IOG Catalyst Team: Goals for the project, validation, and feasibility?

The primary technical objectives of the proposed project will:

1. Streamline the existing Catalyst experience into a single Voting Centre platform, effectively replacing Ideascale and readying to deprecate the existing iOS and Android voting apps, to enable:

   1. Creation of role registrations on mainnet to participate as a voter, representative, or proposer(enabling all future roles)

   2. Browsing, collaborating on, and submitting proposals (at any time) with all updates signed by authorized wallet

   3. Casting, confirming and auditing encrypted votes on private voting sidechain

   4. Viewing earned and paid rewards tied to connected wallet

2. Introduce decentralized Authentication / Authorization (AuthN/AuthZ) framework to enable role-based access control for sensitive activities including collaborative (private) document editing and Catalyst dRep voting - without collecting emails

3. Collaborate with the community on CIP changes and wallet integrations to associate key activities like proposal submission and vote casting with on-chain registrations to increase auditability and accountability across funding decisions and project delivery

4. Lay unified foundations for future open-source collaboration with the community to refine processes and develop new capabilities inside a single home - without limiting opportunities for parallel community innovation

Benefits for each of the user groups impacted include:

• Voters

  • Reduce number of applications required to participate

  • Improve decision quality by helping voters find the right proposals based on skills, interests, and participation history

  • Enhance visibility of rewards and post-funding outcomes of approved proposals

• Representatives

  • Reduce the cognitive load of reviewing hundreds of proposals with intuitive navigation and embedded decision-assist insights

  • Improve decision quality by increasing the amount of staked ADA participating on every proposal funding decision

  • Boost visibility and adoption with representative discovery, including vanity link profiles on the platform complete with bio, socials, and domain of expertise

• Proposers

  • Improve proposal quality with more intuitive interface that places submission questions and guidelines alongside proposal submission inputs

  • Promote collaboration (and accountability) with embedded capabilities for co-proposing and signature-based document editing - available at any time

  • Protect intellectual property with option for encrypting drafts prior to submitting final proposals

In combination, these improvements will enhance the overall decision quality and thoroughness of the funding process, in addition to the quality of proposals submitted for consideration.

Approach and implementation

Engineering and security best practices will be followed to implement the solution, in addition to consultation with both the Catalyst / Cardano community and internal IOG subject matter experts from cryptography, and game theory domains. Prior user research and community feedback informs our initial understanding of challenges to solve for.

Catalyst Voices intends to develop iOS, Android, and Web applications from a single code base with near-native speed and performance.

We will approach the implementation of sets of features in terms of “modules”. Each module will correspond to a user role, segmenting the experience into sections aimed at completing specific actions.

Role registrations, participation history, and saved preferences will unlock new aspects of the experience to help users engage at their own pace, on their own terms.

Learnings acquired through developing and maintaining existing tools (such as Catalyst Mobile App, Voting Center, Snapshot Module) will be leveraged in order to rewrite the target development frameworks by building a single platform that is highly secure, extensible, and maintainable. While we anticipate unexpected challenges in integrating all features into a single platform, our plan to leverage battle-tested reference implementations should de-risk and accelerate development significantly.

The project will also benefit from maximizing the results of prior discovery and design research. Wireframes and mock-up designs created for and after user testing for the proposal submission module to replace Ideascale will continue to refine the UX with further user feedback gathered during the delivery of this project. This will include features and UX interactions for user profiles, cross-module navigation, and embedded guidance.

Finally, the development of Catalyst Voices will follow the testing and deployment framework planned for the existing Catalyst stack. The latest experimental features will be deployed to a public devnet, and the latest stable features will be deployed to a public testnet. The community will have opportunities to engage with new features and provide feedback before promoting features to the production release candidate.

Recurring voting events will run every 2-weeks on the Catalyst testnet to provide more frequent opportunities to engage with each of the phases of proposing, reviewing, and voting.