Hello there, beautiful soul!
Hope this message finds you well.
Living in the Cardano ecosystem often feels like time travel. You blink - and there it goes. One week flies by. In that sense, it also means that it was another week of building, educating, and participating in the collective shaping of how Cardano looks like.
This week, during town hall we’ve seen great presentations from DLT 360 team and their industry onboarding efforts, building dApps with Python, Chinese community building with Dumpling, or this amazing agreements-building platform - Consenz. The ingenuity and hard work of Catalyst is shining through and we wish all the best of luck to these projects in the coming weeks and months. Well done.
The Catalyst team also shared a quick update during this month’s Cardano 360 show and you can catch the timestamped segment here. Topics? Current progress and call to action to start registering for the upcoming Special Voting Event. More details will be shared soon as well.
I also recommend reviewing community-led governance conversations around CIP-1694 and Voltaire more broadly. Learn more about these further below in the 'Governance front and center’ section.
Let’s dive into what’s the latest.
Town Hall
TH Recording: http://bit.ly/3ImqCGN
TH Slides: Project Catalyst Townhall - Feb 22 - Google Slides- TH Playlist: link here
Break Out Rooms: https://bit.ly/33i38SB
- Want to open your own room next time? Book it via this form at least 24hrs in advance and get those conversations rolling!
Next: Mar 1 at 5PM UTC. Register now via this recurring link.
Catalyst Circle Updates
Catalyst Circle is working diligently to formalize its next steps and set the firm direction and the north star for its engagement within the ecosystem. There are so many directions and needs that require attention. Lloyd Duhan offered to hold a special training session this week to help navigate these decisions with all the Circle members. The Circle will be sharing soon their insights with you.
Thank you Lloyd for your leadership and willingness to help this amazing group of individuals in their pursuit of navigating the Catalyst ecosystem.
Meanwhile - make sure to follow their Twitter account where you’ll catch some of their messaging. Or fancy a question? They are now just a tag away at your service. Give them follow here and share their profile wide.
Project Catalyst research and distributed accountability
Stephanie King of Lido Nation has shared a great milestone achievement from their recently funded project to build a community tool to help with resurfacing data insights in a humanly readable manner. In her words
“The data behind the amazing numbers in Project Catalyst - the people, the projects, the results - have always been hypothetically public. However, actually accessing and understanding it has always been difficult. If you could manage to track down one of the many, it was still up to you to click through the many tabs and rows of raw data.”
“Knowledge is power, and the Catalyst community needed a new tool: Introducing Catalyst Explorer”
“In Project Catalyst Fund9, Lido Nation was funded to build out our Catalyst Explorer tool.”
- Search and Filter
- Claim your profile
- Follow People and Projects
- Read more here or jump directly to the long-form article here
Challenge Team Updates
Thank you all who managed to find time out of your busy lives and attend one of the two Challenge Team roundtable sessions last Thursday.
If you are reading about Challenge Teams for the first time - these are dedicated community members that have stepped up to help onboard, monitor and report back to the community on the learnings and efficacy of Catalyst challenges. It’s an important feedback loop tool that community can leverage.
As promised, please find the recordings here (including video, transcript, and chat)
Both sessions worked out of this Miro. The morning session used the left 4 quadrants, afternoon session used the right 4 quadrants on the retro board. Please save/review it for your records.
During these sessions, Stephen from QA-DAO presented the following topic related to the collective efforts:
“Is Cardano Ethical? - Remuneration in Project Catalyst.”
QA-DAO looks at the Ethics of Blockchain and how it applies to Remuneration. Catch the key concepts and outlook via the following links:
- Full Video : https://youtu.be/Ncb4k8BEwVM
- Docs : https://bit.ly/3IsOdXv
Governance front and center
Last week, a community-led roundtable took place on the topic of CIP-1694. Maybe you ask, CIP what? CIPs - commonly known as Cardano Improvements Proposals - is a framework with which the community can formally put forth a proposal for an improvement for review in the ecosystem. You can learn about these more in the section further below that summarizes weekly updates from the CIP world.
Circling back to the CIP-1694 community workshop - as Zoe from Swarm reviews:
“First, in the plenum, we discussed what the CIP process actually is and how it works. We then distributed ourselves into breakout rooms on the topics of dReps, Constitutional committee, SPOs, and inclusivity/accessibility of specific communication and information.”
“During the wrap-up, we discussed some further broad governance questions; and after the “official” (more or less lol) session we also raised and collected more concerns. Overall, it has been a very broad and rich discussion on all things Voltaire! Lastly, we collectively collected points raised as good as possible as sticky notes on the following Miro board.”
You can get the full recording of this session via this youtube link. Also recommended some additional perspectives from these videos:
- Army of Spies; Jspeak; QA DAO; Voltaire Discussions; Exploring Dynamic Governance
- Not sure how GitHub can be used? This video will help you.
On a related theme, next week, a number of SPOs and developers (including some from the Catalyst community) will attend a focused technical workshop in Colorado (run by the Cardano Foundation and IOG) to review the mechanics of CIP 1694, the first in a number of community consultations planned for this year.
Full meeting minutes will be published after the event for further community engagement and feedback. If you wish to add your perspectives to CIP 1694, you can find it here.
Make sure you add your voice as the era of Voltaire rolls out!
Auditability Workgroup Meeting #2
In November 2022 we’ve kicked off the auditability workgroup re-boot. Time has come for the second meeting and we’d love you to be there. If you’d like to catch up - here’s the original Cardano Forum post from last year.
Workgroup Meeting #2:
- When? Mar 2 at 3PM UTC. You can register via this zoom link.
Last meeting we worked out of this miro board. Please review the topics as we’ll build upon our conversations further.
Recording and notes will be shared after the meeting. This invite will be circulated via email sign-up list as well if you have done so previously. If you haven’t yet - please reply to this forum post and I will pick up your intent there. Thank you in advance.
Workshops for funded projects
Last week, we announced the Funded Project Workshops on technical and business growth topics focused on empowering project owners funded by Catalyst. The goal is to develop the skills and the right frameworks to complete their projects and be successful in the ecosystem.
This week, the funded projects had the first of these workshops, titled: Business Models for Disruptive Emerging Tech Businesses presented by Harry Hellyer from Edify Collabs. The session focused on finding the best ways to express the value created by your team, its products, and services — to yourselves, your customers, partners, and investors.
Fundamentally, the funded projects present during the session went through an exercise to get under the hood of their value propositions and identify the value they bring and the ecosystems it is best suited for.
For more on the session, check out the video recording here: Coordinator workshop 21st Feb 2023 - Google Drive
Expect more funded project workshops in the coming weeks as we aim to provide more education and resources for projects building in the Catalyst ecosystem throughout the rest of the year. These workshops are going to be made available soon via Catalyst YouTube Playlist as well.
Last week in CIPs
Here’s the recap from my colleague Ryan Williams that writes these fantastic CIP round-ups. I figured you’d like them, too. So here’s the latest to get up to speed. You can catch past and future summaries via this Cardano forum thread here as well. If are unsure what CIPs are about - please check out this link to dive deeper: https://cips.cardano.org/.
RW: What happened in CIPs last week?
- CIP-??? Extendable dApp Connector [New Proposal]:
- This CIP proposes an alternative to CIP-30 for a base dApp-Wallet communication bridge whilst adding a scheme for how functionality can be enhanced.
- I (Ryan) am an author of this
RW: Continued Recommendations:
- CIP-0057? Plutus Smart-Contract Blueprints
- CIP-0086? NFT Metadata Update Oracles
- This proposal extends the CIP-25 standard for defining and updating token metadata via transaction metadata, by providing a new mechanism to update token metadata without having to mint or burn tokens.
- Interesting proposal for updating NFT (or another asset) metadata.
Next Meeting:
- CIP Editors Meeting #62 (next Tuesday):
- Feb 28th 9:30am UTC.
- Held on Discord - here.
- Agenda TBD.
Further varied governance and Catalyst community conversations can be also followed on the official Cardano forum here. Don’t be shy to be part of the conversation.
Catalyst GitHub Repo - Weekly Round-Up
One of the primary objectives this year is to make it easier for Community members to understand how Catalyst works on the technical side and to access the Catalyst technical backend to increase transparency in systems. The major side effect later this year is expected to be around the ability of the community to come along and start co-creating/helping build/suggest improvements to these foundations.
This repo is the starting point and we’re seeking improvements to it throughout the months to come. For now, feel free to bookmark the pages and lurk around as we get it ready:
- GitHub - input-output-hk/catalyst-core: ⚙️ Core Catalyst Governance Engine and utilities.
Catalyst Core Documentation - Page Redirection (draft/WIP)
Community Events
Many community events are taking place regularly across the ecosystem. In the image above and below you can find a snippet of what is available out there. A great way to lurk around and over time participate even more directly. You can browse more via this link.
Catalyst Project Completions - 400+ and counting!
400+ projects funded by Catalyst have been completed to date by submitting their self-reported close-out reports and videos. Not seeing your favorite project completed yet? You can check their progress on other tabs and also the monthly reporting output documents. Save the links below:
- Monthly Reporting: Catalyst Public Reporting Tracker - Google Sheets
- Monthly Report Output Data: Public Catalyst Monthly Reporting - Google Sheets
- Proposal Journey: Proposal Journey in Catalyst (public) - Google Docs
- Want to do more? Check this call to action about accountability and participation!
- You can also reference this town hall slide for the first meeting outcome.
Are spreadsheets a little too much? Leverage community tools like Lido Nation which you can find here or via projectcalyst.io website directly.
Get in touch
And that’s a wrap. Let’s talk Catalyst & governance via twitter, or telegram, or reddit, or wherever is your home online and keep conversations engaging on these very important topics.
Enjoy your weekend ahead!
Danny & the Project Catalyst team
Daniel Ribar
Community at Project Catalyst
Note: References in this newsletter to the 3rd party projects, products, and services are provided for information purposes only and are not endorsements. Everyone should carry out their own investigations before relying on the information provided in this newsletter.