With the first Deep Funding round based on the new platform coming up in early 2024, it is time to tell you all about the features we have built AND the things we are planning to develop next.
In mid-2022 we started the first Deep Funding Round, based on the ideation platform of swae.io. After a very good start with some important changes that really impressed us, the Swae team had to slow down their development efforts and there was an increasing gap between our needs and expectations and what the Swae team was able to deliver. As a consequence, we investigated different routes that would put us back behind the steering wheel and enable us to lead the development and feature set of Deep Funding in the desired direction.
In June of this year, we had a Town Hall session where we explained the pros and cons of the current platform and discussed whether we should aim to have DFR3 on the new platform or have one more round on Swae. The outcome was the latter, which enabled us to further develop our own platform, adding some additional features.
At the time of writing, we have deployed the new codebase on deepfunding.ai, migrated the awarded projects and teams, and conducted some testing rounds with the help of our community. We are very happy with the results so far.
While we could give a long list of improvements to the new platform, the main difference lies in having a more structured approach and better integration in the Deep Funding website. This should lead to fewer errors, which will be a boon for both proposers and the Deep Funding operations. At the same time, the added structure will make it easier for the community to get a good impression of a proposal in a shorter time. Overall, giving a better experience to all participants!
Some of the highlights of the new portal
Profile and project information
Public profile
My Account
A Login flow and account pages that enable everyone to be in full control of their public-facing profile. We will add an option to connect with WaLT, (our Wallet Linking Tool) So behavior on the platform can be seamlessly matched with behavior on our voting portal, enabling behavior-based voting weights and token rewards.
‘Your projects’
Project overview
‘Your projects’ gives an overview of awarded, published, and unpublished proposals. In our vision, a team won’t have to wait for a new round to start the definition of a new proposal but can start at any time they like, making the project pages always relevant. The number of pools may be limited to the more standard options, but teams can change the designated pool with, minimal loss of data. As more teams are adding their proposals before an open round we can better predict participation rates and prepare for this in terms of timing, organization, and rewards. A topic to be explored is how to incentivize teams to start preparing their proposals in between rounds.
The new, tabbed project detail page
Project Detail Page
A new, tabbed, project detail page offers more information and makes it easier accessible. when loaded the overview will give the most important information on the project’s status. We will retain the comments and ratings collected during an open round and allow the community to continue to use the comments section after awarded. In a next iteration, we may have better separation between ‘before award’ and ‘after award’ communication, to invite the community and teams to keep the conversation going.
A multi-step proposal flow designed for Deep Funding
Select and switch pools, even after proposal creation
Select and switch pools
The new flow features: An easy way to select and switch pools, even after proposal creation, and a very structured proposal information form, with required fields, max. Nr. of characters and partly generic, partly specific questions per pool.
Get support in entering milestones and calculating rewards
Guided milestone definition
Perhaps the best new feature is the new structured way of adding milestone deliverables that will support the proposer by calculating the total amount left after each milestone and checking that they don’t exceed to total amount requested.
We are also assisting the proposer by prefilling the milestones that are required, such as the 25% that should be reserved for API calls in some of the pools.
These milestone features alone will remove significant friction and confusion and save time on the part of the proposer and the review team.
The new commenting section.
- Comments
The new commenting section helps visitors to focus on the comments that are deemed most helpful on average by the community, by enabling anyone to up- or downvote each comment once. Additionally, the proposer of the project can mark comments they feel are most helpful or insightful.
The new rating section
Ratings and reviews
The new rating section enables more structured ratings and reviews of the projects (prior to voting). Community members can show their preferences in the same way the Peer Review team does, by rating on the 4 dimensions; Feasibility, Viability, Desirability, and added value to the platform, leading to simultaneous display of community and ‘expert’ reviews.
It will be interesting to see how both ratings (community and peers/experts) will evolve and where they will continue to overlap or differentiate.
Email functionality
Finally, unlike Swae we will have the functionality to email individuals or groups of proposers directly. While this may not seem groundbreaking, we have experienced that the absence of this option in our former platform proved to be a large handicap, sometimes leading to unnecessary friction.
Features in progress
All this has been developed and has been tested. In the meantime, we are pushing the envelope by adding two more important features before going live:
Select, describe and invite team members
Level 2 participants’ network
Proposers will not just describe their team members, but can also invite them to log in and connect their own Deep Funding public profile to the project. In time this will enable us to show which people were involved in what projects, creating a richer profile for all participants and laying a foundation for further networking and exchange of tasks and capabilities
Nested RFPs
Structured RFPs
Embedding the RFP (‘Request for proposal) concept deeper in the proposal flow and wider platform. RFPs will be nested into pools (e.g. SingularityNET RFPs or Community-driven RFPs) and each RFP will have its own maximum amounts defined. This also needs to be propagated to the milestone calculations and other checks during the proposal flow. Additionally, we will also have a section in WordPress where the RFPs are showcased including all information and conditions, based on a predefined foundational template.
What’s next?
We believe that all this functionality will already offer a very usable platform. But of course, it doesn’t stop there! We have many additional ideas and improvements in mind that will give more or better information or reduce the operational tasks.
The list below gives an impression of the features in the pipeline. This is not set in stone, as new feature requests may come up and priorities may shift. But it gives a good overview of our current thinking. We hope to see many of them (but probably not all) in production at the end of 2024. We will list them in order of priority, based on business value and urgency. The order of an item on this list doesn’t say anything about its overall importance. There may be opportunities to offer some of the features as an RFP, to be developed by a community team. If feasible and successful, this may change the order of the deliverables.
Future improvements
High priority improvements
(After completion of the ‘Level 2 network’ and RFP integration)
Structured AI-service data.
Category: Proposal platform
Description: Enforcing better structured AI-service data in the proposal creation flow, and use this data throughout the platform such as the project detail pages and, potentially, overviews or dashboards.
Medium priority improvements
Townhall updates, Listening sessions, and DF Calendar
Category: Frontend Information
Description: Offering input and output related to community (zoom) events to the website, giving more publicity to past and future events in a predictable format and location.
Automated project status updates, WP native form
Category: Operational process support
Description: The automation and integration of the current manual process of collecting and uploading project status surveys
Automated contract generation
Category: Operational process support
Description: Have a contract generated for awarded teams based on a standard base contract and structured project input.
Milestone delivery and approval process
Category: Operational process support
Description: Teams can mark milestones as ‘Delivered’, and add relevant data so the review team will be informed and can start the approval process. After approval, the milestone will be paid.
Communication tab
Category: Proposal platform
Description: Enable proposers to easily keep track of communications with DF operations by a separate tab on ‘my proposals’. Make proposers aware of feedback by a daily aggregated notifications mail, and by adding this feedback to the notifications tab.
Title: Import/export data
Category: Proposal platform
Description: At the first stage enable export of all relevant data in a CSV format. Next stage develop an API for two-way communication based on certain triggers.
Medium/low priority improvements
Dashboards (services, projects, and contributors)
Category: Proposal platform
Description: Overviews of the progress of projects, the related AI services on the platform, and best contributors per round.
Overview of contributions per participant
Category: Proposal platform
Description: Overview of all contributors with an option to rate and ‘like’ a contributor, making their contributions more relevant in one’s personal view.
Integrating Community Engagement Scores
Category: Integrations
Description: The community-built Contribution Engagement Score (CES) tool requires a two-way integration:
- All activities per user on the platform will be exported to the CES, so different calculations can be made.
- Calculated contribution ratings can be imported back into the platform, so contributions by valued contributors can get a higher visibility
Note: This will likely overlap with the CSV/API feature
Lower priority improvements
Blog – Comments and Circle logins
Category: Frontend Information
Description: Create more dynamics and activity in the blog section by enabling comments and allowing Circles to write and publish blogs of their own.
LLM-based summarizing features
Category: Proposal platform
Description: Have an LLM make a summary of all feedback on a proposal.
Have an LLM make a comparison of all proposals + feedback.
Note: This will hopefully overlap with the RFP created by the community ‘Content Knowledge Graphs’.
Team member profile pages
Category: Proposal platform
Description: Overview and detail pages of individual team members
Integrating a freelance platform
Category: Integrations
Description: Future project of integration of a Freelance platform into Deep Funding, making it easy for participants to offer their capabilities and for projects to augment their existing team
Options to improve the accessibility of videos by LLM techniques.
Category: Frontend Information
Description: Embed functionality in Deepfunding.ai that will automatically summarize videos, including a short summary for the preview, and a longer summary for more in-depth information. This can be complemented by a search function making the videos more accessible, as well as features that will give an overview of topics, current status, history, decisions etc. This might be integrated with the Community-driven RFP on a ‘Content Knowledge Graph’
Communicate with awarded teams
Category: Proposal platform
Description: Differentiate between pre-award and post-award conversations on the discussion tab of awarded project detail pages, to facilitate ongoing communication between team and community.
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That is all for now, but we are fairly certain it won’t stop here. While we are currently starting to add more content into ‘Gitbook’, such as detailed instructions for awarded teams, and reports and updates on our operations, this may ultimately find its way to the platform. Similarly, we might add a solution that will help the teams share their knowledge effectively. And perhaps our community will come up with additional features and functionality we haven’t even thought of!
In any case, we hope that you are as excited as we are by what we already accomplished as well as this list of improvements we are looking forward to. With a solid foundation already rolled out we are ready to continue building great stuff and make Deep Funding an attractive program and a thriving community for every individual who wants to contribute to the realization of a Beneficial Artificial Intelligence!
Wanna read more on how we plan to develop the organizational aspects of our program?
Continue to read ‘Scaling For Success – Operations Strategy 2024’.
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