[READY][GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Karma Delegate dashboard

Project name: Karma

Author name and contact info: Mahesh Murthy, mahesh@showkarma.xyz and Stablenode

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes

L2 recipient address: 0x627f84bb4bBA3333f253F09fe22A445F195bCF34

Grant category: Tooling

Is this proposal applicable to a specific committee?: No

Project description: Karma is a reputation system for DAO contributors. We aggregate delegate activity by aggregating and curating data from various tools the DAOs use, such as Snapshot, Discourse, Discord and on-chain voting contracts.

We pull these metrics for each delegate, assign weights to these metrics and quantify the activity by generating a Karma (reputation) score. These weights are customizable and determined by each community. Also, the scoring logic is open source, so anyone can audit and verify the scores for themselves. The aggregated data is exposed through APIs anyone can consume.

Project links:

Additional team member info (please link): Arthur, Amaury, Andre. Our team of devs have experience building high quality, scalable software systems. You can find our team’s work by looking at our product on www.showkarma.xyz

We are also closely working with the team at Stablenode who are actively involved in the governance at Optimism and various other DAOs in the ecosystem.

Please link to any previous projects the team has meaningfully contributed to: Few notable use cases of how DAOs use our product include:

  • Gitcoin DAO: The steward health cards at daostewards.xyz are powered by Karma. All the stats are calculated by Karma and exposed through API that is rendered by their frontend.
  • ENS DAO: The ENS DAO uses a discourse forum plugin we built that is powered by Karma. Data aggregated through the Karma platform is used to display governance stats of users in the forum on the user’s profile.
  • Idle DAO: The Idle DAO uses our product for governance mining (to reward active governance participants).

Competitors, peers, or similar projects (please link): Boardroom, DeepDAO, SourceCred. All these products are great, they show various governance stats along with delegate information. We go a lot deeper into surfacing delegate activity. For example, we have the ability to look at a delegate activity at a granular level on the forum (proposals created, discussed, posts created in various categories) and assign different weights to these metrics to get a true picture of a delegate’s contribution on the forum. Similarly, we have integration with Discord to understand their activity on that channel.

Most importantly and relevant to this project, we are offering a whitelabel solution, i.e, the website will be run on optimism’s subdomain and can be customized fully to meet Optimism’s requirements which no other competitor offers.

Is/will this project be open sourced? The frontend site that will be built will be open sourced. It is a work in progress but you can find the code here: GitHub - show-karma/dao-delegates-app: Whitelabel application to display delegate stats for DAOs

Date of deployment/expected deployment on Optimism: Oct 1, 2022

Ecosystem Value Proposition:

  • What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Optimism ecosystem?

Optimism DAO has an active community with hundreds of delegates who participate in the governance of the DAO. An ideal delegate participates in the DAO by actively voting on proposals (on-chain and off-chain), participating in proposal discussions on forum and discord, attends community calls and is generally involved in decision making.

As a token holder looking to (re)delegate their tokens, they need a way to evaluate a delegate’s involvement in the DAO. Having a single place where they can find all the delegates, with an aggregated view of their activity will simplify a token holder’s workflow in delegation. Even delegates gain by looking at their own aggregated activity across various channels so they can improve their own involvement in the DAO.

  • How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?

Gitcoin’s steward health cards have gained popularity in their community where token holders can learn about all the delegates in the DAO and with relevant information can make a decision on whom to delegate too. Gitcoin’s health cards display Karma’s reputation data aggregated across Discourse, Snapshot and off-chain voting. We propose to set up a similar frontend website on Optimism’s subdomain (example: delegates.optimism.io) which will consume data aggregated by Karma’s reputation system to display all the delegates and their stats.

Token holders can see who the delegates are, their activity in the DAO across different time frames (lifetime, 30 days or any other time frame) and delegate or re-delegate their tokens. This will also provide visibility to delegates into their own activity in the DAO and help them improve their contributions.

Karma has already implemented the backend that aggregates delegate data from various sources for Optimism. This grant is to build the frontend website that will hosted on Optimism’s subdomain to display all the delegate stats and give token holders an easy way to delegate their tokens.

  • Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Optimism ecosystem?

To grow the Optimism ecosystem, you need a well functioning DAO and delegates will play a key role in it. As Optimism grows, delegates will become key players within the DAO. Providing visibility into Delegate health will hold the delegates accountable, help them improve and help token holders delegate their tokens to the right delegates.

Since this site will be hosted on Optimism’s subdomain, it is much easier to garner feedback from the community and iterate to meet the needs of the token holders and delegates.

Implementing Karma will help set a standard for the DAO, since it provides a much needed transparency into delegates. Ultimately, this will help token holders understand whether they need to re-delegate.

Has your project previously applied for an OP grant? If successful, please link to your previous grant proposal and provide a brief update on milestones achieved with the grant. If unsuccessful, and this is a resubmission, please specify how you have incorporated significant changes in accordance with feedback.

No

Number of OP tokens requested: 10,000

Did the project apply for or receive OP tokens through the Foundation Partner Fund?: No

If OP tokens were requested from the Foundation Partner Fund, what was the amount?: N/A

How much will your project match in co-incentives? (not required but recommended, when applicable): N/A

Proposal for token distribution
This project is purely to improve the governance by providing more visibility into delegate activity. We are requesting a grant to support the development of work of this project and do not plan to distribute the tokens. This is in-line with what is mentioned in the proposal template.

Please provide any additional information that will facilitate accountability

We will use the funds for enhancing the frontend to support Optimism and enhance and maintain the entire backend infrastructure to aggregate Optimism delegate reputation data.

9 Likes

@bobby and team have provided feedback on the project.

  1. We will sort delegates by voting weight to begin with. After the launch, we will garner community feedback on how delegates should be sorted and displayed. We will also add additional fields based on feedback from the community.
  2. We will be working with one of the designer on Optimism’s team to make the styles match Optimism’s brand
  3. We will host the site on our end and Optimism will point their subdomain to it.
5 Likes

Thanks for the proposal! Under the ‘Grant category:’ field, please specify which committee should review your proposal (NFTs and Gaming, Tooling, or DeFi).

1 Like

Thanks, it’s been updated!

1 Like

We supported Karma in writing this proposal and will abstain from voting, but we believe their proposal will add great value to the Optimism ecosystem.

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Hello, I have some points to comment:

1- Please update the proposal with the new template, I see that some important points are missing.

2- It is not clear what the tokens are going to be used for.

3- Do you have a link to github, could you make it available?

4- As of today, is it already implemented in Optimism? if it is implemented, which of all the functionalities is already in production?

5- Metrics?

6- How are you going to promote its adoption within Optimism?

7- What advantages does Karma have over its competitors or what differentiates them?

2 Likes

I updated the proposal to address all your questions. Regarding Metrics, we haven’t launched the project yet, we can update this thread once it’s launched and is being used. Please let me know if you need clarity on any of the updates.

1 Like

Hello and thank you for your proposal.

I have some questions.

  1. How are the OP tokens going to be used? Since you are asking funds for development, a high level overview of what will be spent for what resource is needed. How many devs, what salaries etc. 10,000 $OP seems to be about $9k right now which seems quite littleto fund development of something.
  2. Optimism governance has recently switched to committee decisions. So a lot of work is happening in the committees and the committees themselves are not using the forums, apart from the case where interaction with the applicants is needed. Since you are applying for a grant to improve optimism governance, Karma dashboard should be configured to take this into account.
2 Likes

This will take about 3 weeks of work for a frontend dev and a bit of devops work. The reason it is not a huge effort is because we already have a fully working backend. This proposal is to build the frontend site. The feedback we received from Optimism team was to start with basic information and then based on community feedback we iterate.

That is a really good point. We definitely want to include committee member contribution in these dashboards. This is going to increase the scope of the project but this is something important and we will do it as part of this project.

1 Like

Hello thanks for the response. If it’s only 3 weeks work and only frontend then the requested amount seems to be quite high.

3 weeks work for $10,000 OP is $9,252.
That’s a monthly salary of $12,336 and yearly $148,032.

1 Like

Sorry, I was only focusing on your developer question. Here is a clear breakdown of everything

Frontend dev: 120 hrs X $60 = $7200
Devops: 20 hrs X $50 = $1000
PM/BD work (me): 20 hrs X $75 = $1500

2 Likes

We see lots of value in small tools like this (for all kinds of stakeholder groups), especially if maintained, further iterated & improved. The funding Ask is small overall and seems reasonable for the project size.

Generally speaking, for Optimism grants, it might make sense to add tiers for funding requests. A good example is Polkadot/Web3 grants which require different approvals & can be divided into

  • InstaGrants: up to 10K for small tasks, projects and getting the ball rolling
  • Small Grants: up to 30K for small projects
  • Large grants: up to unltd. funding for large projects
1 Like

Thank you this looks reasonable.

@lefterisjp with cycle-6 ending, should this be updated to cycle-7? What else should I do? Thanks.

I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #18 by katie] with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #37 by linda] with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

1. Presentation

We are an officially recognized Tooling Governance Committee, responsible for assessing proposals related to tooling and infrastructure (wallets, bridges etc.).

2. About the project

Karma is a dashboard to show DAO delegate activity and rank them by that activity. They are already being used by other DAOs, notably the gitcoin DAO to help token holders decide on who to delegate their tokens.

The proposal is for the project to create a similar dashboard for optimism delegates and governance.

3. About the following

Karma submitted a proposal on the 6th of September: https://gov.optimism.io/t/review-gf-phase-1-proposal-karma-delegate-dashboard/3411. Various delegates interacted with the proposal including a committee member (@lefterisjp).

4. About the proposal valuation

In this part, we focus on the following aspects:

  • Added value (good to bad): good. Having an Optimism dedicated dashboard would help token holders with the decision on who to delegate their tokens to. Could also provide insight to delegates themselves about their activity.
  • Impact or expected usage (high to low) low: This proposal will only impact token holders who want to delegate their tokens and won’t affect Optimism as a whole.
  • Current Status [Development stage/¿Open Source?] (early to ready) early: The project already has dashboards ready for other DAOs, but the optimism one is not yet ready. Code will be opensource. The proposal is to fund development of this dashboard’s frontend
  • Expenditure plan and distribution (appropriate to inappropriate) appropriate: After a query from our committee member the team provided a budget breakdown that makes sense.
  • Amount requested (high to low) low: The amount seems good for the effort needed

5. KPIs and impact tracking

The best way to track the impact of this proposal would be to:

  1. Have the Optimism dashboard implemented
  2. Perform a user survey to the optimism community to provide feedback on the dashboard and see if it helps them or not. It would be nice if the Karma team performed such a survey.

6. FINAL RECOMMENDATION: YES.

3 Likes

Voted yes - Following Tooling Committee recommendation and I’m also a big fan of DAO tooling.

3 Likes

Voted yes for this tool. Definitely a tool that can be plugged into a DAO

Voting YES following the recommendation we published with the tooling committee of which I am a member.