by 0x0e80fdfd9e13c90179ab2069bd288bd32826c499 (troysadkowsky#c499)
Should the following Tier 3: up to a 3 month vesting contract of $3000 - $5000 USD in MANA, with a one month cliff grant in the Community category be approved?
Abstract
Decentrapolooza will be a regular Decentraland convention event that allows citizens of Decentraland to gather together as artists, technologists, gamers and innovators.
The event will provide structured speaker panel sessions as an opportunity to present past, present and future projects and topics of interest.
The event will invite high profile individuals from industries such as academia, business and entertainment to participate as guests and panelists.
With a focus on decentralisation the event will celebrate the experimental application of technology in a virtual world that is limited only by imagination.
Grant size
5,000 MANA
Beneficiary address
0x0E80Fdfd9e13C90179AB2069BD288BD32826c499
Description
The recent pandemic has emphasised the growing need for virtual events. By merging video conference calls with virtual world convention halls, stages and lecture theatres, this project will increase the intimacy of a virtual event in a new and entertaining environment.
Many global events are now transitioning from physical conference halls to online video conference calls, but video calls fail to deliver the same atmosphere. This project will showcase as a bridging platform to allow global events to transition to a more virtual environment that delivers opportunities that online video calls lack. These opportunities include aspects like the ability to virtually meet up with friends between sessions, ability to move from one session to another halfway through, ability to see hot spots of participation and even allow the elderly, physically impaired and underprivileged communities to be involved in something that would otherwise be impossible for them to participate in.
The event will be hosted by Decentraland and run over 1 day in a format similar to a Pop Culture fandom based convention such as ComicCon (US) or SuperNova (AUS). The day will consist of an opening plenary, multiple streams of parallel panel sessions, workshops and a closing plenary. The streams of panel sessions will bring groups of panelists (2 to 5) together to discuss a single broadly defined topic from a list of categories. Categories will include areas such as Gaming, Content Development, Platform Development and Community Development.
This project will also aim to build academic interest. By collecting and making data available for research purposes (such as the text transcription of all panel sessions) the project allows for spin-off data science studies. For example, with the application of machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques (such as Natural Language Processing (NLP)) data scientists may analyse all the session’s text transcriptions to perform topic classification. Topic classification may be able to identify common points of interest and proposed solutions throughout the whole event. These studies could provide great insight into best directed future developments in Decentraland.
Specification
This project will depend heavily on open source and shared resources accessible from the GitHub repositories and Decentraland community. The approach will be to utilise what is already available before building anything new.
The University District and its already established structures such as Decentraland University and Learning Spheres, will make for a suitable location to run this event, though some additional development is foreseen as necessary.
A small research study will be performed to identify the feasibility of all existing reusable resources for this event. The outcome of the research study will report a detailed plan of implementation using agile and iterative development methodologies.
Necessary modifications and additions to scenes/features will be developed through the Decentraland SDK and 3D modelling software (such as Blender). This project will contribute to the open-source code repositories.
Already identified existing GitHub resources include:
- Wearables-store
- Crypto-valley-art-gallery
- Clap-meter
- POAP-Booth
- Nft-scanner
- Ws-broadcast
- Switchboard-platforms
- Grab-objects
- Guest-Book-API
- Beer-dispenser
- Donations-Box
- Paid-Button
- Paid-Lever
- Sliding-door
- Npc-dialog-example-scene
- Events-API
- Digital-bouncer
- Basic-Interactions
- Grab-objects-advanced
- discordWebsocket
- Nft-wall-example-scene
Experience has been gained in using the SDK and deploying dcl scenes to local development environments.
Personnel
This project will be managed by Troy Sadkowsky, CTO and Data Scientist at Data Logical Services Pty Ltd. Troy is a native data scientist and the owner of the Data Scientist group on LinkedIn which currently has over 100,000 members. Troy is also a full-stack Java developer with extensive experience in npm and TypeScript programming. He is moderately skilled in 3D modelling with Blender.
With the successful award of this grant, a small team of enthusiastic technologists will be assembled and given necessary roles and responsibilities in order to achieve the project goals.
Roadmap and milestones
Month 1 - Planning Phase
Month 2 - Development Phase
Month 3 - Trial and Promotion Phase
Planning phase will involve the recruitment of the team, the execution of the research study into reusable resources for this event and the documentation of the overall event management plan. Milestone deliverables include the public release of the event management plan.
Development Phase will involve the design and development of any additional components to be deployed to the scenes in Decentraland. Milestone deliverables include the announcement and deployment of any new Decentrapolooza scenes/features.
Trial and Promotion Phase will involve testing and running trial/rehearsal events to identify any issues and establish confidence for all stakeholders before the actual event is run. This phase will also involve the execution of numerous marketing campaigns to promote the event.
All phases will include research and investigation into ongoing funding opportunities, such as charging for tickets/exhibitor booths and getting support from paying sponsors.
All progress related to the phases and milestones will be regularly reported openly on social networking platforms such as YouTube, Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.