Deepfunding Blog

To all our dear community members from SingularityNET: We are ready to start our Deep Funding program! As outlined in our Phase 2 proposal, Deep Funding aims to seed our decentralized platform with new and exciting AI services. But it has the potential to be even more than that! We hope that the program will spur discussions on the importance of decentralized AI, on decentralized governance within SNET and beyond, and on the future of Deep Funding itself.

We also hope to see lively discussions from people that are passionate about their idea, their project, and the mission and vision of SingularityNET. In short, We are looking forward to constructive discussions and meaningful contributions from all of you!

Over the coming rounds, we will explore how best to facilitate everyone’s participation, make sure that everyone is properly rewarded, and ensure that all processes remain transparent and fair.

Optimal outcomes of this process are:

• A vital, proud, and constructive community
• An environment that teams love because they do not only get funding but will also get guidance and support in a positive atmosphere
• A collaborative environment where people with ideas and people with relevant expertise and capabilities meet to create wonderful things
• An incubation ground for promising new projects that will become part of an expanding SingularityNET ecosystem

There are several areas where our community members can be active. Some of these areas will require more time and effort than others (but may also bring higher rewards). Let’s have a look at them:

Giving feedback to new proposals

Using our platform everyone can give feedback on a proposal. In fact, this is divided into ‘Concerns’, ‘Questions’ and ‘Strengths’ for a better overview and targeted approach. This means you can give constructive criticism, and also compliment a project on its strengths! Having this properly organized will give guidance for voting. 

Rating

The platform also facilitates a way to grade the overall merit of a project from 1% to 100%, by using a slider. This should enable the most valuable projects to float to the top.
We hope that many people will contribute, but we may need to take some measures to ensure that there will be no doubt about the fairness and truthfulness of the feedback.  We should avoid unwanted bias in the ratings coming from votes from people directly involved in the projects. This includes community members that are actively helping the project (see next paragraph). There are several ways to accomplish this, and this might take some time to mature. While a bit beyond the scope of this article, we’re looking forward to discussing the best way to ensure reliable ratings in the short and long term on our social media channels. 

Project support, coaching, and mentoring

If adopted by the community, this aspect of Deep Funding might just become its main success factor! Over the coming rounds, we would like to develop a support group of people that can help the project teams in many ways. Creating a good proposal, doing some AI research, helping publish a service on the platform, marketing execution, graphic design and so on. This offers our community members an opportunity to become involved in promising projects even if they have no AI expertise. Projects may reward these individuals in the way they see fit.

For the projects, the benefit would be immense. Most funding programs promise guidance, but few can deliver on this. Having a growing, multidisciplinary group of people that are able and willing to support promising AI projects in multiple ways can be a huge differentiator. This will attract the best projects out there, which in turn will attract new talent to the support group, leading to a virtuous circle of growth. 

Voting

Every token holder will have the option to cast a vote, based on the principle of one token – one vote. We will use the SingularityNET voting portal for this to enable wallet integration. Already in the first round, we will have our first experiment by applying ‘grade voting’. Voters will have the option to grade a project with a number between 1 and 10, instead of just stating ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

We will define the lowest average score for a project to be eligible for voting. By this measure, we want to avoid projects with low scores and low quality getting funded, even if there are not many participants. We will also assign a minimum percentage of votes cast to be eligible to avoid strange outliers. See the specifics of round one for the current numbers. Note however that these metrics are fully open to debate until the portal opens for proposals! 

Feedback on Deep Funding itself

Our processes and tools are not finished. There are a lot of things we know that can be improved, and probably also many things that we are not yet aware of. we are particularly looking forward to discussions on how to improve our processes, which functionality we most urgently need to add, and even more fundamental questions related to the future of Deep Funding. Along the way, we will discover what questions need to be voted upon and what type of issues we can cope with, in a less formal way. The ultimate goal is to have Deep Funding governed as an independent community-driven DAO. Making Deep Funding an example of how a decentralized community can come together and solve complex problems. Before we are there, we need to ensure that there will be an enduring active community to engage with the DAO, not just in the next year, but in many years to come.

For this and all of the above, we need to develop the main ingredient of decentralized governance: A fair and transparent incentive structure. 

Incentive structure and reputation

All the actions described above take precious time of our community members. We need to make sure that these efforts are rewarded appropriately. It will be a challenge to make this fair and transparent while keeping it as simple as possible.
One aspect of this is reputation management. By keeping a log of a person’s constructive contributions, we can estimate and rate their value to the overall system. Based on this ‘reputation score’ we can assign more or less weight to their feedback to projects and other users. Except for weighting their feedback, we can also make reputation a factor in rewards. The longer you have been active, the more effort you put in each round and the better references you get from other users may also impact the rewards you will be given. 
This is a complex domain, and it will evolve over time. In the first round, we will start without any financial incentives. But perhaps the interactions may get value in later rounds when our reputation system is up and running and integrates these first-round interactions in its algorithm.

Join us 

As you can see, if all develops as intended and with all your support, this will not only be a funding platform to support the growth of our AI platform, it will also be an ongoing experiment in decentralized governance. We are looking forward to discussing all this in-depth and to sharing our experiences and tooling with many other decentralized teams facing the same challenges. Interested? Please fill out this short survey and indicate in what way you would like to support the program. Note that this is just a first assessment and submitting the survey will not commit you to anything.

At SingularityNET we have a real possibility to make a change, in so many ways…

We hope to see you with me and the SingularityNET team on this journey!