Please describe your proposed solution.
How We Perceive the Problem and Approach its Stakeholders
The professional services group at IOG came to us with an internal documentation problem. They were struggling to manage their own documents which caused inefficient internal collaboration. We saw the problem differently. It is not a problem of proper documentation, but rather a lack of motivation to document and share knowledge. Realizing an opportunity for IOG, we started a company and devised a method to document more efficiently by monetizing the sharing of knowledge in a collaborative marketplace.
Documentation takes time and has value, yet it is not properly incentivized by organizations. Put simply, when you create a successful process, you are not incentivized to document or share it.
This problem is not limited to IOG; many industries, organizations, and projects have similar issues, including Project Catalyst. There are 900+ projects that have been funded on Project Catalyst. How many of these projects could have benefitted from sharing knowledge with each other, especially if they were similar? Each of these projects have valuable insights that are not being shared.
Only 1.3% of proposals have been funded, completed, and implemented on Cardano. Imagine if the thousands of proposed projects were able to share their valuable insights with each other and were incentivized to do so. This could create a higher rate of completion for funded projects, of which only about 15% have been completed, as well as increase the overall quality of Catalyst projects. It is not easy and there is no incentive to share and collaborate on Project Catalyst, and the entire Cardano community would benefit from an improved collaboration process.
We see a lot of people creating multiple versions of the same idea when they could be creating value together instead.
How Our Project will be Implemented
To solve Cardano's knowledge problem, we wish to build a blockchain-enabled ecosystem. In traditional ecosystems, the tragedy of the commons is frequent. The tragedy of the commons refers to an economic phenomenon in which individuals are incentivized to extract value from shared resources, such as a knowledge index, but are not incentivized to contribute to the shared resource.
In the current iteration of ecosystem and platform business models, this is a common occurrence. Users can game the platform to the detriment of the public, which in the case of a business ecosystem, is the knowledge base of it's individual users. This nature of value extraction often leads to a decline in the system and eventual failure. Knowledge management systems often experience this problem as contributors are burdened by documentation and do not receive proper incentives to continue, leading to a significant decline in value added by such a system.
As an example, imagine a group of Cardano dApp developers have an innovative process they utilize in their designing phase. Right now, the company has no incentive to document or share this process as it gives them a competitive advantage. If there were a method for this process to be documented and shared, then all parties in the Cardano ecosystem could utilize and benefit. However, no company will do this without compensation.
Indico is a blockchain-enabled ecosystem which allows a process or knowledge item to be monetized by an individual or company and provide continuous royalties as the knowledge item is used by other community members. Maintenance of a competitive advantage is a reasonable argument against sharing knowledge or processes, however, many non-advantageous knowledge items exist yet still remain underutilized. Incentivizing the documentation of knowledge and successful processes will enable a collaborative marketplace and strengthen the Cardano ecosystem as a whole.
Our Desired Outcome
With a decentralized and sustainable knowledge(1) documentation system, we can incentivize individuals to participate in an ecosystem(2) of knowledge collaboration(3). An incentivization structure is both feasible and sustainable via a blockchain due to its immutable and recursive nature. Incentivization promotes individuals’ participation in the ecosystem and a smooth transition towards competitive meta-organizational(4) structures. We are not building a proprietary blockchain, but we wish to develop interoperability of our marketplace between as many layer-1 blockchains as possible with Cardano as our main focus.
Definitions
1 We define knowledge as intellectual properties, interpersonal networks, skills and expertise acquired through education and experience, and the ability to integrate and coordinate one’s experiences with others.
2 We define an ecosystem as a dynamic community of individuals and organizations with mutually beneficial relationships that consist of both collaboration and competition.
3 Knowledge collaboration is defined as the co-creation and transformation of knowledge between parties while sharing, combining, modifying, and integrating existing knowledge possessed by the parties. Knowledge brokering is defined as the organization and negotiation of knowledge between parties.
4 We define meta-organizations as business structures and groups that collaborate with higher standards than those possible on a traditional intra-organizational level.
Relevant academic articles:
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.3250>
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
We will address the challenge problem by providing a dApp to incentivize collaboration. This dApp is a decentralized seeker-solver network for Cardano. A seeker-solver network is a collaborative system where problems are presented and solutions are exchanged in return for value.
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This network includes an incentive structure in the form of a marketplace where market participants determine the value of the knowledge they exchange. This provides problem solvers with a platform to share their knowledge and receive compensation while also giving quick solutions to already existing problems.
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Implementation of our system on the Cardano network will bring impactful use cases that include a heightened capability for collaboration and innovation and the accessibility of unexplored value by Cardano ecosystem participants. This will accelerate Cardano's adoption rate through user onboarding.
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We are building a marketplace for knowledge work(1) where every member is represented individually and within the ecosystem as a whole. This mitigates knowledge exploitation while providing incentives for collaboration.
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We view innovation relative to what has been accomplished with current platform-based organizations. The capacity for innovation is greatly increased when problems are solved using knowledge and expertise from those outside the problem-related industry.
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Search before you solve. We see an opportunity to increase mutually beneficial collaboration by incentivizing horizontal thinking across industries. Put simply, rather than spending valuable time and resources trying to solve a problem internally, it is far more efficient to find solutions from outside entities who have often already solved similar problems.
1 We define knowledge work as unique knowledge sets that typically allow individuals such as programmers, engineers, academics, ect. to monetize their experience and abstract ideas.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
<u>Risks - How We will Address Each Risk</u>
Initial Costs: This is a big project with a complex problem and solution. This means we will require a scaling of our technical development team. This fund will not sufficiently cover the entirety of this project; however the fund 9 catalyst funding will help us scale our team to develop an operational and high quality MVP (minimal viable product) and provide the Cardano Community with a secure and useful dApp.
Solutions -
- We will be securing external funding while development begins to cover cost that exceed those that are covered by Project Catalyst.
- We will use applications like the Marlow Playground to do as much technical work with our current team to lower the work load and expediate the timeline pre-scaling of our dev team.
Critical Adoption within the community: This is a new project with a new team that involves an abstract solution to a complicated yet important problem. This system will only be as useful as the community members that engage with it which makes capturing a critical mass of adoption a necessity.
Solutions -
- We will be actively engaging/informing the Cardano community through town halls, discord, blogs, events and other available channels of communication.
- We will actively be soliciting feedback throughout development and beyond to better tailor the Indico System to the community's needs.
- Nearing the launch of Indico, the team will begin a focused marketing campaign to drive user adoption using social media and seeking promotion through IOG channels.
- Utilizing community feedback to make our user experience seamless and intuitive to mitigate confusion.
Security of user Data and I.P.: Sensitive user data, I.P. and funds will be flowing through the Indico System making it essential that we implement high quality structures and security features.
Solutions-
- We will conduct a robust smart contract audit evaluating all smart contracts utilized by the system.
- We will build out a competent QA team to evaluate the operational product and identify flaws to be addressed in a timely manner.
- We will deliberately avoid storing any user data in a centralized repository to avoid risk to end users.
- All employed code will be vetted, open source code, and it will be stored in a public repository.
Unforeseen Road Blocks that come up during our timeline: In any development process there will be unaccounted for and unrecognized risks and barriers.
Solution-
- We will always be transparent with our situation throughout the process.
- We will work closely with community members to ask advice as to how to maneuver these barriers as they arise.
- We respect the experience of those who have come before us and we will always be soliciting advice and feedback from the community to help ensure our project is completed on time and to the highest standards of the community.