Grant/Project Name: ECF Platform
Proposer’s contact info: tech@ecf.network
Grant Category: Apps, Community
Project Summary: Web3 needs legitimacy to reach critical mass, for any meaningful web3 projects and tools to reach adoption, whereas the missing piece is a trustable, organized knowledge base to learn, experience, communicate and coordinate. We’ve been working on the social mechanisms for completely open coordination on information for any given project and the design of sense-making frameworks for both on-chain and off-chain information.
Project Description:
Some questions as a starter has:
How do I trust a certain app or service? What are the most important attributes or data I need to understand so that I can make a clearer decision on what to use?
Problem Elaboration:
At ECF, we’ve been focusing on coordination problems in the funding and crowd-sourcing of resources and information in the space since its inception back in 2018. Its initial aim was to solve coordination around funding non-profit infrastructure projects in the space and now with past years of research we’ve laid out the roadmap of a platform for coordination of intelligence:
With an abundance of information, it has been difficult to discern quality information. With the absence of critical information that helps users determine the legitimacy of projects, it’s been an impossible job for general public to find and participate in meaningful web3 projects, especially of those critical blocks of the web3 infrastructure and applications… There is a lack of clear and relevant context to what is factual, insightful and truly representative of a project it claims to describe.
Solution Description:
We start with providing a data framework; a clear structure of information as editable items. These items make up a project page which we call Project Blueprints. Where key items (i.e editable items) to learn about a project are featured in addition to other optional informational items (i.e proposable new items to data framework/data model) and compound it with trustable source of information by leveraging our own research work on decentralised collaborative knowledge-bases:
- Sense-making of data and information: Providing contexts such as clear descriptions of projects’ performance, security measures, accountability schemes among other, relevant attributes that fall under the criteria of an item’s representation to a project’s credibility. Items by default are constructed in the format of both “intended display” and “source”, though in certain cases the source of proof (i.e link to a document or a transaction ID on blockchain) may not be displayed as an item on the page.
- Open data collaboration: We’re also working on building collaborative mechanisms for users to both provide and curate page information via a decentralized consensus with a dynamic voting system. The mechanism features also dispute resolutions for controversial content in items and pages. (Explained in details of the platform’s whitepaper and decentralised editing mechanism paper: ECF Pensive) [release date: 2022 Feb]
- Source-backed information: It is required for users to support what can be perceived as arbitrary content with proof to support their claim. Users need to prioritise verifiable content to gain support from community by providing the best evidence (such as with primary sources) so that claims could be used for double-checking on the content submitted and will ground discussions to how conclusions are made.
- Evaluation of information: Our evaluation contains these parts: accountability, transparency, security, performance and participation. This provides a better means to showcase the legitimacy of a project in an analytical way and allows for the coordination of project exposure in the space.
Additionally, the design and development of the sense-making and decentralized collaboration mechanisms which will interact with Ceramic for real-time community collaborations in order to have a legitimate process of extracting collective intelligence from the masses. The community participates by validating project accountability instead of solely relying on data from authoritative sources.
Further on in the roadmap, the next stage is a knowledge graph by creating more structured data and information that can be openly shared and used across other applications.
Relevant links:
- Website: https://ecf.network/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethereumecf
- Github: EthereumCommunityFund · GitHub (The product is in stealth, but the code will be public once Alpha is launched. Alpha intends to test the decentralised collaborative editing mechasnism (Pensieve) for preparation of deployment on decentralized network and integration with Ceramic)
- Previous projects the team has meaningfully contributed to:
- MakerDAO (MakerDAO | An Unbiased Global Financial System)
- Ethereum Community Fund Grant Program
- Dotlaunch (https://dotlaunch.io/)
- Comparable projects or peers: Golden (https://golden.xyz/)
Ceramic Ecosystem Value Proposition:
- What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Ceramic ecosystem?
1. Adoption:
We are aligned with Ceramic’s goal on building the Web-scale Dataverse, and propose a supplementary tool (decentralised knowledge-base building) for data sourcing with a launching prototype. Adoption might not be best characterized by the word “problem”, as it is a constant focus for any project in development at any stage, though adoption would always be preferred to be faster in the early stage. Specifically, adoption of Ceramic requires the scale of adoption by application builders for creating use instances and for their projects to reach larger groups of end-users and generic public scale-up data. We believe the launching ECF Platform would potentially speed up the process by addressing all three levels of concerns in adoption: builders, users and data.
2. Ceramic’s discovery UX:
Discovery of data models in Ceramic is crucial in adoption for developers to construct data fast for their use cases, it is our understanding that ComposeDB intends to address that. And in our efforts of building with Ceramic, we have encountered the difficulty in discovery of data models suitable for the project.
- How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?
1. Adoption Acceleration:
a. Reach
As far as the user experience goes, Project Blueprints contain attributes where we attach context that can be valuable to and easily digested by both the early web-3 adoptors and the potential group that are interested in Web-3 but are more used to a Web-2 experience. With our data framework and our focus on user experience, we look to break these dimensional barriers to lead and engage pluralistic users to the whole ecosystem.
And as the mechanisms incentivise contribution of data, we are looking at a mixed group of projects and community enthusiasts collaborating to educate the general public. And this gives a very optimistic outcome evaluation in user size and data scale.
b. Expansion
We aim to be as inclusive as possible in our web3 project discovery data where users are open to propose any project in the landscape of web3 for recommendation to the community and general markets, and thus the coverage of projects not only is open to more than 30k listed tokens but also projects that need attention and resources in the building, and tools, research, programs that do not necessarily feature the financial aspects that markets are interested in now due to convenience in display and tracking.
c. Adoption
With a long-term collaboration with Ceramic while the platform expands, it will showcase and feature Ceramic to all projects freely added to ECF but it’d also onboard people thinking on building projects as well as generic public on the watch about Ceramic by a live product they are experiencing.
2. Data model Discovery:
Discovery of data models can be figured out better framed in a specific use case that will have large enough data and users to test it with. ECF Platform will deploy a series of features in the scope of social coordination, where data models will vary according to the information required for such coordination to take place. As stated in the solution description, as a start, project blueprints need to cover a few categories of projects in the space and need to evolve to cover more that enter the scope of web3 projects. Solution-focused debates, bounty, governance proposals cross a few landscapes of web3 tools will be integrated on the way for assisting informed decision-making by the community and thus data models will grow with features as well. The construction of general purpose data models will be a constant work on our end, and improvements we make can be fed back to Ceramic as an empirical research conclusion to help advance database of models. We propose this application to get the work started and continue to explore alongside Ceramic.
- Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Ceramic ecosystem?
As mentioned above the concern our solution addresses mostly lies with the growth or Ceramic ecosystem. In summary, the focus on user experience and easy-to-read Project Blueprints would drive user growth from the entire ecosystem and beyond extends to the growth to the key web3 stacks and tech partners such as Ceramic, and gives Ceramic an expanding and lasting exposure as ECF’s utilisation of the Ceramic stack being a live demo. Secondly, a variety of features in the scope of the community coordination including the scheduled Project Blueprints as the first and foundational feature of the platform will embark on the journey of our contribution to ComposeDB.
Funding requested (DAI/USDC): [$49,900]
How much are you applying for? Make sure to break the amount requested down by milestones
Milestones:
Self.ID implementation [1 month, $12,000]
- Deliverable: data-modeling of user profiles - [1.5 week][40 Hours @ $100/ Hr]
- basic profile
- social graph
- Contribution data (user-triggered system events) [2.5 weeks][80 Hours @ $100/ Hr]
- contribution points
- project proposals
- page editing
- voting
Building out Ceramic Objects of Project Page & Page Editing flows with ComposeDB [3 months, $37,900]
- Onboarding to Ceramic and ComposeDB with research and testing. [2 weeks] [50 Hours @ $70/Hour]
- Initial Data Modeling and creating composites for Project Proposals, Project Pages, Page items, user profile data. [2.5 weeks] [80 Hours @ $80/ Hr]
- ComposeDB initial node set-up and testing. [1.5 week] [40 Hours @ $100/ Hr]
- Migrate existing APIs to Ceramic/ComposeDB for storing, editing and retrieval of data. [2.5 weeks] [80 Hours @ $100/ Hr]
- Migration of existing app logic and current stack to work with Ceramic and ComposeDB. [2.5 weeks] [80 Hours @ $100/ Hr]
- Full integration to ComposeDB for our MVP. [2.5 weeks] [80 Hours @ $100/ Hr]
I accept the 3Box Labs Grants terms and conditions: Yes
I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the 3Box Labs to receive this grant: Yes