[READY TO VOTE] Crowdsourcing Useful Verifiable Data

Mission Grants šŸ¹
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The following is a sponsored mission request:

Crowdsourcing useful verifiable data.

Delegate Mission Summary:

Crowdsourcing verifiable data about the constituent components of Web3 will significantly enhance discoverability and trust at the user interaction layer. This enhancement improves the Web3 customer experience by making it easier for users to understand and engage with our extremely complex ecosystem. By offering users accessible, community-sourced insights, we will make Optimism the most user-friendly and easily navigable choice in this field.

S5 Intent : Intent 3 ā€œImprove the Consumer Experienceā€

Proposing Delegate: opmichael.eth

Proposal Tier: Ember for amounts less than 50k, Fledgling for teams requesting more.

Baseline grant amount: 300,000 OP total

Should this Foundation Mission be fulfilled by one or multiple applicants: Multiple

Submit by: To be set by Grants Council

Selection by: To be set by Grants Council

Start date: To be set by applicant

Completion date: September 30, 2024

Specification

How Will this Delegate Mission Request help accomplish the above intent?

The ā€˜crowdsourcing useful verifiable dataā€™ mission is a strategic initiative aimed at enriching the consumer experience within the web3 space. Achieving this full mission will require iterative progress, with each stage building on the foundation laid before it.

This mission is fundamentally designed to harness the collective intelligence and expertise of a diverse crowd to generate a repository of useful and verifiable data. By aligning with one of Optimismā€™s core principles of decentralization, we aim to democratize information gathering and validation, thereby enhancing transparency, accuracy, and accessibility of data for various applications. This initiative directly supports the overarching intent to foster a community-driven approach to problem-solving and innovation.

The mission first establishes public infrastructure and APIs for developers, facilitating the creation of verifiable data. However, its primary focus is on collecting, aggregating, curating, and querying this data to achieve the ultimate objective: fostering a vibrant ecosystem enriched with useful verifiable data. This mission will unlock new use cases within the Optimism ecosystem, such as enhancing Optimismā€™s ā€˜Trust Tiersā€™ with advanced reputation features, creating social applications for community building, developing data-driven mini-games, and implementing a safety layer to ensure secure smart contract interactions.

Please explain alignment with the relevant Intent

This mission proposal directly supports Intent #3: ā€œimproving the consumer experience,ā€ by equipping developers with the necessary tools to develop next-generation applications powered by useful verifiable data. These applications are expected to foster sustainable user growth and secure a solid product-market fit within the Optimism ecosystem. Additionally, as more developers create applications that enhance the pool of verifiable data, this collective resource grows in value, enabling even more sophisticated application use cases.

The current state of web3, characterized by its challenging navigation, disjointed user experiences, and vulnerability to fraudulent activities, underscores the urgent need for this mission. By prioritizing the collection and utilization of verifiable data from the outset, we enable critical functionalities such as enhanced reputation systems, smart contract safety ratings, and beyond.

A growing data lake of publicly accessible verifiable data removes significant obstacles for developers, allowing them to focus on crafting applications that enhance user experiences. Again, as more developers utilize the data lake, the amount of verifiable data grows, attracting even more developers to build for Optimism users, amplifying the missionā€™s effect. Engaging this verifiable data flywheel unleashes substantial potential for the ecosystem, paving the way for a future where users confidently navigate web3, backed by a solid verifiable data foundation and groundbreaking applications.

What is required to execute this Delegate Mission Request?

  • Development
    • Infrastructure
      • Digital identity creation
      • Attestations about digital identities
      • Incentive mechanism for data creation
    • Tooling
      • Developer API facilitating attestation creation and search
    • Applications
      • General and use-case specific
  • Data creation campaigns
    • Data quests
    • Application integration incentives
    • OP rewards for user engagement

Listed responsibilities and/or expected deliverables:

Deliverable 1: Infrastructure Development

Build platform that facilitates crowd-sourced creation and aggregation of attestations about any entity, including:

  • Digital identity creation for any object, e.g.,:
    • People
    • Wallets
    • Smart contracts
    • Organizations
  • Attestations about digital identities
    • Facilitate peer-to-peer attestations and entity-to-user attestations
    • Attestations that can be agreed or disagreed with by other users
  • Incentive mechanism for data creation

Deliverable 2: Tooling Development

Build tooling that makes the data created by above infrastructure useful and easy to use.

  • Tooling
    • Developer API facilitating:
      • Creation of new attestations
      • Searching and advanced querying of existing attestations
      • Flexible utilization of above within new and existing applications

Deliverable 3: Application Development

Build general and use-case specific applications leveraging above infrastructure and tooling that enable creation, search, and curation of attestation data.

  • Example applications:
    • General attestation/identity explorer portal
    • Ecosystem search/explorer using verifiable data
    • Peer to peer DAO reputation tool
    • Composable profile creator
    • Smart contract security (aggregating auditor and social attestations)
    • Social applications that leverage and generate many-to-one claims
    • Reputation / review systems to help users make judgment calls on trustful interactions

Deliverable 4: Data Creation Campaigns

  • Data quests
    • Incentivize creation of data with rewards (tokens and/or quest completion attestations about participants). Example quests:
      • Create an attestation
      • Attestations about specific part of ecosystem
      • Give yourself a nickname with self attestation
  • Application integration incentives
    • OP tokens to applications integrating above infrastructure to distribute to users
    • OP tokens to reward applications creating data about specific part of ecosystem
  • OP rewards for user engagement
    • Direct distribution of OP tokens for utilizing above infrastructure

How should the Token House measure progress towards this Mission?

  • Attestation smart contract deployed: 1/1
  • Developer API deployed: 1/1
  • Promotion event announced: n/n
  • OP incentives deployed: n/n
  • Application integrations: n/n
  • Attestations created: n/n

How should badge-holders measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

  • How many subsequent applications are using the missionā€™s verifiable data infrastructure in their own application design?
  • Has the introduction of crowdsourced useful verifiable data introduced new features and use cases to subsequent application developers?
  • How many user wallets are submitting new verifiable data?
  • How many new identities have been created?

Have you engaged a Grant-as-a-service provider for this Mission Request? No

Has anyone other than the Proposing Delegate contributed to this Mission Request? This is a sponsored mission originally proposed by @mkultra with input from intuition.systems

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Thank you for taking the time to post this @Michael!

Looking forward to discussing this further with the community.

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I am a strong supporter of this proposal for several reasons:

  • This initiative is a significant step towards enhancing transparency and trust within the web3 ecosystem. By enabling users to contribute and verify data, we are not only democratizing the information flow but also fostering a community-driven approach to data validation. This will undoubtedly lead to a more robust and reliable Web3 infrastructure
  • It aligns perfectly with the intent to improve the consumer experience. By making verifiable data easily accessible, we are simplifying the decision-making process for users, thereby enhancing their overall experience within the ecosystem
  • The emphasis on attracting technical teams with strong design fundamentals ensures that the execution of this mission will be of high quality and standard. This is crucial in maintaining the integrity and reliability of the data being crowdsourced
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I support this proposal. Crowdsourcing verifiable data in Web3 adds a crucial layer of trust to the online environment. It simplifies complex decisions, enhances security for smart contracts, and fosters innovation within the Web3 community. Supporting this mission is about shaping a more secure and user-friendly digital future.

A couple of examples that come to mind:

  • Imagine knowing which smart contracts are safe to use in the Web3 world. Crowdsourced data can provide real-time insights and warnings about potential risks, making it safer for users to engage with these contracts.

  • Think of a system that tracks and verifies the reputation of users within Web3 platforms. This data can help others trust and collaborate with individuals, fostering a more reliable online community.

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Really good examples, I agree, I think having better crowdsourced data can lead to a bunch of new applications that can be built on top of this data.

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I support this proposal.

I find it very impactful that this mission request has the potential to streamline the onboarding of non crypto-natives by helping them identify trustworthy sources to interact with. Web3 needs a single source of truth like this, and the potential for applications built using this suite is endless.

What is an ideal primitive/product that the team behind this mission request would like to see built with them first?

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One of the most important things we can do imo :saluting_face:

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I support this proposal!! I have been studying crowdsourcing and graphy theory since my college days and there has yet to be a sensible/logical solution of aggregating verifiable and trustworthy data. There is still no single verifiable source for people to reference globally and a trustworthy place, in addition, for people to rely on. With this proposal, we can truly leverage the best benefits of blockchain and Web3 to solve deep data search problems in Web2, and thus solve a complexity and variety of consumer problems that we didnā€™t realize we could solve!

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Thereā€™s a bit to clarify and ask here. Broadly speaking, Iā€™m generally very much in favor of something like this being built.

First, locks for grants of this nature are 12 months. It is unclear in this proposal whether that was understood. Critical milestones will generally be determined by applications but the broad guidelines are fine signposts.

Second, itā€™s unclear who the recipients of the grant are. Is the idea that each recipient would generate an end-to-end roadmap for crowdsourcing data and carry it forward to deployment? And would the grant council be responsible for grant selection, etc.?

Third, are you new to the Collective? I suspect you are not, but if so, welcome ā€“ itā€™s great to have new faces with thoughtful asks. If not, apologies for my ignorance. In any case, possible to get a brief rundown of your org affiliations and whether you work in the general field of verifiable data?

Fourth, could you more fully define the boundaries of what is ā€˜crowdsourced useful verifiable dataā€™?

Finally, i donā€™t know whoā€™s responsible for this influx of shilling this mission proposal by new accounts ā€“ although itā€™s great for people in the community to show support, in practice this pattern of support tends to reflect poorly on the proposer (at least to me).

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Absolutely thrilled about this proposal! Itā€™s a game-changer for the Web3 experience and a perfect match for Intent 3ā€™s mission. This could be a huge leap forward in how we build trust and interaction in our ecosystem.

Youā€™ve got my full support on this one. Letā€™s make Optimism the go-to platform in Web3!

Cheers,
Mihailo

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@jackanorak greatly appreciate the thoughtful reply and the warm welcome :slight_smile: I am relatively new to this side of Optimismā€™s governance process but I am learning as quickly as possible. Iā€™m a core contributor at InternDAO, which is a decentralized consulting DAO. I am also a core contributor at Intuition.systems which is building generalized attestation infrastructure. I was actually introduced to the open mission proposal window after a call with some former OP Foundation folks and felt that this was the perfect opportunity to intersect verifiable data and open-sourced building.

With that said, I am not 100% certain of the mechanics of the 12 month grant lock, but will look into it - 12 months is a reasonable timeframe - and critical milestones being set by the applications also makes a lot of sense to me. In my initial draft I tried to illustrate how an applicant may approach establishing and communicating those initial milestones. I think I can make that more clear by updating the draft and specifying that applicants have freedom to set milestones and that the mission is merely suggesting considerations as they build their own roadmap.

Your assumptions around grant recipients are correct. The mission in its current form requires applicants to submit end-to-end roadmaps for crowdsourced verifiable data - however applicants have free range over how ambitious or narrow their approach, who their end user is, and what use case(s) theyā€™re solving for. I had hoped to properly communicate that in the ā€˜How Will this Delegate Mission Request help accomplish the above intent?ā€™ section; however your reply is making me think that the ā€˜Listed responsibilities and/or expected deliverablesā€™ section is going to confuse readers. Is that where things started to get confusing when you were reading the mission proposal? If so, I can focus new clarifying language there. Good call out, thank you!

I have no strong opinions nor do I know of any best practices when it comes to grant selection. I have expertise in verifiable data and would very much volunteer that knowledge to help with selections. In my mind there are three possibilities here (1) grant council, (2) independently formed committee for this specific mission, or (3) a consortium between the grant council and independent experts. If it were up to me then I would lean toward #3 as I feel that it balances both the councils experience with subject-matter expertise and helps to spread high-level culture to new entrants. Is that a possible path forward? I would really appreciate your insight here. Also, in an earlier comment, I mentioned that so long as I can stay away from conflicts of interest (specifically referring to my affiliation with Intuition), then i would absolutely love to help with selection. That could take the form of me recusing myself should Intuition submit an application, and lending my support on all other applications.

I am happy to better fully define what is ā€˜crowdsourced useful verifiable dataā€™ (thatā€™s a great question that I know many others will have and I think the term ā€˜usefulā€™ might throw people off). For the mission proposal, ā€˜usefulā€™ is in the context of web3, more specifically to enhance web3 discoverability and trust.

Also to provide more contextā€¦any claim about any object can be captured as verifiable data provided its stored in a verifiable data registry (w3 spec here: Verifiable Credentials Data Model v2.0. Objects can be people, smart contracts, products, organizations, etc. - anything that can have a decentralized identifier can be an object (w3 spec here: Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0) and statements about those objects can be considered verifiable claims (aka attestations). The nature of the resulting crowdsourced attestations therefore depends on the use-case-specific applications ultimately built atop verifiable data infrastructure and the objects those applications are making attestations about. Hopefully that doesnā€™t make things more confusingā€¦in short blockchain infrastructure introduces sovereignty to the things we say, and by organizing the things we say around decentralized identifiers we can build out new knowledge and social graphs that introduce entirely new uses cases: verified reviews, crowdsourced smart contract safety, decentralized reputation, authentic work history, guaranteed credentialing, just to name a few.

In my honest opinion, this is the type of technology that marks major turning points in user adoption.

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@jim380 Thank you for taking the time to signal your support and for so clearly articulating the benefits of this mission. I want to highlight your third bullet as I think we still have a lot to learn regarding how to best attract and work with technical teams. Itā€™s my opinion that weā€™re one cycle away from decentralized applications that will fit the more traditional web2 definitions of product-market fit and attracting technical teams at this juncture will be the greatest indicator of long term success.

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Helpful to know. So I take it that Intution.systems would likely serve applicants to this grant, or would it apply directly for a grant as an infrastructure provider?

Yeah, I think the idea here ought to be to make sure the expected deliverables are matched to likely grant amounts - the way this is laid out is a lot for any project to take on, and the phases as defined may not apply to all grants. I think the proposal ought to be a bit more inclusive in this respect.

Iā€™ve read this proposal a few times now and am worried that the actual thing being sought after here is still pretty obscure to me. Is this proposal intended to be inclusive of all sorts of implementations of tooling around crowdsourcing attestations, etc.? Are we giving grants to dApps that build out attestation services on existing infrastructure? Are we seeking only novel types of infrastructure to be built? Is it the case that, as defined, this mission request would exclusively serve grantees that would be potential users of Intutionā€™s offerings?

And if Iā€™m not sure what this is for, in plain English, Iā€™m not sure who is actually going to know to apply to this. And thatā€™s troubling because how this reads at the moment is that this mission request is essentially tailored to Intuition and its prospective users. So Iā€™d love to see how this mission request could be made more inclusive, both in its definition and in its scope.

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The Intuition team does intend to apply for this mission should it be approved and has been directly encouraged to propose this mission from folks who hope to see more deeply technical teams embedding themselves in OP governance.

Amazing call out, we agree that the current milestones could alienate teams. Would love to hear some suggestions on how the milestones could be made more flexible, without pigeonholing teams into predefined tiers. The intention was to be able to accommodate a more diverse array of projects, of varying scope, but with a lean toward technical teams. At the end of the day grants are a scarce resource and technical teams, whether new or established, have limited opportunities.

The framing is intentionally broad, because it is meant to be inclusive of any new, novel, impactful ideas that people bring to the table, though weā€™d love for this mission to have more of a technical bias. To your point, for the sake of allowing a more diverse array of projects to apply, it is probably a good idea to edit the Milestones to be more inclusive. The problem space is quite large, and while infrastructure is important, it is not, by any means, all that is needed to achieve a critical mass of useful verifiable data about things in Web3. Application developers, community leaders, educators, etc. are all very important pieces of the puzzle.

While the fundamental mission does placate to the fundamental primitive that Intuition is building, there are many teams approaching the problem of crowdsourcing verifiable data, for example Disco, Ceramic, Gitcoin Passport, World ID, Clique, and others that arenā€™t top of mind this moment. In my opinion this mission may serve as a calling card for other existing teams to enter the OP ecosystem through the mission grant program.

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GM @mkultra! I find this Mission very intriguing, but I share some similar thoughts with jackanorak regarding the one-year lock for Builder Grants. You can read more about it here: Collective Grant Policies

Furthermore, while I appreciate the room for creativity, I believe that a Mission Request, being the RFP itself, should provide a more detailed outline of the initiative to be executed. Considering that the Grants Council will review all Mission Applications to select the team(s) to carry out each Mission Request, specificity can greatly assist them in making the right decisions. You can find more information about Mission Requests here: Missions v2: Season 5

In essence, my recommendations are as follows:

  • Make the Mission Request more specific with clear expectations.
  • Adjust the percentage allocation per stage, as the grant will likely be locked for one year (Builder Grants)

Iā€™m glad to see you here and I hope to continue seeing your interesting ideas on this forum. :sparkles:

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Thank you @brichis, the feedback has been clear and I agree. I am going to be making edits to the proposal tomorrow. Are there any specific steps I should take after the edits are made so others are aware of them?

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Hey mkultra. Any update on these edits?

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Hey all! also awaiting for the updates.

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updated version coming tonight (MST)

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wanted to also make sure you got the @ mention:

updated version coming tonight (MST)