Request for Proposal: Decentralize Gitcoin Kudos

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
4

:wave: Who are you

Hi there! We are the Kudos team at mintkudos.xyz. Kudos captures individual and team off-chain contributions as on-chain, peer-verified, Soulbound (non-transferable) tokens… all with a celebratory twist! We are unlocking the Contributor Economy, a world where people can fluidly work for communities that they’re mission-aligned with and get paid in ownership by creating the building blocks to contributor identity. For more information, check out our Twitter intro thread:

Team

Kei

  • technical lead
  • previously led engineering at early stage startup and before that worked as a software engineer on the blockchain division of a large tech company

Catherine

  • product lead
  • previously product manager at a tech company that’s deeply rooted in the future of work

Kathy

  • design lead
  • member of VectorDAO and curates beautiful vibes at Kudos

We also have other part-time full-stack and frontend contributors on the team as well :man_dancing:

:pencil2: What is your proposal to build this

We’d like to start with the goal of doing product discovery to ultimately build out a custom user experience that’s appropriate given common user journeys within the Gitcoin ecosystem. The solution we’re proposing would reuse our Soulbound smart contract and various UI experiences to prompt a Kudos creation (both manual and automatic) upon things like bounty completion, quest completion, hackathon participation, and even grant contributions. We would also like to rebuild the Gitcoin profile view as well.

The key here is that any Kudos you receive in Gitcoin should be presentable as part of your decentralized reputation in any context outside of Gitcoin. The non-transferability of the Kudos is a big plus when building proper decentralized reputation that shouldn’t be traded or bought. By leveraging the smart contracts and our platform, this should be a win-win situation for everyone. :slightly_smiling_face:

Our team currently has a working alpha version of these designs:

  • Completed functionalities include: creating a Kudos, specifying recipients, inputting information around the Kudos, claim link generation, profile view, and art generation (we have generic & branded backgrounds)
  • Upcoming functionalities: peer-based verification/endorsements where teammates and community can vouch for a contribution, public APIs, more programmatic art generation (open to ideas!)

We strongly believe that our team and the Gitcoin community have a shared ethos of celebrating and capturing contributions in a decentralized world. We would love to share our learnings from our journey in building Kudos, and work together with the wonderful community to build out the best experience for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

:mantelpiece_clock: Timeline

We estimate about little over a quarter (~14-18 weeks) to perform product discovery, iterate on designs, and deliver the MVP.

  • 2 weeks for team formation (we want to work on this in collaboration with GitcoinDAO contributors)
  • 3 weeks of product discovery
    • 1 week for interview script creation & recruiting user interview participants
    • 1 week for conducting interviews and interview synthesis
    • 1 for prioritization & roadmap creation + MVP definition
  • 3 weeks to test and iterate on designs
    • 1 week for brainstorming, creating low-fidelity designs, and user testing recruitment
    • 1 week to user test, synthesize learnings
    • 1 week to iterate on designs and prepare for engineering handoff
  • 6-10 weeks to deliver on an MVP (rough estimate, highly dependent on output from product discovery)

:gem: What do we need

  • Funding to execute on product discovery & product design, then development. We have a small core team of contributors but would love to enlist community help! Examples of how we’d enlist community help at this stage:
    • Co-create product discovery goals and questions
    • Recruit users from the community to perform user interviews with
    • Conduct user interviews
    • Co-synthesize interview learnings + insights
    • Decide on an MVP and roadmap
    • Co-create designs via community feedback
  • Funding to develop the MVP. Again, we would love to enlist community help here as well to develop the MVP.
  • Marketing, PR, and communications support from Gitcoin to share our collaboration & partnership goals
  • Mentorship on running processes in a decentralized fashion
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