOps: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-sizer-455467
• Kevin Onalo - 10+ years Full-Stack Developer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-baraza-onalo-24712018
• Thanh Hoang - 5+ years Full-Stack Developer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thanhth85
• 80+ more: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords=snapbrillia

We are fellow humans. :) Check our team pictures: https://www.snapbrillia.com/about

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

Unlikely. This freemium smart contract product will generate revenue after it's out of beta and battle-tested. The only case where we would require additional funding is to provide additional funding for go-to-market for this DAO governance tooling product, to provide funding for extra developer maintainers, or implement extra features for any future community requests.

[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?

The audibility of project development and impact is clear:

• Objective KPIs to measure its success.

• The project has been separated into stages to make it feasible.

• Plural Voting & Decentralized IDs for DAOs will be open-source on Github where everyone can clearly see and measure the progress and development of the project on Snapbrillia repositories.

• We use ClickUp for project management but will migrate to Github Issues once this proposal is funded to track and measure this project's progress openly to the public.

We measure progress daily based on:

• Proposal Progress vs. Deliverable Deadline (and delay if any)
• Number of Outstanding Tasks/Story Points
• % of Completed Tasks/Story Points
• Number of Pending Pull Requests
• % of Accepted Pull Requests
• Date of Deployment to Develop (and delay if any)
• Date of Deployment to Staging/Testnet (and delay if any)
• Date of Deployment to Prod/Mainnet
• Date of Beta Release & Launch
• Date of Official Public Launch
• Number of Outstanding Bugs/Blockers

Transparency and community involvement:

• We host a Snapbrillia Demo & Progress After Town Halls at least once to twice a month to let the community get involved and provide feedback on our progress until the proposal closes out.
• We join almost every Catalyst Town Hall where the community can get involved and provide feedback on our progress until the proposal closes out.
• We work closely with other ADAO, FreeDAO, and ClearContracts partner teams to provide updates to the community.
• For open-source projects, we invite the community to join our daily open-source scrum meetings Monday through Friday.
• You may also see us working and huddling in voice channels on our Discord server: https://discord.gg/vJuPXu86vS

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

The success of this project is very clear:

• to provide DAOs in and out of Cardano with an alternative governance system that fits their community, culture, and mission the best

• to incentivize DAOs in and out of Cardano and the builder community to come and build their DAOs on Cardano - the blockchain of governance

• to increase Sybil Resistance for Plural Voting on Cardano

Snapbrillia's Mission:

Snapbrillia was born over one year ago with the mission to accelerate the world's transition to a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce and guarantee fair opportunities for all through the adoption of AI and blockchain technologies globally. Earlier in February after deep research and much deliberation, we decided to work with Cardano then 2,282 Catalyst voters decided to fund Snapbrillia in Fund 8. Ever since we have been hacking away to launch Mentor-Mentee Bounties and OpenSource Quadratic Voting & Funding in beta in July 2022. Funding this proposal will help us launch the Cardano dApps community into the Metamask world and strap Snapbrilllia along for the wild ride to the moon and back.

Snapbrillia's long-term goal is to build a platform that gets one million people who are underrepresented and self-taught into tech that otherwise wouldn’t break into tech at all.

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

This proposal is much-needed research and implementation of Quadratic Sybil Resistance and a DAO tooling extension of our F8-funded and soon-to-be-delivered proposal for OpenSource Quadratic Voting Funding: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/396834

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

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

Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation

SDG subgoals:

8.2 Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading, and innovation, including through a focus on high-value-add and labor-intensive sectors

8.3 Promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, including through access to financial services

9.1 Develop quality, reliable, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure, including regional and transborder infrastructure, to support economic development and human well-being, with a focus on affordable and equitable access for all

9.5 Enhance scientific research, upgrade the technological capabilities of industrial sectors in all countries, in particular developing countries, including, by 2030, encouraging innovation and substantially increasing the number of research and development workers per 1 million people and public and private research and development spending

9.b Support domestic technology development, research, and innovation in developing countries, including by ensuring a conducive policy environment for, inter alia, industrial diversification and value addition to commodities

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

8.1.1 - Annual growth rate of real GDP per capita

8.2.1 - Annual growth rate of real GDP per employed person

8.3.1 - Proportion of informal employment in total employment, by sector and sex

9.b.1 - Proportion of medium and high-tech industry value added in total value-added

9.5.1 - Research and development expenditure as a proportion of GDP

9.5.2 - Researchers (in full-time equivalent) per million inhabitants