đź“Š ZOMG! Dashboard

Community Grants
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ZOMG! Dashboard

:shield::heart::bar_chart:

Background

The Zcash Users Group (ZUG) is an independently-funded organization where members learn and earn. ZUG curates educational content for a growing audience of early adopters. We have more than 30 paid members and nearly 1000 subscribers, including Ycashers and Pirate Chain users.

Activities:

Each week, we host
- a member meeting for internal operations
- a public workshop to discuss weekly news and demonstrate new applications
- a public channel to share daily polls, trivia and rebroadcasts

Learn more at ZcashU . org

Motivation

  • We educate our audience by sharing timely information about Zcash developments
  • We’ve assembled a pseudonymous R&D team from within our own ranks
  • We will create a simple dashboard to keep up-to-date on the status of all ZOMG grants

Accountability

Receive milestone alerts and timely reminders

“ZOMG needs help holding grantees accountable as it is outside the ZOMG time commitment”
From <[zomg-meeting-minutes-7-6-2021/39675](https:// forum. zcash community . com/t/zomg-meeting-minutes-7-6-2021/39675)>

Transparency

Visualize overall grant progress

“There is an ongoing problem on verifying that milestones are completed”
From <[zomg-meeting-minutes-7-6-2021/39675] (https:// forum. zcash community . com/t/zomg-meeting-minutes-7-6-2021/39675)>

Clarity

Make confident projections

“ZOMG wants to make sure they (ZOMG) don’t get too far ahead of themselves in granting”
From <[zomg-meeting-minutes-7-6-2021/39675]
(https:// forum. zcashcommunity . com/t/zomg-meeting-minutes-7-6-2021/39675)>

Technical Approach

We will fork Zdash .info and incorporate data from Grants.zfnd . org to produce three pages:

1. Grant Milestones

2816Ă—1904 294 KB

2. Grant Reserves
!(https://i.imgur . com/XKrqW6h.png)

3. Performance Metrics

  • Alerts and reminders
  • Exploratory stats (min/max/median)
  • Rates (completion, funding, savings)

Execution Risks

Additional reports are subject to data availability.

Execution Risks are minimized because

  • we recruit from a diverse community of ZUG members,
  • we target weekly milestones, and
  • we host public meetups every week

Upsides

  • Gain insights effortlessly
  • Leverage existing applications (grants.io, aftok. com) and past grants (zdash.info)
  • Support an independent community and inspire new developers

Schedule (6-10 weeks)

We expect to deliver three milestones within 10 weeks or less:

I. Design Dashboards (2 weeks) ($8,000)

Week Task Deliverable
1 Interview and Empathize Publish user stories
2 Collaborate and Design Publish wireframes

II. Develop Back-End (4 weeks) ($16,000)

Week Task Deliverable
3 Define Data Detailed data flow diagram
4 Extract Data Source data lake
5 Transform Data Relational database
6 Load Results Query database to update dashboard

III. Develop Front-End (4 weeks) ($16,000)

Week Task Deliverable
3 Front-end framework Live UI/UX template
4 ZOMG Pipeline Dashboard Live schedule overview
5 ZOMG Finance Dashboard Live budget overview
6 ZOMG Performance Dashboard Complete dashboard with additional metrics

Maintenance (weekly)

If necessary, ZUG members will propose a follow-up grant to provide weekly dashboard maintenance including data entry and/or additional automation.

Team

ZUG Team = $400/hour

  • Lead Developer(s) maintains user requirements and backlogs
  • Data Scientist(s) defines data requirements and develops back-end
  • UI/UX creates wireframes and develops front-end
  • Marketing distributes internal and external annoucements to ensure collaborative design

Budget ($40,500)

We reward our contributors
via Aftok . com or similar

10 hours per week for 10 weeks at $400 per hour = $40,000

Plus $500 for miscellaneous tools = $40,500.

z2z. to/ZcashU

3 Likes
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Sounds like a good idea, I’d prefer we get somebody to do this for $40 per hour, $400 per hour is crazy.

Edit: I see it looks like $400 per hour for a team of 4, is that correct? That leads me to some follow up questions.

  • Will each person work 10 hours per week?
  • Will each person be paid the same rate of $100 per hour?
  • Can profiles of the team be shared? Including examples of previous work.
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$40k grant for a webpage that tracks grants.

ZOMG minutes have plenty of detail & there are existing tools for tracking projects. Do we need this?

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Who will be the end user of this portal? Will MGRC Grant recipients themselves need to sign-up and maintain the status of their progress or will this be up to ZUG?

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We discussed this at our last meeting and were going to reject this on the basis of the high cost of $400/hr, and the high total cost.

Now that I see that it’s ~$100/hr per team member I think we’d be open to discussing it again at our next meeting.

Just so that it’s clear to us and everyone, could you include a breakdown of hourly rates for each person, along with a link to a CV or portfolio that makes it clear the $100/hr rate makes sense given their experience and how it matches to the work they’d be doing?

Just to set expectations, it’s possible that the cost will still be too high, since this isn’t exactly what we need for our internal processes, and the forum and ZF grants pages are probably the best places for public transparency, since they’re the canonical places where decisionmaking happens.

But I want to go back to this because our discussion was based on a $400/hr rate, or at least that’s what I was operating on, which seems to have been a misunderstanding.

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Just to add on this point: we currently have a ZOMG dashboard/spreadsheet that tracks all of our grants, our existing funds, commitments, projected balances, etc… constantly updated for us by the Zcash Foundation ( @Danika and @Dodger )

A second dashboard with the same information seems redundant to work already being performed.

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I was unaware of an existing ZOMG dashboard / spreadsheet.

Is it publicly viewable? If yes, link please?

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It’s not currently public, I believe that is because it has details of accounts and where they hold funds that they probably don’t want public.

ZF updates it for us before our weekly meetings so when we discuss grants we know our current budget/liabilities.

Having said that, it’s 99% aggregated public info like block balances, grant amounts, milestone payments, market rate, etc… I think a version with a few sensitive details removed could be made as a public doc. We could post it along with the meeting minutes for transparency.

I’ll bring it up at the next meeting.

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Thank you.

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Our dashboard ingests data produced by zfnd.grants.io but can also incorporate other data sources like Discourse posts and exchange data via APIs. Please let us know exactly what you need for your internal processes during our design phase.

We are looking forward to reviewing your current spreadsheet/dashboard when it is made available. It is likely that your current tools require redundant and manual data entry to maintain, while also prone to human error.

For example, how do you connect the data, manipulate it and visualize it to achieve your dashboard? We can reduce time and effort required to leverage readily available data while offering additional features like alerts, reminders, and interactive visualizations. Our work will bring together a single-source-of-truth.

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The ZOMG! Dashboard is broken up into 10 weekly milestones, each culminating in a demonstration during our regularly-scheduled, public meetups.

We assume 40 hours per week for the 4 required roles. We benchmark rates to other entry-level grant recipients by role. Our team’s rate is both highly competitive as well as negotiable.

The idea of setting up more flexible community funding mechanisms that are more inclusive of pseudonymous contributors is traditionally well-received in the Zcash community. Here, through Zcash Users Group, we present such an opportunity.

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Thanks for supporting our idea!

Will each person work 10 hours per week?

We are allocating a maximum of 40 hours per week for each milestone and we will split the earnings between contributors after each delivery.

~~We host live working sessions in our Discord channel. ~~

Can profiles of the team be shared? Including examples of previous work.

Our core contributors are a pseudonymous extension of Zcash Users Group. Our members include both amateurs and experts. Our wallet’s view key, which includes our membership database and transaction history, is available upon request.

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Plenty of Detail

Minutes are a cumbersome way to depict key metrics, especially over time.
Forum discussions have a high level of transparency but this is not a translatable or accessible form of media for casual users, analysts and non-English speakers.

Do We Need This?

ZOMG is calling for additional support. ZF is being called to provide more transparency and accountability. However, hiring more people to manage data will add complexity to an already time-consuming, but critical, task of scheduling and budgetting. We believe current work flows can be automated away by leveraging existing tools… and without requiring any additional maintenance or data entry!

$40k grant for a webpage that tracks grants!

Unofficial ballpark ranges for these vendors’ dashboard solutions are $100,000 to seven figures. Typically, these vendors will route you to one of their partners for business below $100,000, and deals with those partners tend to fall in the price range of $25,000 to $100,000. Jan 11, 2018
https://www.yurbi.com › blog › mu…
How Much Does Business Dashboard Software Cost? - Yurbi

By donating $40,500 to Zcash Users Group in the form of milestone payouts, ZOMG/ZF and the broader community not only gain rapid and real-time insights from a single-source-of-truth, but they are also spurring the growth of an independent Zcash community.

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image
image1611Ă—839 138 KB

Great questions. There are six main users:

  1. Anyone in the Zcash Community or Cross-chain ecosystem that are interested in governance topics including zomg’s budget and calendar
  2. Retail Users can watch the progress of our favorite projects instead of sifting through wordy minutes
  3. Builders can study the frequency, duration, and status of related projects to refine their own grant proposals, potentially finding new areas to coordinate and collaborate with others
  4. Media, narrative & policy are guided by infographics and news alerts
  5. ZF/ZOMG gains clarity with statistics and projections
  6. Institutional investors who are accustomed to dashboards like Messari.io

No maintenance is required to keep the dashboard up-to-date. By leveraging the data publicly available on the blockchain and on grants.zfnd.io, we can provide insights in real-time.

No, users do not sign up to view the dashboard or operate it in any way.

1 Like
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I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the grants platforms features.

grants.zfnd.org is a bespoke platform built (and hosted) for the Zcash Foundation by the grant io team. As such it’s lacking many features such as a out-facing API running for applications to connect to. If we wanted that functionality it’s likely that we would first have to pay grant.io to build it and then others could utilize it. I don’t know how much that would cost or if ZF would pay for it.

The back end information in the grants platform is 100% manual input via grant applicants, ZOMG, and ZF. ZOMG and ZF manually review/approve each milestone before payment. Having pie-charts and bar-graphs on a separate website wouldn’t reduce time or effort required in the grants process.

Further complicating matters is the grants platform (even if it had an API) has zero information on current ZOMG holdings. ZF has several separate accounts which hold ZEC and also USD which are part of the base calculation of obligations/commitments of ZOMG to current and future grant milestones.

The only way an external application like the one you are proposing would be able to display this additional information is if ZF themselves input the data, manually, each time a payment is made from one of the accounts. ZF is already doing this via a spreadsheet for ZOMG and I don’t think it makes sense for them to do it twice.

A solution to not duplicate work is that we could simply share a large part of that spreadsheet via our meeting minutes, as I suggested above. If graphics are desired then Google sheets makes it pretty easy to add charts and graphs to that data.

For the reasons I outlined above, both the platform and any linked GUIs would be reliant on ZF and the accuracy / “truth” of that information. If a typo or mistake occured it would be reflected on both sites.

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As part of the Extract Data milestone during Week 4, we will write a public endpoint and open a pull request into the grants code repository. To foster our effort, please refer any colleagues at the grant.io to our virtual meetups.

ZOMG holdings can be estimated by block rewards minus payouts. The unknowns may or may not be classifiable. For example, your Google sheets can be streaming inputs that help fill in the blanks when necessary should users request these sorts of advanced analytics (out of scope).

When the payout is registered on the grants platform, the API endpoint will receive the change and update the visual. On Week 4 (“Extract Data”), we will demonstrate how you will be able to follow a URL or make a GET request in your browser.

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Pseudonymous is not a term that should be used to avoid providing proof of competence.

I’m fine with grants being provided to people who do not expose their real identity to the community at large, but (if they are going to ask us for money) we need to be able to see what these people are capable of, such as GitHub repos etc.

On reflection I’m not sure what value this will bring so I would not be in favour of funding this.

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Milestones assure that payouts are only made after deliverables are submitted. Public meetups and live working sessions allow many members to contribute, even you!

Our polling reveals that more than 9 in 10 members of the Zcash Community would like to see ZOMG Dashboard live.

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What poll ? First I’ve heard of that.

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Please follow the Zcash Users Group on Twitter. The majority of the followers are previous followers of ZECpages.