Hello there, beautiful soul!
Hope this message finds you well.
And that’s a wrap for the submissions in Fund11. Earlier this week, the public submission deadline expired and now all Fund11 proposers with active submissions will get a chance to refine and finalize their proposals ahead of the Community Review.
Registration is now open for Community Reviewers. Just navigate to cardano.ideascale.com and answer the pop-up message if you’d like to participate. Make sure to do so before the end of day UTC on Dec. 10th.
What else? This week, After Town Halls are back - your favorite Catalyst hangout space. With help from Christina and LidoNation - you can expect these break-out sessions to resume their regular cadence. If you would like to host a room - make sure to register it before Tuesday every week so that the team can plan accordingly using the registration here.
With that - let’s dive right into other things happening around us.
Town Hall #148
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- Townhall #148 link here
- TH Slides link here
TH Playlist: link here- Want to host after town hall? Register here before each Tuesday
Next: TH #149 on Dec. 3rd at 5 p.m. UTC. Register now via this recurring link.
Community Review Ahead
Learning about Fund11 for the first time today? Make sure to check out the Catalyst Weekly #91 to get all the latest. You can check it out here. There are lots of exciting updates, changes, and more.
Now that the Submission stage has closed for Fund11, it’s onto the Community Review portion. And YOU can take part.
- Community Reviewers provide opinions, scores, and feedback about proposals submitted
- Reviewers come from all walks of life and regions around the world
If you are wondering why you should participate?
- Help to provide data and opinions to voters to make their decisions
- Learn about cutting-edge innovation on Cardano
- Receive incentive rewards for your review or moderator contributions
- Unlock other opportunities to contribute to Catalyst
The deadline to register your interest via the cardano.ideascale.com form (shows as a modal window when you log in) is Dec. 10th, by end of day UTC. You can also change your mind later in your profile settings. You will be emailed instructions later in the week on what’s coming next. As always, feel free to bookmark Catalyst Knowledge Base via docs.projectcatalyst.io GitBook. How to participate in the community reviews section is linked here.
What’s on right now? Proposers are finalizing.
At the moment, all proposers who are currently in Fund11 should spend their time and energy planning around Project Catalyst to fine-tune their propositions. What are some of the key things to focus on? Here are some key things to consider that were shared with all Applicants earlier today as well via email.
Comments section
It is important to keep an eye on all comments submitted under your proposals. There may be information requested of you to confirm compliance, or generally your readiness as a proposal, or just curious insights from fellow community members. Ensure to check that section periodically to stay up to date with the latest development of your application status. This is done via comments to ensure public accountability and track record of changes made (if any). Due to volume, these are expected to continue throughout the Community Review stage as well. Thank you for your kind co-operation.
Categorization
Ask yourself - is my proposal in the right category? Have I read everything correctly in the category brief where I submitted my proposals? Am I not misaligned to any of the eligibility requirements? Category briefs can be found via:
- Cardano Use Cases: Concept
- Cardano Use Cases: Solution
- Cardano Use Cases: Product
- Cardano Open: Developers
- Cardano Open: Ecosystem
- Catalyst Systems Improvements: Discovery
- Catalyst Systems Improvements: Development
For example, take the Cardano Use Cases classification. This is the category where you are going to build something that leverages the Cardano blockchain. There are three levels: Concept, Solution, and Product.
If you haven’t done a feasibility study to build a prototype and demonstrate Proof of Concept (PoC) - then the Concept track is right home for you. If you have an existing working prototype as PoC, and this is accessible to the public - then you can proceed to the Solutions track towards making a step on the way to MVP - Minimum Viable Product.
If your product has already launched, has user traction on the market - and now you want to extend advanced functionalities to that specific product, or new features - Product is a great category for that. In case you are building a brand new product that hasn’t been launched yet, well then it’s time to consider whether you’re out of prototyping already or not yet and adjust accordingly.
For Cardano Open: Developers need to ensure that everything they build is open source, this is a critical requirement for this category. If you are seeking to build upon your existing product as feature extensions and similar endeavours - you may want to consider one of the Cardano Use Case categories as well. As always - reading category briefs is highly recommended.
For Catalyst Systems Improvements - it is critical to ensure compliance with the category brief - especially to ensure clarity of the testing framework proposed and or compatibility with the existing roadmap via Catalyst Voices and Accelerator proposals. If you’ve submitted there, keep an eye on the comments section of your proposals these days for additional clarifications where required.
Proposals will be expected to have the final category assigned/determined ahead of the moderation period of the Community Review stage scheduled for early January. If you would like to change categories, tag a moderator on Ideascale in the comments section under your proposal.
Budget limits
Is your budget the correct amount? Is it not under the limit (universal minimum is 15,000 ada), or over the limit (varies based on category)? Did you consider that the budget must be stated in the primary fields as ada-denominated (and not $ or other currency)? All of these will lead to an automatic archival. Does your budget explanation match well with your total amount requested? Make sure it does for better alignment.
Milestones
Your milestones do not require to be in finalized form but should represent a quality outlook of your proposal roadmap. Put a good effort into outlining your outputs, deliverables, and acceptance criteria. However, once any proposal is approved post-fund vote - Applicants will need to produce a more detailed/appropriate level of milestones during the onboarding stage in the form of an actual Statement of Milestones. This will be reviewed and approved by the community-led program and funding is conditional upon passing this stage. You can learn about requirements, which will not be too dissimilar in Fund11 compared to Fund10 - outside of some adjustments.
Licenses
All categories require you to declare your open-source status. As you do, make sure to indicate what license you are going to use wherever applicable for clarity of engagement. Stating simply YES isn’t sufficient. Do not let the community engage in guesswork. To highlight, Cardano Open: Developers is a fully open-source category by default. Indicating any other licensing option in this category specifically will result in proposal archival. Please read the category brief to understand the requirements exactly.
Applicant limits
There are submission application limits in place for Fund11, following the outcome of extensive community-led workshops post-Fund10. This limitation does not affect ONLY ideascale profiles but looks into the overall engagement of key stakeholders to deliver a proposed project.
- (i) Applicants may only participate in a maximum of 5 Catalyst proposals across all categories. If an Applicant is included on more than 5 proposal submissions, only the first 5 published entries will be eligible for funding. This limit also applies to entities that are made up of the same teams/individuals and/or have the same key stakeholders involved in their management operating in a ‘family’ of related ventures. Proposals that fail to disclose accurate information about their Applicants may be disqualified; ref Fund Rules
In other words, if you are committing to work on your own five proposals, but are also partnering to develop or participate in another five with someone else seeking Catalyst Funding, you need to prioritize your engagements effectively for Fund11.
If the current Applicant is an idea generator only but will require another team to be the implementer of their idea - the implementer (eg development team) will need to prioritize their engagement vis-a-vis Fund11 proposals effectively. It is critical to consider responsible disclosure around stakeholders within the context of Catalyst grant funding. Disclosure will be inspected during the Fund11 onboarding stage as well in greater depth.
This limit (as most of the changes) came as a result of intensive community-led workshops post-Fund10 signalling a strong desire to enable a more equitable nature of the grant program to support grassroots innovation. The fund outcomes will be revisited during the Fund11 retrospective once again to analyse future iterations as required.
Additional requirements
Do you still have an open Fund7 or older project? Track record matters. Make sure this is closed out as soon as possible ahead of the Community Review starting on December 14th. Keep in mind, that we’re getting very close to that timeframe - and it may be challenging to satisfy this requirement anymore as a close-out process for completed projects can take some time to complete. If you want to ensure your eligibility - ensure to send it before Friday, Dec 8 - noon UTC. Do you have Fund8 projects? This may become a requirement for F12. Start planning.
Equally, your track record in the case of projects funded post-Fund8 is also important. This is highlighted by the need for proper reporting etiquette in the last 6 months. As an active Applicant in Fund11, you must have not missed less than 50% of monthly reporting cycles on your existing funded projects in the past funds.
Incomplete proposals
Any proposals post-finalization deadline on Dec. 7 that will still have any outstanding fields that include elements such as TBD (to be determined), coming soon, updating, WIP (work in progress) or of a similar nature - that signal proposals have not been completed - will be automatically archived. Ensure all your fields are adequately populated to avoid archival - there are 1,000 proposals and individual notifications are not available at scale.
Last tip? Title length
The Voting App has a visual limit of about 60 characters for your title. It is recommended to try to fit into that so that the title isn’t cut off in some user interfaces where overly long titles can suffer from this. Unsure how to cut your title? ChatGPT does a pretty good job in case you want to give it a try.
Fund11 Timelines
Note: Given the dynamic nature of Project Catalyst, the following dates may change as the fund progresses. If this is the case, we will notify the community via our announcement channels on Discord and Telegram.
Dec. 7th, 2023 11:00 UTC
Deadline to finalize proposals
Dec. 10th, 2023 before EOD UTC
The end of the Community Reviewers registration
Dec. 14th, 2023 11:00 UTC
Start of Community Review stage, ending Jan 22nd
Jan. 15th, 2024 21:45 UTC
Voter registration deadline (epoch boundary 460/461)
Jan. 25th, 2024 11:00 UTC
Fund11 voting begins, ending on Feb 8th, 11:00 UTC
Around Feb. 15th, 2024
Fund11 selected proposals announced
March 2024
Onboarding of Fund11 funded proposals
A Project Catalyst funding round consists of four phases: Proposal submission, Community review, Community voting, and Onboarding. We are in the proposal submission phase, where the community has until Nov 30 to submit a proposal to answer one of the many challenges found here.
Open Source GitHub Repo Round-Up
I encourage you to follow along with milestone developments via the following links to get the latest on Catalyst Roadmap Proposals:
- Catalyst Voices Milestones:
- Catalyst Accelerator Milestones:
For full access to GitHub branches please review:
- https://github.com/input-output-hk/catalyst-core
- https://github.com/input-output-hk/catalyst-voices
- https://github.com/input-output-hk/catalyst-ci
- https://github.com/input-output-hk/hermes
Get in touch
And that’s a wrap. Let’s talk Catalyst & governance via X(Twitter), Telegram, Reddit, or wherever your home is online and keep conversations engaging on these very important topics.
Enjoy your day ahead!
Danny & the Project Catalyst team
Daniel Ribar
Community at Project Catalyst
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.