Part 1 - Proposal Submission
Name of project: DataUnion Foundation
The proposal in one sentence: Power data collaborations for AI
Description of the project and what problem is it solving:
Data colonialism is dominating in the Web 2.0 space - the big corporations are taking advantage of their users and their data to capture value from AI created with their data.
We are building Data-Union-as-a-service creating data unions that produce AI ready data for co-owned algorithms. These algorithms create a new trickle down data economy as a service layer on top of Ocean Protocol - sales of the algorithms via datatokens and liquidity pools are distributed among everyone that contributes to the value creation. We do this by connecting people, data, and algorithms in the DataUnion ecosystem.
Grant Deliverables:
[ ] Gamification concept mobile app implementation sprint one
[ ] User profiles for DataUnion products
[ ] Customisation of Ocean marketplace - login & use DataUnion backend
[ ] Add Reward API to mobile app
[ ] Publish mobile app with WalletConnect & MetaMask integration
[ ] Extend backend to handle different roles in the mobile app e.g. uploader, annotater, verifier
[ ] Publish new website for the DataUnion ecosystem
[ ] Setup Docker registry
[ ] Launch the first algorithm on our Ocean Provider & marketplace
[ ] Start migrating our liquidity pool to
Which category best describes your project? Pick one.
Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean
Which Fundamental Metric best describes your project?
Total Value Locked
What is the final product (e.g. App, URL, Medium, etc)?
We are building our computer vision data union as the prototype for data unions in different verticals. We are currently working with 12 different data unions.
Our alpha is already online, please go ahead and check it out.. The mobile app is available in the Google Play store. The Data Portal is available here.
Here is a video explaining what our final product is and how we are approaching it on YouTube.
How does this project drive value to the “fundamental metric” and the overall Ocean ecosystem?
Let’s do a ROI calculation - we are using facts rather than speculation as we are ROI positive already:
Currently there are 419988 $OCEAN locked (TVL) in the DataUnion.app liquidity pool on the Ocean marketplace. Additionally we also have an active Twitter account, a Discord and a Telegram community to bring in additional users into the Ocean ecosystem. And we have 485 users contributing on our alpha website. The unleashing of data is happening continuously, check it out in our dashboard.
bang = 419988 $OCEAN TVL
buck = 224114 $OCEAN - this is explained in more detail in the financial section of the proposal, we assume 32.000 $OCEAN for this proposal here
(% chance of success) = 100% as we are talking about the current situation and the TVL is there
ROI = 419988 $OCEAN / 224114 $OCEAN * 1.0 = 1.87 which shows that the ROI of the project after this grant is above the demanded ROI of 1.0
Funding Amount: 32,200.00 USD
Proposal Wallet Address: 0xF9ac73f30dBe52c10e3d5950db66357f9d0be44D
Have you previously received an OceanDAO Grant?: Yes
Team Website (if applicable): https://dataunion.app
Twitter Handle: @DataUnionA
Discord Handle: DataUnion Foundation#1870
Contact Email: info@dataunion.app
Current country of residence: Singapore
Part 2 - Team:
Core Team:
Robin Lehmann
- Role: product owner, developer, utility man
-
Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
- GitHub: https://github.com/w1kke
-
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/robinlehmann
-
Background/Experience:
- Co-founder and CEO at DataUnion
- Ocean Protocol Ambassador program manager
Dr. Mark Siebert
- Role: partnerships, business development
- Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
- Data publishing (10yrs)
- Business Development for Data Markets
- Owning and driving global executive engagements and partnerships, Data and Open Science
- Web3 experience: < 1 Year
- Positioning businesses in emerging markets or innovative fields with focus on data and AI-driven solutions.
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsiebert/
Sarah Kay
- Role: developer
- Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
-
Background/Experience:
- Frontend development
- Computer Vision
- Ocean Academy
- Ocean Ambassador
Akshay Patel
- Role: developer
-
Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
- GitHub: https://github.com/akshay-ap
-
Background/Experience:
- Backend developer in the finance industry
- Ocean Protocol Ambassador
- Ocean Protocol Bounty hunter
Okpo Ekpenyong
- Role: developer
-
Relevant Credentials (e.g.):
- GitHub: https://github.com/okpoEkpenyong
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/okpo-ekpenyong/
-
Background/Experience:
- MD/CEO of Vesoft Ltd
- 5 years experience as a software engineer and reservoir engineer building solutions for the oil and gas industry
- Prize winner at Ocean Protocol’s COVIDathon
Heidi
- Role: UI/UX intern
Batu
- Role: UI/UX designer
Rin
- Role: developer
- Relevant Credentials: anon
Brightman
- Role: developer
- Revelvant Credentials: anon
Jackson
- Role: developer
- Revelvant Credentials: anon
Part 3 - Proposal Details
What problem is your project solving?
Here is a link to our pitch to the Ocean Protocol community on YouTube.
Project Deliverables - Category
-
Webapp is available at https://mantis.dataunion.app
-
Parts of the software are open-source with a permissive license at: github.com/DataUnion-app
-
Data is available on Ocean Protocol via our data sales portal
-
Mobile app will be live in the iOS (unfortunately still delayed) and Google App Stores. There might be delays due to the app store checks.
Data asset statistics:
Start of round 9:
Start of round 11:
Project Deliverables - Roadmap
Any prior work completed thus far?
Check our alpha web app, alpha data portal and alpha mobile app.
We managed to get into the Celo camp accelerator as one of 31 teams from ~300 applications. This helps us to access the mobile first user base of Celo which is targeted towards unbanked people all around the world - exactly whom we want to contribute to our datasets.
We also managed to get into the Outlier Venture Filecoin Base Camp accelerator as one of 8 teams from ~200 applications. This is like having 20 more professional employees on the team for three month. Unbeatable advantage, crazy network and concentration on getting to investor funding.
What is the project roadmap? That is: what are key milestones, and the target date for each milestone.
- New annotation tools and mechanisms (ongoing)
- Onboard new data unions to our tech and concepts (ongoing)
- Release gamification mobile app (Q4 2021)
- Algorithm training and sales via our Data Portal - have the data providers become co-owners of that as well (Q4 2021)
- Release Swipe-AI (Q4 2021)
- Simulate the token value flow using simulation tools (Q4 2021)
- Increase decentralisation of our solution by moving the control to smart contracts (2022)
- Allow addition of data while it resides on different storage (2022)
- Include NLP to translate annotations and cater to a worldwide audience (2022)
- Launch a governance token (2022)
Please include the milestone: publish an article/tutorial explaining your project as part of the grant (eg medium, etc).
Our web app and Data Portal include tutorial videos explaining the project.
Here is an article about our view of DataUnion and how it helps to create a better future.
Any maintenance?
These prototypes are the beginning of the journey for the project. There will be a lot more steps after that but we want to first validate our idea via the crypto enthusiasts of the Ocean community (via the web based version) and after that for other target audiences in Nigeria, South America, India and Thailand (via the mobile version).
For us it is important to proceed in an agile manner and to proceed from working prototype to next working prototype to get validation and feedback from our community.
Foreseen or possible additions?
Big additions in the future will be an independent rating system for the quality of the data via state of the art machine learning algorithms. Another validation system for the quality will be algorithm creation competitions a la Kaggle where the winning algorithms will become part of our marketplace.
The contributors that worked on the data as well as the liquidity provider of our pool will get a share in these algorithms’ liquidity pools to benefit from the results of their hard work.
These algorithms will also enable pre labeling of freshly uploaded data to reduce annotation times (basically annotation becomes quality control) and the sale of pretrained models for transfer learning.
Are there any mockups or designs to date?
Check our alpha web app, alpha data portal and alpha mobile app.
Here is a preview of our new gamified mobile app on YouTube.
An overview of the technology stack?
Frontend: React.JS + Vue.JS (web), React Native (mobile)
Backend: Flask + Python libraries, CouchDB (+ PouchDB), MongoDB
If the project includes community engagement:
Running the campaign on social media for how many weeks?
We will actively promote each phase with datatoken incentives for participants.
For the web app we will focus on the Ocean community, the mobile app will be promoted more widely. We joined the Celo camp to expand to a mobile first blockchain and get access to a user base in developing countries.
Additional Information
Market situation?
Currently there are no end-to-end solutions for the capturing, annotation and machine learning training available on the market. Especially not on this scale and with the involvement of a worldwide workforce.
Any grants or fundraising to date?
We got 129.679 $OCEAN in the funding rounds so far. 7435 $OCEAN from the Ocean Shipyard program and won 5000 $OCEAN in the Ocean datatoken hackathon. Additionally we applied for a Filecoin grant over 30.000$ but there was no decision about the grant yet.
Other costs are bootstrapped by Robin, approximately 180.000 $OCEAN as a personal investment into the project. Most of this sits in the datatoken pool but we also invested a good amount to buy 70 QUICRA-0 from the pool to reward the contributors in our initial challenges.
Time and tokens spending
At the moment we do not reward anyone in the management team for their hours. Over the course of the project, we have been working on this for 11 month now, around 4500 hours were spent by the management team.
We do reward the engineering team and there have been around 12000 hours spent by the engineers on the product so far. This means that we are very cost efficient with an average hourly rate of ~10 $OCEAN for our engineers.
To see what the tokens were spent for, please check our wallets here and here - all transactions have been made from there. And except the buying of the $QUICRA-0 as rewards and some money for Token Engineering courses (~600$) every other token has been spent on the engineering team.
Social implications of the solution?
If this project succeeds it will change the life of many people in dire situations on our planet. As soon as they get access to a mobile phone and internet they can start making a living. In Venezuela 200$ can feed a family for one month, we expect to be able to reward much, much more than that for a full month of contributions. So it is a global game changer that will enable these contributors to take care of their families right now but also retain datatokens for the future to create a passive income for retirement. Something that was not available to them ever before.
We connected to potential users in Caracas, Venezuela in May 2021 to get a first impression of their needs, limitations and willingness to help. The feedback is going to shape the project to fit to their needs.