Catalyst Research & Voter Tool

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Dedicate more time to the LIDO Catalyst Research tool to bring in more data, help proposer owners tell richer stories, & help the entire community make sense of Catalyst Data & the humans behind them.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Darlington is a co-dreamer at Lido Nation & the developer behind lido's catalyst research tool, voter tool, & visualizations.

Darlington has 14+ years of software and cloud system engineering experience.

Stephanie is a trained teacher, experienced blockchain writer & educator.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

More on the problem

Right now, when a funding round is over, the data and insights created by the community are pushed to the side, and largely forgotten. On Ideascale, the slate is cleared and the product of hundreds of individuals’ blood, sweat, and tears, is "archived." With the bulk of the data locked behind ideascale’s login page, casual observation and learning  is impossible, unless you're willing to create an account.

What We Already Have:

We've already been working hard at Lido Nation to treat all of Project Catalyst’s history as equal, providing a robust tool for learning from the wealth of knowledge and talent of the Catalyst hive.

Our Catalyst Research tool  lets you:

- Instant keyword search for proposal, title, content, and authors and co-authors for all past catalyst proposals that made it to the ballot...across all funding rounds.

- Useful filters and sorts for segmenting search results by fund, challenge, and funding status. - https://www.lidonation.com/project-catalyst/proposals

- A metrics dashboard for exploring catalyst by the numbers with reports (top funded proposals, word cloud of what popular keywords across proposals, completed proposals, etc) - https://www.lidonation.com/project-catalyst/dashboard

- Exploration of catalyst by fund and/or challenges - https://www.lidonation.com/project-catalyst/funds/fund-8

- Exploration of the almost 2000 proposers that made it to the ballot and their respective proposals - https://www.lidonation.com/project-catalyst/users

- Startups and groups within catalyst, word cloud of their top of mind concerns, their lead challenges, proposals and team  - https://www.lidonation.com/en/project-catalyst/groups

- Voter tool to help you bookmark thumbs up and thumbs down proposals to speed up voting in the official voting app - https://www.lidonation.com/en/project-catalyst/voter-tool

We've also written over a dozen articles published and translated to Swahili and Spanish about the inner workings of Project Catalyst. New content is published each week.

Our next step:

We want to invest more in our coding and architecture to make the proposal search tool close to instant search.(Currently, it takes a few seconds with each filter interaction.) This will be even more important as we add more filters to account for things like new tags, SDG scores, etc.

## How will we do it

If funded, we will hire  another dev to join Darlington in implementing these features:

* Move the proposal search to a Web Component Single Page application that plugs directly into our advance search engine (aka, instant search results)

* Add more filters (tags, SDG ratings, filter by group or company, one or more users)

* Create the ability to save and share your current search

* Create bookmarks that can be named and shared (maybe you want to compile all the DAO proposals, for example)

* Pull Proposal monthly progress reports and give users the ability to "follow" a proposal, group, or user to get monthly reports  in their inbox!

*Add the ability to export and import pick lists that are compatible with existing tools at cardanoaim.io (for both the voter tool, and research bookmarks).

* Create the ability for the public to push a button to: generate a machine translation of a proposal, then edit and commit the edit.

* Add the ability for proposers to claim their profile and add, social media links, comments to their proposals, and, edit their bios

* Add the ability for groups to claim their profiles and remove or reassign proposals, add social media links and  manage their core team 

* Add the ability to create your voting list and share it with the community with your rationales!

* Add the ability to mint an ""I Voted"" NFT to raise awareness of Catalyst

* Internalization of the interface into Spanish, Swahili, Japanese, Chinese, and French.

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

This project addresses many key areas of the "Dapps, Products & Integrations!”

The Challenge brief:

“Increasing the number of dapps and products available for the community to use that help to enrich the ecosystem with new use cases.”

Sometimes work on proposals gets started but for unforeseeable reasons have to be abandoned. Other times work was already started, but the team couldn’t complete because they weren’t funded and to return to their fiat jobs. One goal of the Catalyst Research tool is to help surface these proposals. Perhaps the relay partners from the community can pick up where the work started by repurposing or connecting with the original team to take over the project or combine efforts.

We are also working with the Accelerator and Mentorship effort to surface information about ways proposals can help each other. The big idea is to add to our group pages (ie: https://www.lidonation.com/en/project-catalyst/group/gimbalabs) services being offered by the team, help needed by that team, and contact information for reaching out 

“Increased quality of existing products & integrations through suggested improvements that is supported by customer feedback or increased usage by the community”

The ability for the community to view companies and people in catalyst and the work they are doing has been a huge win for the entire ecosystem. Thanks to the existing version of our tool, we’re already seeing these specific increased in community feedback and engagement: 

• There's been more conversations on Twitter Spaces. 
• People have used the tool as a way to find service providers and other developers.
• Completion reports are up (112 completion reports submitted at the time of this proposal)! 

For some the of the new features we will be adding:

The ability for anyone to “Follow” a project, person, or group and receive “progress reports” will open the lines of communication between funded proposers and the rest of the community in a brand new way. We expect better lines of communication and open “customer feedback” loops will lead to improvement in the quality of products being built through Catalyst.

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

Data access and availability is l the biggest challenge for refreshing the Catalyst Research Tool with new data from fund to fund. There is an incredible amount of manual data entry, cleanup, and migration required with each fund. Having the human power to facilitate manual data entry may become a challenge as Catalyst grows. We don’t anticipate this will be the case for fund 9. For fund 10 and beyond, We've heard that Catalyst will be debuting a Governance API, which would allow us to automate a lot more data flow.

There’s also the option of accounting for increased data entry labor in future proposals. 

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

Rebasing

--> Proposal Instant Search

Overhaul the search to be instant and add the ability to save your results, catering to research and building your voting picklist!

--> More filters

Add more filters when trying to find proposals:

* by one or more user

* by one or more groups

* funded in own challenge setting

* filter by SDG values

* filter by tags

→ Everybody love endless scrolling

* move from paginated to endless scroll

Rebasing effort complete by end of Month 2

Social Features

--> Compatible Exports and Imports

* Add export support to let you export out of lido and into AIM’s voter tool

* Add Import support for importing an AIM picklist into lido catalyst research tool

--> Share all the things

* add the ability publicly name publish your bookmarks

* add the ability to publicly share your voting bookmark (pick list) with rationale… this will lay the groundwork for adding tooling to facilitate threaded discussions with dReps and their picklist in the future. 

--> Profiles and reports

* proposers and groups/companies can claim their profiles.

* follow proposal, person, or group to get project reports in your inbox!

Social Features rollout complete by the end of Month 5

Quality and Inclusivity

--> Internalization

Make the interface, buttons, and prompts available in Spanish, Swahili, Japanese, Chinese, and French.

--> QA

Full audit of the data for accuracy.

Quality and Inclusivity complete by the end of Month 6

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Service & Blockchain Developer (pre-tax): $32,280

This pays for 400 hours of Senior Developer work time, at a rate of $75/hour. We estimate that 2/3 of this time would be spent in the first three building the Dapp and setting up the required infrastructure.

* UI/UX design

* Wallet integration

* DevOps and server infrastructure setup

* Development hours

* Documentation and FAQs

* Testing and QA

Interface translation: $800 - this is at a discount thanks to our ai power translation engine combined with human editors. 

Server and hosting for one year: $1,200

TOTAL BUDGET

34,280

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

We are Cardano enthusiasts and a growing collective of dreamers who believe in providing insightful education about Cardano in plain English, Swahili, and Spanish. Most online blockchain content is written by and for developers and finance geeks. We break down complicated technical ideas for everyday people, and provide relevant news in quick bites, and build tools that everyone can use.

Our website is a resource for anyone who wants to learn what Cardano is, why they should care, and how they can participate. We want to make these resources accessible to as many people as possible.

Stephanie is a teacher and technologist with a passion for helping non-profits navigate and capitalize on technology. She applies her communication skills at Lido Nation by writing and editing articles, and helping to organize ideas in a way that people can understand.

Darlington is an engineer by day and at all times a dancer, humanitarian, idealist and entrepreneur. Darlington has deep knowledge about blockchain technology and broad experience in the Cardano ecosystem.

Linked In Pages

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

https://www.linkedin.com/in/profd2004

https://www.linkedin.com/company/lido-nation

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

Yes, maybe. We are discussing an NFT revenue stream that might provide ongoing funding for continual development. The LIDO pool is also committed to using some of its pool rewards to fund development on the site. Block production is currently far and few in between, but with rising delegation, that will be a viable funding source in the future.

[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 have a list of features to add as listed above. The community will be able to track progress as those features are completed and released. 

We will track usages and engagement using web analytics tools.

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

Doubling our current weekly engagement, from 6k to 12k. 

Increased public interest in proposal monthly reports (would like to see at least 500 follows of proposal, proposer, or group by the end of the year).

Teams are finding it easier to get a sense of who’s working on what within catalyst.

Teams are being cross-pollinated by each other’s work. 

Curious passive observers are able to see what’s being built on Cardano without having to give up personal information.

[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.