Atlas Analytics - Open Sourcing the Platform for the Community

by 0xe400a85a6169bd8be439bb0dc9eac81f19f26843 (howieDoin)

Should the following $150,000 grant in the Platform category be approved?

Abstract

The Atlas Corporation has worked with clients in the ecosystem for 3 years now, so we’ve come to recognize the importance of data to our clients. No matter what you’re doing in the metaverse, KPIs and feedback is crucial to understanding the success of your initiatives. We’ve provided Atlas Analytics as a platform and much of the community uses it today - trust us, we know. As we believe the platform is critical to the success of Decentraland, we want to take the first step toward making this a sustainable offering.

We are seeking funding to continue to provide the Atlas Analytics service for a year, provide enhancements to the product, and open source the code to reduce dependency on the Atlas Corporation going forward.

Grant size

150,000 USD in DAI

Project duration

12 months

Beneficiary address

0xe64581F067Cfdce58657E3c0F58175e638C30f2B

Email address

howie@atlascorp.io

Description

Atlas Analytics, available here is integrated with a scene to collect data directly from in world, and is fundamentally different from the other public data feeds that are provided. Builders can customize their own data points they want to collect, and get more granular feedback that can be visualized. The data obtained can shed insights into user demographics, a user’s technology, and helpful information to assist in debugging scenes. Atlas Analytics often catches data and users that data sources dependent on Catalyst Nodes do not, and can paint a more complete picture of user traffic in one’s virtual world.

To the best of our knowledge, we are currently the only provider of such a service in most of the metaverse. Other platforms, such as Roblox, offer these services to their builders and we believe Decentraland needs to retain similar offerings to remain competitive.

Last week we reached out to @Yemel to discuss this topic, and he agreed on the value the platform provides the community. The Foundation is not currently planning on building such a service; any analytics collected today are in support of Foundation engineering teams to improve the product and not at providing metrics and KPIs for users.

One of the goals of this project is to make this product more sustainable; we don’t want to be reaching out to the DAO for more funding in perpetuity. Instead, we think of the DAO more as a government - spending the equivalent of your “taxes” on initiatives that add value to a community but where capitalism may fail to deliver because of high barriers to entry. The local Mom n’ Pop shop may not have the ability to finance the interstate highway that would increase traffic to their destination. An individual is not going to pioneer a space program (and even when a billionaire does build their own rocket ships they are often still heavily subsidized by the local government).

We also have never, and will continue to never sell any user data. We do not consider that a viable path to profitability as it compromises the values and ethics of the community.

This grant seeks to accomplish the following:

• Open source the code, making it the property of the community. Anyone will be able to take the code and run the platform.
• Operate the service for another year. While the code will be open source, to operate at the scale of all of Decentraland it currently requires $5k/month of infrastructure and is expected to grow over the course of the year with increased adoption and usage.
• Enhance the product, alongside the community publishing out in the open, to include:
• Worlds analytics
• Official support for SDK 7
• Additional content and tutorials to help new creators onboard and understand the full breadth of capabilities.
• Running focus groups to determine how to paywall to make the solution more sustainable, and provide the highest impact new features for the community
• Bringing the platform in line with other metaverse analytics offerings so that Decentraland can remain competitive

To express their commitment to the above, Yemel has pledged that the foundation will become an “enterprise” client, and will be supplementing the funds contributed by the DAO.

Roadmap and milestones

Atlas CORP has a long history of delivering open source code for the DAO, and as such can provide the following roadmap targets:

Product Sustainability:

• Code Open Sourced and available to the community (as soon as possible)
• Focus group defined and assembled to discuss monetizing the solution now that the DAO is the owner.
• Financial projections assembled to determine future funding requirements (e.g. growth of infrastructure footprint, subsidy from paying clients).

Stability Enhancements and Upgrades:

• NPM library installation
• Worlds analytics
• Support for SDK7
• Infrastructure overhaul to protect against DDOS attacks, move to a more distributed, scalable architecture as usage increases

Feature Roadmap:

Implement the feature roadmap as determined by the focus group which may include previously brainstormed functions such as:

• User history in a scene with user path through the map
• More precise heat maps
• Searchable scene directories
• User profile information deep dive
• Airdropping helper tools from visiting user lists
• Anti-phasing / anti-cheating dashboards and reporting

This proposal is summarized due to technical limitations. To view it complete and vote on it, visit the DCL DAO Governance dApp