Introduction

In today's rapidly changing world, we are faced with increasingly complex and interconnected challenges. Addressing these challenges effectively requires a clear understanding of the impact of our actions. The ability to perform transparent and sophisticated impact evaluation has never been more crucial. This involves assessing the intended or unintended effects of an intervention or action, and its ability to achieve a desired outcome. This evaluation can be conducted across different levels, including individual, organizational, and societal levels. Such complex evaluation requires sophisticated solutions.

That's why we're excited to introduce IEKit, a modular framework built with Autonolas and Ceramic data streams that empowers developers to build autonomous impact evaluators. This powerful new tool, developed in the context of a grant, lays the groundwork for the creation of multitudes of open, modular and self-improving designs for how impact is evaluated and rewarded in any decentralized organization.

With its highly extensible and composable design and powerful compute capabilities, IEKit makes it easy for developers to spin up custom and sophisticated systems for valuing contribution. IEkit brings a new type of utility to Ceramic, and pioneers a novel technical architecture for creating full-stack decentralized applications.

The IEKit was built by Valory AG using Autonolas. Valory is the VC-backed team of engineers, researchers and commercial thinkers that built the Autonolas stack and is building the first services using it, offering expert, customized support to those interested in decentralizing & owning their own apps.

Empowering developers to create a better future

In an ideal future, social, environmental, and other collective challenges will be met with greater efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Our ability to overcome even the most complex and multifaceted collective problems will far exceed today's. This is a future where opaque institutions and bureaucracy, as well as inefficient closed frameworks for impact assessment, are things of the past.

IEKit represents a significant step towards realizing this vision. It opens up innovation space for impact evaluation and reward in Web3 and beyond. IEKit's modular, composable, and open source design provides an unprecedented level of flexibility and adaptability in impact evaluation. With no limits on use cases, the framework could be used for anything from general impact evaluation to specific use cases, enabling stakeholders to iterate on their approaches and improve their impact over time. By strengthening collective coordination, IEKit empowers organizations to achieve their goals more effectively. At the heart of this innovation is Ceramic, providing the robust and secure data stream infrastructure crucial for transparent and sophisticated impact evaluation.

Key Features of the IEKit

To make this ideal future a reality, IEKit offers a range of powerful features that make it stand out from other frameworks. Here are some of the key features of IEKit:

• Eliminate boilerplate development work: With IEKit, developers can skip the tedious task of building from scratch and get straight to developing coordinating and incentivizing impact.
• Transparency through open-source code: The IEKit is designed to be transparent, giving developers the ability to fork, tweak, and audit all the code that's being run.
• Full-stack decentralized operation: The IEKit can be operated in a full-stack decentralized way, allowing for greater resilience and censorship resistance. By leveraging the Autonolas operating framework, IEKit provides developers with the tools they need to build autonomous impact evaluators that are truly decentralized.
• Highly extensible and composable via Autonolas Protocol: The Autonolas protocol is at the heart of IEKit, enabling developers to add measurable actions to their IE in a highly extensible and composable way. This means that other developers can easily contribute to your IE by adding new actions that help push the evaluator towards its objectives.
• Powerful compute capabilities through Autonolas: IEKit leverages the powerful compute capabilities of the Autonolas protocol, enabling developers to process complex data streams and run sophisticated algorithms. This means that there is no upper limit to the complexity of what can be processed, making IEKit ideal for tackling even the most challenging impact evaluation tasks.

How IEKit works

With IEKit, DAOs can create Impact Evaluators with a specific objective in mind, and reward contributors for completing automated actions that push the impact towards the objective. Because these actions are handled by Autonolas, they can be composable and easily integrated with other components created by other developers.

The demo app built with IEKit showcases how an Impact Evaluator can be used to increase Twitter followers for Autonolas. The objective of the app is to get Autonolas’ Twitter account to 10,000 followers. The automated action created by the DAO is to @-mention Autonolas on Twitter, and contributors are rewarded with 300 points for each mention. The Autonolas backend watches for these actions to be completed, calculates rewards based on the relevant action, and writes to Ceramic to issue the points.

With the IEKit demo app, DAOs can create and manage their own Impact Evaluators, configure rewards for actions, and track progress towards a specific impact objective. To see the demo app in action, head over to https://iekit.autonolas.network or watch the demo video below.

In closing

The IEKit is a powerful and innovative framework built with Autonolas and Ceramic data streams that opens up a whole new world of impact evaluation possibilities. Its benefits are numerous and include greater transparency, decentralization, and extensibility, among others. With features such as the elimination of boilerplate development work, open-source code, and full-stack decentralized operation, the IEKit is poised to become the future of impact evaluation. If you are a developer interested in building impactful evaluators on the Ceramic Network, get started with the IEKit today!