Building a Public Roadmap: Draft

English General Discussions
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Hi everyone,
We have begun the building of a public roadmap with the following objectives:

  • to establish goals and timelines for the Cardano Foudation
  • to establish community expectations of the Cardano Foundation
  • to provide guidance and oversight to the Cardano Foundation
  • to transition CF activities to a DAO

This is an open and public roadmap. Here is the current screen captures as of Sep 6, 2020. It would be good to have a roadmap that can be voted on by the public by September 20 (approx). Dates, line items, and strategies are subject to change based on public inputs. Please feel free to comment below or on the document linked below.

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Here is the first open public discussion on YouTube to get things going:

Here is a Telegram channel for discussion: Telegram: Contact @BuildTheRoadmap

Here is the link to the Public Open Roadmap excel spreadsheet: CF-RoadMap.xlsx - Google Drive

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I encourage users to engage in this discussion and looking at the draft and giving feedback - as I think we as a community is ready to help CF accelerate its efforts. I know I am going to try to do my bit!

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Here is a pdf of the spreadsheet for local viewing

CF-RoadMap.xlsx - Sheet1.pdf (45.7 KB)

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First of all, what an awesome initiative.
Big kudos to you guys.
Its great to see community members chipping in and evolving the Cardano project!

However;

Every time i try to comment on the excel sheet and join the debate with my thoughts and ideas, someone deletes/removes the comment.

Thought this was supposed to be an open and public roadmap/debate.

Hope this is a glitch and not someone trying to censor.

Keep up the good work guys!

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@fluxah you have to request permission on the document to get permission to edit it. Otherwise your comments is autodeleteed because you are looking at view only.

I have to use permissions, otherwise some troll could delete everything.

You can request permission inside the document and I will approve it, or email me your google account email address at rickymac/at/email.com and let me know.

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Hey Rick.

I didn’t wanna edit the document, just comment on some of the points as i went through it. I thought it allowed me to do that.
However thank you for the explanation :slight_smile:

I might send you an email after i go through it thoroughly if i feel like I have some valuable points to add , appreciate the offer of inclusion!

Also a little tip, I think you should add a space/“at” in the email address you posted (rickymac at email.com) to avoid getting spam from forum bots!

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I haven’t watched the whole video yet so maybe what I write is addressed, but I can’t hold back on ranting this:

It’s all well and good providing these ideas, and I applaud you guys for having the courage to do this. I will happily participate and throw my ideas out there. Many of us can sit down and provide good ideas. But ultimately who makes the decisions at the CF? This is the source of the problem is it not. I don’t want to sit down and waste my time participating if this goes back to the CF board and they conclude arbitrarily that they don’t want to do anything on the matter, or they pick and choose what they want to do. I think a lot of the community feel we don’t have a voice.

Currently it seems that an unelected person or a small group of people make decisions FOR the community, with the communities money. I believe this generally leads to bias - people in power are incentivised to make decisions that benefit themselves and their egos. Look at the political/financial system that doesn’t entirely if at all function for the majority of the people as an example of that.

CF belongs to the community, correct? but it doesn’t feel that way. Why did the broader community not get to vote on the board members? Where are the accounts of the CF. How much did the McCann hiring cost? Who is being paid for what. Why is this not public information IF the CF is owned by the holders of ADA. Why were we not asked as a community if we wanted to hire McCann. Why did a community manager get fired? Someone made a decision FOR us, without considering community opinion. Why is everything a secret. One thing I love about Charles and IOHK is the transparancy.
My feeling is that some of the group of people in power think their decisions are more important than the people they work for. Some of the past admin team were ridiculously self righteous. That along with the secretive firings, says to me that the corporate culture at CF is not in line with Cardano values.

For example. I critique the website on the forum. I get no feedback from CF. I’m not expecting personal attention but some obviously unprofessional and embarrassing things on the website that I mentioned, have since been removed under the radar without any comment. It’s good they got removed, but it seems that some workers at the CF want to pretend that they didn’t make any mistakes. (I’ve learnt since that this is one department or just one person at CF). That’s the corporate marketing paradigm: “Every one must be positive about everything we do, and you have to walk on eggshells if you make any criticism because it will get ignored or we will ban you if you discuss xyz subject more”.
This is the reason the website went so long with those obvious mistakes being uncorrected.
Everyone is scared of FUD but complete non disclosure is the result.
They hire workers and ambassadors that fit in line with these/their values. Who concluded the community wants these values in the ambassador program that CF took upon themselves to make


It would be nice if it was admitted openly by the CF that the CF isn’t functioning well at present. Currently I see no accountability.
I would love the CF to come out and say “Yeah, eventually we want to make the CF a DAO”

Until the governance problem of the CF is fixed I find it hard to be motivated to input.

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ALL of this :point_up:t5:

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You make all great points and I share some of your skepticism. I think these sentiments are shared by a lot of us who are keeping up on the community news. This is precisely why its important to work to put this roadmap together and put things to a community vote. Remember that we are the fourth pillar of the Cardano ecosystem and without us neither CF, IOG, or Emurgo have any reason to continue working on this system. It’s healthy and bullish for Cardano for us to be assertive and constructive in our responsibility to hold our other three pillars accountable. If this initative fails, then we try something else. To do nothing, means we’ll probably get nothing but the current status quo.

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@emurgo_nico are you willing to join the conversation? Please let us know your thoughts.

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All for this effort to design a roadmap that matches the community’s desires! That being said I think we need to express our willingness to help in taking on some of the new load, as we’re potentially creating a new burden for the CF. What needs to be done is two-fold: 1. creating a roadmap to map our goals and 2. describe how WE the community could help in achieving them. I made this video to describe my concerns: https://youtu.be/C06PviIX2d0

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I can’t speak for everyone but I have noticed an energized attitude in our community. There is deep rooted belief in Cardano and a heavy desire to contribute something to make our global financial operating system live up to it’s potenial. With all of the great development that has dropped in 2020, the enthusiasm to get started is about to boil over, but many of us are proverbially waiting at the starting line for the signal. I’m pretty confident that if CF had better communications with the community about any “official” roadmap, that we would have seen more people volunteer or apply for grants to peel off some of the burden from the CF. My point is that we need some sort of agreed published roadmap to even start having those conversations.

The best outcome that I hope for through this initative is that we communicate our commitment to coming alongside them to both under-gird and supplant what they’re trying to do. Then based on that trust, open a dialog to come to a community consensus and then consensus with the CF too, to commit to a more codified version of this roadmap and delegate where needed.

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Hi guys i find this tool, its a nice way to a group collaborate in the road map, after that it can be plugged in to a Jira.

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Here in lies the problem. Cardano is an engineering project. The solutions to problems are predominantly fixed by code and software engineers. There is relatively very little a non-engineering entity can contribute to an engineering project.

Ignoring engineering, I believe these should be the ‘strategy verticals’ for a non engineering roadmap:

  • Funding (DAPPs, Defi, Engineering solutions)
  • Marketing (Summits/Conferences. Website)
  • Reporting news/information (Social media / website)
  • Community support (Social media / website)
  • Legislation?

I think the ‘actions’ in any roadmap/strategy/plan should be prioritised because some things are not important at all, but are listed alongside incredibly important things. To establish what is the priority the community can vote on the actions. Personally I think the dates should be removed. A lot of the ‘actions’ will be continuous, and it’s hard to project or establish how long different actions will take without knowing how many people are working on those actions.
If you do the above, then the contents of the ‘roadmap’ become ‘Cardano Improvement Proposals’(CIPs). Dor Garbash accounced the Catalyst Project and Voting app at the summit: https://gyazo.com/02e639011c8528c0ffcc16ed69972a07
So there is already an engineering solution being built where literally any strategy or actionable solutions within those strategies can be proposed, funded and voted on by the community when Voltaire is released. Which would make a roadmap obsolete. I guess that is why Charles referred you to him.

Also the purpose of the Cardano Foundation becomes obsolete, and the solution to that obsoleteness is again an engineering solution: Make the Cardano Foundation a Digital Autonomous Organisation (DAO) so the community have access to the significant amount of funds (apparently owned by the community) currently locked up with Cardano Foundation.
We as a community can’t achieve that. Charles said on telegram he is hiring a dedicated product manager specifically to look into implementing a DAO, and he is hiring a lobbyist to try to get legislation passed for legal rights. So I trust he will sort that out in the future.

Assuming the Cardano Foundation will continue as they are, what is in our control as a community? Marketing/reporting/community support begin with a good source of concise information: a website or a wiki.
If CF refuses to do anything about the current website, which seems to be the case. I believe the current non engineering priority should be to make an alternative ‘community’ website or wiki that contains the information the official website should contain. Most importantly what the current website needs:

  • On social media I see the same questions asked again and again: Collect the reoccurring questions and write the solutions in a FAQ on the website.
  • A News portal / or twitter account that gives updates about what is going on, and the latest announcements. This will require the community speaking and interviewing with engineers like Dor Garbash (like you do in The Cardano effect)
  • Show a link to IOHK and EMURGOs teams.
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Just to note, this already exists tho’ it’s been moribund for quite a while, needs bringing up to date, maybe some reorganization: https://cardanowiki.info/

(If you’re tempted to think it’s too outdated/boring/whatever so we might as well start afresh, it actually gets fairly decent traffic, four figures per day last time I checked, and a few of the pages are pretty good.)

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Hi Rick,

Thank you very much for the draft roadmap.

I will support your idea from Japan.

Thanks.

toshi

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I really agree that Cardano Foundation is not engaging with the community as it should be.

Good layout breaking down per mission statement. It’s a bit overwhelming to comment on for the average person, and there are several points that I don’t think are relevant.

Commenting on the screenshotted version:

Driving adoption

Marketing - I’m going to be radical and say I’m not sure CF should be doing “marketing”, actually, depending on what the word means. They should, however, provide a stream of original information about what they are doing via Youtube, Twitter, and blog. Which I think they have not been doing.

Hardware integration - Ledger - I think that is already handled by a consulting company paid by IOHK?

Interoperability Crypto - “Integrate with Ethereum” - my perception is this is protocol driven. Once the Cardano protocol allows for it, which is not yet, tokens can be moved from other blockchains, but the other blockchains also need to be interested and implement protocol updates. In other words highly technical, still way off, and nothing CF could engage in.

Interoperability Fiat - VISA, Google pay. Interesting! I would like to see CF engaging with the relevant actors, and reporting on the effort in the appropriate way.

Adoption - define strategy to reach 1 million, 10 million
 Yes! 100%. Also need to define what counts as “adoption” and what a “user” is.

Smart contracts - I dont see any of this as the CF’s job. I expect IOG and Emurgo will knock it out of the park though.

Annual development conferences - CF are not developers so wont be able to speak with authority, this should be left to IOG & Emurgo.

Grants - interesting!

Web presence - cardano.org, cardanofoundation.org, “remove passive voice & complex expressions”. Yes, absolutely. I actually don’t like the cardano.org website at all. What is the relation between the websites, who will take ownership of work on cardano.org? Add videos, make it human. Make regional pages for regional community.

Ecosystem development - “onboarding/migrating projects from ETH” - I see this as something that requires developers and needs to be handled by Emurgo/IOG.

Shaping Legislation and Commercial standards

Legislation support - I would expect CF to track committees and workgroups in major jurisdictions, to engage where conductive and represent Cardano, and summarize the effort. Legislation moves at its own pace so no timelines.

Taxation support - guidance on accounting in different jurisdictions - I think guides for the largest countries should be produced. Of course, potentially a bottomless pit of work for other countries.

Growing the global cardano community

Council - yes, some type of election

KPI quarterly survey of performance - all the efforts CF is engaged in should be surveyed at regular intervals. Quarterly is a good cadence.

Community management - Japan, Africa - sounds good to me.

Community engagement - QA for target exchange listings. Bringing in exchanges I believe involves some developer work, so again not something would have for CF.

Community platforms - bidirectional decision making platform. Like what for example?

Ensuring stakeholder accountability

Who are stakeholders?

Facilitating Partnerships

Work with IOG, Emurgo partners - a bit vague.

IFI partnership, Country strategies
yes, a plan here.

Financial reporting

Unsure about this one.

Other points

As for dates, only scope what is reasonable for next 6 months. No hard dates.

Moving CF to a DAO. I would be interested in an investigation if some limited function can be lifted into a DAO. Not an an all or nothing approach. Also to have a smart contract, that expires at the end of X months, and transfers control back from the DAO, to allow for reevaluation if the approach has worked. For governance functions, kind of timed experiments.

Before finalizing document, weight the items on the list by importance.

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We support all of this
 :point_up_2:t4:

We would also like to expand on marketing and general adoption. Currently marketing is Cardano community and crypto focused and rightly so, moving forward a more global marketing and awareness approach should also be considered.
We have just published Cardano and Staking PR material (including video where applicable) across 450+ global sites and forums, including Yahoo! Finance news, Asia News, India Forex, Pakistan Forex, Middle East, most of crypto, trading and investment forum including travel and entertainment site with the purpose of generating awareness for Cardano and hopefully adoption. If we can do this (as a nobody in this community) imagine what a proper PR and marketing company can achieve with allocated budget.

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what happened is CF gone?

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Thanks for taking the time to review roadmap. So regarding my own contribution part:

One current example is ideascales inovation platform where it is no longer the case of one person having an an idea and getting etiher voted up or down but a process that involves more than one person refining and communicating on the idea and giving feedback to the users who would then vote on the idea and then offer more steps of refinement. In this way we get communication not just from one person to the other but the person offering the idea gets influenced by others and the others get influenced by the person offering the idea etc.

So what I see so far is some holes in the platforms we offer for our community. We had some great video meetings for smaller parts of the community and the CF but in general what became actions and then how they where refined (again a bi-directional process) is less structured and could use some platform.

We see the same problem with experts now that we will have a treasury system where you can delegate voting (liquid democracy) but where we also need a platform and this type of two way communication and refinement process between the experts and voters who delegate to the experts.

Thirdly in governance research anyone that have any social sciences would tell you that in any system with humans involved you cant just do the math and think it will work just fine. You need to define the process and how communication will work. An examples is the failed vote we had on ITN where sure the system was there but users where not informed well in advance and there was no platform to convey voting topics effectively.

Finally I think we will need to research from the grounds up what exactly are the type of decisions we will make and then what type of platforms and how to make it a two direction process and not just a one off vote is going to be very important going forward and will help us be a united community instead of a fractured one. For example for some type of projects for founding disagreement can be very easily solved by splitting into different projects and also in refining ideas majority only agrees 90% on instead of discarding it for the 10% the majority dislikes.

Hope that gives some clarity in my line of thinking here. The reason why I think this falls on the CF resonsibilities is because it is part of what will make up the Cardano community and how we engage with each other in effective ways.

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