In decentralized work, visibility to contributions is low, information doesn’t spread effectively. Action doesn’t align with common goals.
A complete platform that enables decentralized communities, starting with specifying, testing, and implementing the basic building block of decentralized work: the Action NFT.
This is the total amount allocated to littlefish - Shaping Action.
We are the Littlefish Foundation (LFF), a decentralized, global organization, building technologies that align individual actions towards common goals, enabling collective intelligences.
We use blockchain technology to redefine earning relationships between people, work, and organizations, enabling a new model of operation that grants more freedom to participants, while making sure that freedom results in progress towards the goals of the whole.
Our proposals are best experienced in the Littlefish Vault. There will be multiple links to it throughout the proposal with background information necessary to fully understand the concepts.
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PAs, you will need this information to understand what Actions are, what problem they solve, and how. We strongly recommend reading these before the proposal.
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This proposal is a LFF and gimbalabs collaboration.
The Problem
Actions are the fundamental building blocks of the Littlefish Foundation. They are the NFTs, Proofs of Activity, that can be made to represent any activity in the real world. This is a broad definition that must be specified, designed, tested, and implemented.
To make it concrete, the first step is to define the metadata. There are many ways this can be done with each having cascading consequences that must be understood, tested for, and decided upon. The definition process must take into account updateability and interoperability.
In classical software systems, definitions of data evolve over time according to changing business demands. New data fields can be added, old ones changed or deleted. With NFTs (if not accounted for) data can't be updated.
Actions will stay the same. Newer versions may have new information but this introduces an interoperability constraint. All clients that use this type of NFT would have to extend their support for it. This may become an untenable problem for 3rd party applications that want to use Actions.
Our Approach
Hence the design process must account for this dichotomy. Our approach to solve this problem is to define Action incrementally with experimental steps. On the way, we'll be working with gimbalabs, c4c, Sustainable ADA, and other Catalyst colonies, discussing their use cases for Actions, generalizing to the needs of decentralized communities. These are the pioneers of crypto-native organizations. They will be the first users of Actions, along with LFF, the first colony.
Outputs
Our outputs will be:
Outcomes
Actions are the foundation of a new, global, decentralized earning economy. With Actions, LFF and close communities will experiment in earning in new ways. As we expand the number of colonies, more and more Catalyst and Cardano communities, DAOs will experiment in Action, building a new global economy.
Alignment with the Challenge
The challenge states
> Cardano needs a thriving ecosystem of different Dapps
> The more interesting and useful the products … the more reasons people have to interact with the Cardano blockchain that can help further drive more adoption, feedback, growth and even more innovations.
Littlefish Foundation is an original crypto native idea. It is an attempt to redefine existing earning relationships and replace it with a model that serves the people. Actions are at the heart of it.
Actions provide a new, meaningful use case for NFTs. They are a new primitive for web3. A broad, inclusive metadata definition that takes into account extensibility and flexibility will allow new business models based on reward sharing to emerge. It will also allow public/common goods to be valued through community funding.
This is what blockchains are meant to enable. Valuing what could not be valued before. Incentivizing publicly beneficial Actions through mechanism design. Actions will enrich the ecosystem like no existing current system can.
Key Metrics
The proposal improves the challenge Key Metrics:
LFF General - Funding
Littlefish Foundation is a complex organization driven by individual efforts. It only moves forward if individuals drive it forward. The single biggest risk in front of that is financial. A large percentage of the team is based in Turkey, which has been experiencing hyperinflation for the past year.
Funding is the number one challenge we face. With funding we can pay the team to work on Littlefish Foundation and make their financial burden lighter. This all puts us closer to achieving the LFF vision. We are a global community with contributors from all over the world. Without funding, we will still build the LFF, but it will be more challenging and slower.
We are mitigating risk through diversification in multiple proposals, increasing the chance of receiving funding. We’re also budgeting for the Action Fund, partly to serve as a contingency.
LFF General - Technology Risk
LFF is developing a strong infrastructure to be able to scale, for that we need the support of a strong development community. The current team is very strong on tech development, with extensive experience, and we are welcoming more developers to join. We are already engaged with the Gimbalabs development community and have their support.
This proposal - Adapting to new earning models
LFF is defining a new earning solution. Action first, payment later. This is a new way of doing business. It requires adaptation from all participants. This is why early on, working closely with pilot communities is important.
The way to mitigate this risk is by first using it in the LFF community, starting with manual processes like public Action tracking, sharing Actions on Discord, Miro etc, to get individuals used to the model. Next we work with other communities, who have already shown interest, including c4c, Sustainable Ada and others. This process will teach us what the critical problems of understanding are in this shift and how it can be made easy for others.
Roadmap
The proposal is to fund 6 months of developing Actions: September through February 2023. The proposal roadmap is divided into three stages. Stages 1 and 2 output feature complete versions of Actions. Actions will be used on the testnet and possibly on the mainnet to test and collect feedback from pilot use cases.
Stage 3 begins work on the broader vision, including features that will be further specified through the process. It aims to get Actions ready for the future, with a larger toolset available to work within the LFF ecosystem. Stage 3 relates to another LFF proposal, where we employ token engineering principles to build reward sharing agreements that are sustainable.
Stage 1: Action MVP
1 month - September 2022
The early goal with Actions is to have good support for different types of media. Actions, in order to represent real world activities well, must support arbitrary combinations of data links: images, videos, GIFs, documents, … Multiple of the same media types should be supported. An Action can be made up of 5 photos, 2 videos, 1 PDF document for example. This will allow a variety of activities to be well captured by Actions.
To build the Action MVP:
This stage will result in a functional Action NFT specification with the said functionality and a minting contract to mint Actions.
Stage 2: Extensibility
3 months - October/December 2022
Extensibility unlocks many things. It allows Actions to represent any activity. Initially, this is for LFF to define new types of Action. For example, a colony membership extension would turn an Action into a membership badge for a colony. This allows Actions to be the primitives of LFF and enables the other stages.
This stage will result in an extensible metadata specification that allows third party metadata. With this functionality we will create the first example: an Action for becoming a colony member.
To build extensibility:
This stage will result in a functional Action NFT specification with the said functionality and a minting contract to mint Actions.
Stage 3: The Next Steps (Bootstrapping a Community of Contributors)
2 months - January/February 2023
With extensibility, the metadata can have parameters that work with specific smart contracts. These interactions make up the LFF ecosystem together. Some of these parameters we look to implement are:
Modules
How we make work visible - LFF Modules
The work outlined in the proposal is divided into modules, each a specific part of the development process. Much of the work follows an iterative design process. Actions will be tested in stages, feedback collected from users to further iterate on the design.
Key milestones and expected deliveries:
Module 1: Technical Specification
Stakeholders: LFF, gimbalabs
Primary Work Group: The Forge
Duration: July - January
Resources: 150hrs of work + operations budget
To start we have created an informal specification. This is an evolving document, bound to change with new findings and experimentation. It is to give a general, long term vision of Actions, designed both to spark discussion and to prioritize functional experimentation. This specification will be formalized as part of this module.
Activities:
Module 2: Minting Contract, Building Transactions, and Collecting Information
Stakeholders: LFF, gimbalabs
Primary Work Group: The Forge
Duration: July - January
Resources: 400hrs of work + operations budget + audit budget
Activities:
Module 3: Action Frontend
Stakeholders: LFF, gimbalabs
Primary Work Group: The Forge
Duration: September - February
Resources: 150hrs of work + operations budget
The frontend must be able to populate fields for the Action metadata, sign transactions, and initiate transactions to mint Actions.
Activities:
Module 4: Experimenting with Action
Stakeholders: LFF, gimbalabs, c4c, Sustainable ADA, others Catalyst communities
Primary Work Group: Organization Labs
Duration: October - January
Resources: 150hrs of work + operations budget
Once we have the MVP Action and a working Frontend to connect the two, we can start experimenting with Action. We will use the system internally at LFF, to keep track of Actions that help build the LFF, including the activities in this and other LFF proposals. We’ll share it with other communities as a pilot program.
Activities:
Module 5: Project Based Learning Module on Action
Stakeholders: LFF, gimbalabs
Primary Work Group: gimbalabs
Duration: September - January
Resources: 300hrs of work + operations budget
As Gimbalabs developers contribute to Modules 1-4, they will be creating documentation and educational resources in real time. The outcome of this work is to create a Project-Based Learning experience that invites additional community members to use Actions, join Colonies, and contribute to the further development of Action infrastructure.
Activities:
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All LFF proposals follow the same budget structure. They are made up of the module budgets and the Action Fund allocation.
Module budgets
Each proposal is made up of modules. Each module has a specified budget. The sum of module budgets makes up the first part of the overall budget.
1 - Personnel budget
Each module has a personnel budget and an operations budget. The personnel budget is the total estimated hours * the hourly rate for the module.
The base hourly rate for LFF proposals is 50 USD. This is a living wage in most parts of the world. It will bring financial stability to participants.
The hourly rate for a module may change from this default, based on the expertise needed.
2- Module operations budget
Each module is allocated an extra budget sized at 1/5th of the personnel budget to enable operations.
This budget is a pooled organization wide resource used to cover expenses. It will be used to purchase digital work tools like Zoom to be used by all members of LFF.
A part of it will be spent with the discretion of the module team. For example, it can be used to pay for transportation, buy personal digital tools, purchase other teams’ Actions, etc.
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LFF Action Fund
LFF Action Fund has multiple purposes.
1 - Contingency
Proposals may not be funded. The activities in the proposals will still take place if we can account for this with additional funding. Action Fund will provide that funding if and when it is necessary.
The Action Fund can be used to extend a module budget, fund an unfunded proposals’ module, or fund new modules as need arises.
2 - Incentivizing further Action
We are creating a new economy. LFF is the first colony in this economy. Its members are producing Actions, the supply. But who will buy them?
There is a need for stable demand for Actions to bootstrap this new digital economy. Action Fund provides this stable demand.
3 - Admin and other work
There is a lot of unmentioned work that goes into building the Littlefish Foundation. This includes general admin work like setting up meetings, scheduling, scribework, as well as other activities like community building.
The Action Fund will prioritize buying those Actions that aren’t covered by the proposals.
Action Fund Sizing
The Action Fund allocation is sized at 1/4th of the total budget. This is common across all LFF proposals to provide financial safety to the project for the next 12 months, allowing us a healthy runway to create the new earning economy.
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All modules in this proposal have an hourly personnel rate of 50 USD/hr. Module operations budgets are 1/5th the personnel budgets.
Module Total = 74000 USD
Action Fund Total = 24667 USD
Total = 98667 USD
Cem - I completed a Master's degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering. My thesis was about to create a complete Video on Demand system with client-server architecture with its own network protocol called Reliable UDP. After graduating, I set up a high-security financial data center in 2004. Then, in 2019, I started a new cyber security startup with three of my staff. The same year, the startup was funded by the largest bank in Turkey.
I started programming when I was 12 years old, and about 6 years later, I met the Internet, which introduced so many things to me. Open source was the biggest among them. Later on, I wrote a book about Linux and open-source systems. For me, open-source philosophy was the key to real human potential. It was making the secrets of the institutions public.
In the corrupt financial system we are used to living in, a person or group named Satoshi designed the decentralized digital currency called Bitcoin. And afterward, new techniques that were not part of our current order began to develop. Then, in 2021, I met Cardano, where like-minded people find each other. So when I dig deeper into Cardano, I suddenly found myself in the Cardano4Climate community trying to do things to stop climate change with a bunch of people all around the world.
With friends from Cardano4Climate, we formed up littlefish Foundation. It is a system, a reason for being. Encourage people to do anything for the good of the common. It is an experiment to build collective intelligence.
Now, I decided to retire from all of my real-world business to solely think, dream and work for the littlefish Foundation.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ckaraca/
Proposal Focus: All modules. Work on specification design, project management and work on all development aspects of the proposal. Help shape PBL module.
ChaKhan - 3+ years experience as a Backend Developer. Python, REST, Postgres, data modeling. Electrical and Electronics Engineering Major. Found Ikigai working on LFF, thinking/working on it 24/7. MBA Thesis in progress on the LFF, focus is pricing Actions in the context of LFF payments. Learning within the Catalyst/Cardano ecosystem for 7+ months. Focusing on organization building, governance, token engineering with long term interest in economics, game theory, behavioral psychology, political science, and history.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/%C3%A7a%C4%9Fkan-acarbay-b2210b136/
https://github.com/cagkanacarbay/
Proposal Focus: Modules 1, 2, 4, and 5. Work on specification design, off-chain development, run experiments, collect data, help shape PBL module.
James Dunseith - Co-founder of Gimbalabs, funded Catalyst proposer, contributor to projects across the Catalyst ecosystem, and currently leading the development of Plutus Project-Based Learning initiatives at Gimbalabs. Prior to committing full-time to Cardano and Catalyst development, James taught high-school math and developed teacher-education programs at two ed-tech startups.
Proposal Focus: All modules. Minting contract development. Advisor on all things Plutus.
Nori Nishigaya - Founder of the Salmon Nation Decentralized Alliance (SANADA), and co founder of Bridge Builders, and SAMON pool. Member of the Catalyst Circle Admin Team, Cardano4Climate, and Littlefish Foundation. Cardano Ambassador, CA, and Funded proposer. Passionate about radical inclusivity and community, and devoted to making Cardano the best community on the planet. Nori brings over 30 years of experience in software development, agile methodologies, leadership and managing teams, and founding and running technology startups.
Proposal Focus: Module 1. Metadata design.
Mert Akyazi - 2+ years Software Developer experience on Back-End and 1+ years experience on Blockchain development, mostly on EVM compatible networks. Currently working with a close to launch NFT marketplace “LEXIT” as Chief Cryptographer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mertakyazi/
Proposal Focus: Module 1. Specification design and research.
Sebastian Pereira - 5+ years of strategic planning for public institutions as an Economist. 2 years in the blockchain industry EMURGO Academy instructor, content writer for EMURGO Blog and CT team leader.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianpereira33/
Proposal Focus: Module 1. Specification design and research.
Donald Isufi - Electrical and Electronics Engineering Major Senior Year, Self-taught programmer, JavaScript, React, Python, HTML and CSS, 1 year experience as Front-End Developer. Recipient of MITx Certificate for Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science. Blockchain enthusiast and participant of Little Fish Foundation for 1+ month.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/donaldisufi/
https://courses.edx.org/certificates/39a936e9f5454dac823297795d81b9c1
Proposal Focus: Module 3. Frontend development. Module 2. Off-chain development.
Emre Kurt - B.Sc. in Geological Engineering with 4 years job experience in the field. Working as a System Administrator for the last 3 years and Sales Director for the last 1.5 years. Very good knowledge of Linux based systems and Network Security. In the process of excelling in the blockchain technology and currently focusing on organization and community building, marketing strategies. Also using AI tools to create art pieces to be minted as NFTs.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emre-kurt-617272bb/
https://creator.nightcafe.studio/u/Nautilus
Proposal Focus: Module 4. Internal use, collecting information, documenting processes.
Yes, we will return to Catalyst for further funding, until we build sustainable business models around Action. Catalyst allows us to take our time, engineer systems well without rushing to market, potentially risking an event similar to what happened to Luna.
We are an evolving decentralized organization. We expect solid community and contributor growth in the near future. These individuals, along with existing ones who have time from existing commitments, will be starting new initiatives. Until we get to a sustainable business model using Actions, Catalyst will be the place where we come for funding. This allows us to experiment until we can figure our way. Thanks Catalyst!
We aim to become sustainable with the launch of our token on mainnet, which we tentatively aim to deliver by Q3 2023.
Meanwhile, we will be providing Catalyst and the broader community with ongoing services. We will be publishing all our research (DAOs, governance, economic, technology, tools, ...) on the Littlefish Vault. These will be made sustainable through experiments in Action, in due time.
Where to check our progress?
At Littlefish Foundation, everything we do is public, and we like documentation. We will publish major progress updates on Obsidian, sharing our learning with the Catalyst community. Our Miro boards are open to the community, there they can see our progress, comment, and contribute. Discord will be the best place to find daily updates, and Actions.
All LFF proposals produce Action, work done by individuals to achieve a goal. Until we have a working system with NFTs, we will use Discord to broadcast our Actions. There are many examples already on the #action channel, showing our early work. As our community grows, it will contain Actions taken by many different littlefish who are building the LFF.
We will track these posts specifically and incentivize team members and contributors to share their Actions, preparing them for Actions on the mainnet.
LFF General - Community Tracking
The general success of LFF is dependent on a strong community. We will track it from several sources:
We’ll review this data monthly and share updates through our communication channels.
This Proposal - Software
The outputs of this proposal are primarily code. Our repositories are open source, progress will be measured through git commits and important updates will be shared with the community through our communication channels.
This Proposal - Action, in action
This proposal produces Action NFT. As part of the proposal we will develop a backend that reads data on-chain as its written. This means we’ll track how many Actions have been minted. The number of minted Actions is our first measurement of the success of Actions.
We’ll build the system with users from LFF, gimbalabs, Sustainable ADA, c4c, and other communities. We’ll measure the number of unique users through unique addresses in the Actions minted.
This Proposal - Action use cases
Actions are a general purpose earning solution. Their use is potentially limitless. We’ll measure use cases through the metadata, and real world interactions with users. Through collected data we’ll generalize the use cases into categories, measure their number, and report through our communication channels.
LFF General - Solving our own problems through experimentation, building applications the community loves
Our approach to problem solving in this space is experimentation. Trying out new methods of doing business, creating new processes fit for a decentralized organization built from the ground floor.
One example is our Ikigai onboarding model. The bubbles at the top represent work groups and business functions. We walk through the bubbles with newcomers, discussing what they mean in Littlefish Foundation, and ask them to fill their Ikigai board with them. The result is a fun learning experience for everyone.
We create such systems with the aim of turning them into software. First we practice with existing tools, learn, iterate, and experiment, then we'll build it into software that others can use.
Some other experiments relating to publishing Actions by:
Success means these experiments turn into learning which turn into applications loved by the community.
LFF General - A strong community of creators and builders
We are a growing community of 100+. Yet pure numbers aren't enough. Growing the number of meaningful contributors is the key to long term success. Since the F8 proposal, the number of consistent contributors has grown from 2 to 10+ and growing fast. Newcomer numbers are also ticking up. Maintaining a sustainable, healthy growth in these numbers is critical.
This Proposal - Actions are live on the mainnet, and are being used by colonies
Once live, we imagine Actions being generated by many colonies, starting with LFF and adding other interested decentralized communities as colonies. We can't wait to see how Actions will be used by others. We aim to have onboarded 20 colonies with 1000 unique Actions minted by February.
This Proposal - Actions are extensible, communities can easily add their own information
Extensible Actions will bring flexibility to the system, allowing Actions to truly represent any activity that can be taken by individuals. Colonies will be able to represent data specific to themselves. Again, can’t wait!
Littlefish Foundation Kiva-like DAO - Unfunded F7 Proposal
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384063
Littlefish Foundation was born with this proposal from the Cardano4Climate community [2]. The aim was to create a DAO and build a Kiva like product that would allow the funding of on the ground SDG activities.
The proposal wasn’t funded, but we kept working. We held weekly meetings, brought in experts for discussions, and worked hard to understand the domain of problems. Through that we’ve developed the idea further and generalized it to what it is today.
Littlefish: Coordinating Action - Funded F8 Proposal
https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/404668
In F8 we came up with a new vision for the Littlefish Foundation: littlefish, colonies and Actions. We got to work before it was even funded.
We were relatively new to developing on Cardano and found a steep learning curve. Weak documentation slowed development down, and we realized there was more to building a successful Littlefish Foundation.
During this time we have completed many important steps:
Here's a shot of that board as of the 10th June:
Our proposals in Fund 9 aim to supercharge this holistic vision of the Littlefish Foundation.
A community of 100+ total started in Dec 2021, a core team of 10+ and growing, 20+ years of experience in software development, plutus developers, designers, entrepreneurship and startup experience, and active Catalyst community members.