AMENDMENT (as of 05/08/2022) â in light of comments from stewards and other offline conversations within the Gitcoin community, we are requesting to be an official Gitcoin workstream with a much smaller amount of funding to do product discovery. To make sure that this initial post still flows well for any newcomers to this post, we have rewritten the post entirely, but kept the original proposal at the end.
This is the official funding proposal to take over Gitcoin Kudos as a workstream. The initial proposal was here: https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/request-for-proposal-decentralize-gitcoin-kudos/8115/4.
Timeline: Season 14 (May, June, July 2022)
Steward Responsible: @kyle
Official Team: Kei, Catherine, Cody, Tracy, Kathy
Vision
MintKudos provides a platform for people to recognize community contributions in the most delightful way possible. These Soulbound recognition tokens, which range from peer-to-peer appreciations and endorsements to formal attestations of contributions, become the foundation for an individualâs decentralized reputation.
Our motivation stems from unlocking the Contributor Economy, a world where people can fluidly work for communities that theyâre 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:
https://twitter.com/mintkudosXYZ/status/1511010716421001217
Mission alignment with Gitcoin
Our longer term vision with the Gitcoin DAO is to help build out the âreputational layerâ that feeds into various decision making across initiatives, such as funding & grants, internet of jobs, Proof of Personhood Passport, and more.
Weâd love to work directly with the community to understand project reputation needs and integration strategy. Simultaneously, weâre working with other communities outside of the Gitcoin ecosystem and hope to source all of this information into a launchpad to build cross-community reputation. Ultimately, we strongly believe that this will strengthen the incentives and decision-process making behind public goods funding.
More on who we are
We are a team of 3 engineers, 1 product manager, and 1 designer that are deeply invested in helping communities and individuals provide context around their decentralized & online identity.
Kei (technical lead)
- previously a software engineer on the blockchain division of a large US-based tech company and afterwards led engineering efforts and built a 20-person engineering team at a venture-backed early stage startup
Catherine (product lead)
- previously product manager at a US-based tech company thatâs deeply rooted in the future of work
- Kei and Catherine worked closely on launching a new product together at her previous startup gig before deciding to go all in on web3
Kathy (design lead)
- member of VectorDAO & designer of a US-based tech company that deeply thinks about creating intuitive & beautiful web3 product experiences
Cody (software engineer)
- frontend engineer specializing in making our designs come to life seamlessly
Tracy (software engineer)
- engineering lead of a US-based large tech company building PaaS on the cloud
Initial Target
Instead of trying to incorporate the Kudos system from mintkudos.xyz into the existing Gitcoin Kudos system as we mentioned the initial proposal here (https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/request-for-proposal-decentralize-gitcoin-kudos/8115/4), we will focus heavily on product discovery in S14.
What this means is that we will spend the season talking to various Gitcoin initiatives (like Internet of Jobs, PoPP, dCompass, etc) and figure out where we may be able to use Kudos and/or build something else that can provide more âcontextâ to someoneâs online identity within the Gitcoin ecosystem.
In addition, we would like to invest in building design mocks for suggested solutions that arise from our product discovery.
To summarize, here are the expected outcomes:
- a comprehensive report of how we can help build a âreputational layerâ within Gitcoin by working with the various initiatives. This may or may not involve the usage of MintKudos or Gitcoin Kudos.
- design mocks that outline the flow & solutions for how we might implement this in the next season. This may end up being more technical than visual depending on the solution.
Budget
The following table breaks down the potential budget spend to execute on the initial target detailed above (assuming 1 GTC = $6 at the time of writing). Note that the proposed budget takes into account working closely with community members willing to partake on this journey with us.
Initiative | Outcomes | Budget |
---|---|---|
Initial Product Discovery (Leads: Kei, Catherine) | 1) Co-create product discovery goals and questions 2) Recruit users from the community to perform user interviews with 3) Conduct user interviews 4) Co-synthesize interview learnings + insights | $20k (3.33k GTC) |
Initial designs (Leads: Kathy) | 1) Co-creating designs based on distilled feedback from the product discovery phase. | $20k (3.33k GTC) |
This brings our total budget request to 6.6k GTC for Season 14 (May-July 2022).
Milestones
Milestones can vary significantly on the outcomes of the product discovery and user interviews within the Gitcoin ecosystem. However, given what we know now, these are the proposed milestones:
- 6 weeks of product discovery
- 2 week for interview script creation & recruiting user interview participants
- 3 week for conducting interviews and interview synthesis with various Gitcoin initiatives
- 1 for prioritization & roadmap creation + MVP definition
- 6 weeks to test and iterate on designs
- 2 week for brainstorming, creating low-fidelity designs, and user testing recruitment
- 2 week to user test, synthesize learnings
- 2 week to iterate on designs and compile findings for S15
Original Proposal from April 29th
Below is the original funding proposal for context. We omit some of the vision sections because those exist in the amendment.
Initial Target
The overarching goal for this workstream in Season 14 is to incorporate the Kudos system from mintkudos.xyz into the existing Gitcoin Kudos system. The benefits of this is explained in the previous section, âMission alignment with Gitcoinâ.
We suggest the following initial target, keeping in mind that itâs subject to change largely after product discovery & communication with the Gitcoin community:
- integration of the existing Kudos contract (on Polygon) with the Gitcoin Kudos website (Build and Fund the Open Web Together | Gitcoin)
- Show âoriginalâ Gitcoin Kudoses in conjunction with ânewâ Kudoses. In the future we can consider porting them over to our contract if necessary.
- Revamp Kudos detail page to show new Kudos metadata for newly minted Kudoses, and continue to show older metadata for existing Kudoses.
- Kudos search capability to search across both existing and new Kudoses
- Revamp the main Gitcoin Kudos page content to match the new system (ex: talking about the non-transferability of Kudos tokens and our thoughts towards decentralized reputation)
Note that with this tentative target, the following features will no longer be a part of the Gitcoin Kudos experience (although this is up for discussion and they can always be added back in later):
- a Kudos marketplace (since the Kudoses are non-transferable, one should not be able to buy/sell Kudos)
- artist marketplace (where users can request for artwork and an artist creates art)
- a feed of Kudoses in the main Kudos page
- email notifications pertaining to minting / claiming of Kudos
While not part of the initial target and this grant proposal, here are other items that are on our mind that we may want to build with the community in the future:
- minting on other networks
- auto-minting of Kudos tokens (or similar tokens) upon things like bounty completion, quest completion, hackathon participation, and even grant contributions
Budget
The following table breaks down the potential budget spend to execute on the initial target detailed above (assuming 1 GTC = $6 at the time of writing). Note that the proposed budget takes into account working closely with community members willing to partake on this journey with us.
Initiative | Outcomes | Budget |
---|---|---|
Initial Product Discovery (Catherine, Kathy) | 1) Co-create product discovery goals and questions 2) Recruit users from the community to perform user interviews with 3) Conduct user interviews 4) Co-synthesize interview learnings + insights | $20k (3.33k GTC) |
Initial designs (Catherine, Kathy) | 1) Co-creating designs based on distilled feedback from the product discovery phase. | $20k (3.33k GTC) |
Initial engineering architecture (Kei, Cody, Tracy) | 1) Co-creating the initial engineering architecture for the revamped Kudos (ex: storage, contract design, etc) 2) Decide on path for migration of existing Kudos data 3) Work together on designing external-facing APIs and/or SDKs for third-party use of Kudos | $37.5k (6.25k GTC) |
Engineering implementation (Kei, Cody, Tracy) | 1) Decide together how to best implement engineering items together with community members in a distributed manner 2) Co-implementing the engineering items discovered in the initial engineering architecture phase | $112.5k (18.75k GTC) |
Marketing & revamp of Gitcoin Kudos page (Catherine, Kathy) | 1) Update Gitcoin Kudos page content based on product spec 2) PR & communications within and outside of Gitcoin community | $10k (1.66k GTC) |
This brings our total budget request to 33.4k GTC for Season 14 (May-July 2022). It is expected this budget will grow as we meet our goals (defined outcomes) and continue to expand our workstream.
Milestones
We estimate just over a quarter to perform product discovery, iterate on designs, and deliver the MVP with the community. It is worth noting, we have already launched a fully functional beta product that members of the Gitcoin team have already started using.
- 2 weeks focused on bolstering the team and research panel (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 the technical changes outlined above (rough estimate, highly dependent on output from product discovery)
- Some of the engineering architecture items can be started prior to designs finishing, so not all these items are sequential