Why are you participating for Based India?

I am from India and I feel that the general society looks at the web3 and blockchain industry as a bad industry where scams happen and people just loose their money. What folks don't see is that crypto is just a part of this industry and not the entire thing. There are so many technological principles involved in working with blockchain and decentralised systems that if they are used in our daily computing/consumer applications, these concepts can make a lot of things better and secure.

I understand that building applications that are web2-friendly, and are made to help solve problems in lives of everyone, can actually really help in the adoption of these technologies. The jargons and terminologies can be safely abstracted away from users without them having to face a steep learning curve of understanding things.

If we look at my parents generation itself, for the maximum part, they did not understand the usage of smart phones. But once technology grew, internet became more and more advanced, many things in life became more and more accessible through a device that you can travel with everyday in your pocket. And now even the older generation knows how to use smart phones. How? because of such consumer apps that helped users by making their lives easier, and the users were attracted towards learning and using the smart phone.

In web3's case, we can actually make UX and User Journeys simple so that people don't have to face in-depth technology, but just appreciate the fact how decentralisation is making their lives easier, transparent and more secure.

What challenges are you focusing on?

Main focus: Challenge of having local communities greater transparency, participation, and control over their shared assets and infrastructure through decentralized governance. In many residential and commercial communities, there is a lack of clear processes for fund allocation, decision-making, and member participation. This can lead to centralised control, mismanagement, lack of accountability, and a disconnect between community members and their admins. And traditional models for community ownership and management are often opaque and involve intermediaries, which can delay important decisions and create a sense of mistrust among members.
This project serves as an MVP and a sort of collection of building blocks for a bigger and more advanced project. The key features of this MVP are:

1. Transparent voting: Ensuring community proposals are discussed as intended and voted on by members.
2. Fund management: Ensuring community funds are used as intended.
3. Seamless member participation: Enabling members to vote on decisions, and propose initiatives.
4. Decentralized governance: Removing reliance on centralized authorities and intermediaries, empowering communities to manage themselves more effectively.
5. Easy onboarding and usability: Making the system simple enough for non-technical users to participate, without needing to understand blockchain or web3 jargon.

By addressing these challenges, our project aims to democratize decision-making for local communities and allow them to have ownership of shared resources and governance processes.

How does your submission address this challenge?

While still being an MVP, this submission provides a decentralized platform that allows communities, both residential and commercial, to manage memberships, vote on proposals, and collect shared funds.

Key features include:

1. Tokenized memberships (ERC-721 NFTs): Each community member holds an NFT representing their participation in the community. Currently voting rights are based in the form of each member having 1 voting power to ensure equality. And voters are shown to maintain transparency while decision making.
   Potential Future Feature: Votes can be made hidden for privacy-centric proposals, with higher number of options and also allowing for making funding proposals transparent.
2. Safe Wallet SDK integration: We use Safe wallets to securely manage community funds.
3. Seamless onboarding with Privy: To remove barriers to entry, we utilize Privy for easy onboarding using google login, allowing even non-technical users to join and participate in the platform without needing to deal with private keys or blockchain terminology.
4. Real-world compliance, on-chain immutability: While compliance is handled off-chain, our solution ensures that key actions such as fund collection and voting are immutably recorded on-chain, enhancing trust and transparency.

This solution empowers communities to self-govern effectively, offering transparency, fairness, and ease of use through a decentralized system. It removes intermediaries and enables real-world communities to manage their assets in a secure, efficient, and participatory way.

Challenges I ran into

I am taking part in this hackathon as a single person. I am a web2 developer by profession, with web3 experience of past projects. This is my first time working on a full project solo, so it was a tedious task getting it done in time with all features ready as I wanted them to be. Along with that I am still new to using Cursor AI so figuring out the right way of prompt engineering was something I also learned on the go.

On core technical part, designing and then properly building a POC form of smart contracts to serve as building blocks for a much more grand and in-future project was a task that took some time. And then from frontend I would say I faced a decent number of bugs in working with proposals on how to make them easy to understand through the UX.

Thinking about easy to understand design was definitely a challenge, which i overcame by discussing the design with my parents, if it was straightforward for them or not (which it was :))