There is a lot of discussion about vote privacy. Interesting thing on Algorand you can see all the votes. Staking keys, governance measures for the entire protocol, who votes for, who votes against, with how much power and the results are instantaneous:
Its not even for a side program (like Catalyst on Cardano)…
Thanks Felix.
It would be great for @lidonation to get involved and explore how progress can be made on this issue. Currently, I don’t think it’s possible to obtain more information than what’s publicly available due to the way the voting system is designed. There’s a privacy protocol in place.
Yesterday, Danny Ribar shared on twitter/X an Audit Tooling that allows anyone to simulate the final outcome to verify the officially published voting results for accuracy. It’s a highly useful and effective tool for its intended purpose of verifying the integrity of the officially published results. I invite all of you to give it a try.
I explored whether it could be utilized to extract or disaggregate the voting outcomes. Regrettably, the results are already provided in an aggregated format, much like the official publication.
The current debate revolves around privacy vs. transparency.
There’s concern about wallets being doxxed. Personally, I believe we should seek a middle ground, at the very least, by publishing the count of positive and negative casted votes per proposal (right know its only published the total casted votes). This would enable a much more detailed analysis of the voting results. Other alternatives could include publishing information segregated into ranges, like a histogram.
“Small improvements” like these, without compromising wallet privacy, could yield significant benefits for subsequent analyses, aiding in making more informed decisions regarding potential system improvement proposals.
I’m not sure if it’s something that can be implemented for Fund 10, as a user mentioned in twitter that it should be parameterized and programmed before the voting period. However, we could aim to incorporate this in a future fund.
@HeptaCardano Quote
“For the future, the number of voting keys could somehow be integrated into the added up information, but if that has not been done before, it won’t be possible to retroactively get it out of the tally.”
To wrap up this post, I want to clarify that the idea isn’t to spread FUD about the voting system. We’re all here working towards the same goal: improving the voting system. Debate, as long as it’s respectful, is incredibly enriching and necessary. I believe it’s one of the positive characteristics of our ecosystem.
Thanks to everyone who is engaged in the discussion.
Yeah, as Felix mentioned, the Voices roadmap puts it into ‘testable’ status somewhere between funds 12 and 13, so I would guess F13 is the most optimistic outlook for getting off of Ideascale… until then there are sticky problems that we can push back and forth on the board (roles, data calls, liveness, etc) but they won’t get any less sticky.
This assumes they are able to stick to the timeline of a fund every 3 months which is required by their approved Operations proposal. As an aside, it looks like Voices will be able to run bi-weekly Catalysts right out of the box, which could be a platform off of which to build a rolling funding mechanism.
I think a lot of people felt that way, and I think avoiding building back bureaucracy has to be a guardrail we assign ourselves. The arbitrariness is the key point here…and I’m reminded of a quote I can’t place:
“All models are True in some sense, False in some sense, and Meaningless in some sense”
We really are trying to chart a path that achieves some specific purpose…Categories, even if it is to just have one massive Category called F11 are useful abstractions, ways of arranging information so that path can be followed. Allowing arbitrary considerations in our taxonomies, in any ontology, undermines critical pathfinding.
We have to balance that with the ability of voters to actually absorb the information, otherwise the vote won’t reflect preference, but rather fatigue, or asymmetry of information. We can’t do it until we are off Ideascale, but I imagine fluid frameworks where we have loose taxonomies like tags which voters can turn on or off as they find them useful. Almost like a file system directory tree, but the data isn’t beholden to the folder framework: the data doesn’t have to stay in that hierarchy to make sense, it can be moved around by any voter, and removing a ‘folder’ from one’s personal framework doesn’t remove the data that was in the folder.
Edit to add: the best way I can think to describe the ideal Category system, is as a non-essential supporting structure.
But again, it can’t be done in Ideascale, so I’m getting ahead of myself…
??? If it is purely a tool for individual voters to tag proposals. Sure, go ahead.
As said time and again: It should have been a protocol/API in the first place. We have lots of different wallet apps catering to different needs. We should have long had the same for voting apps. And they could do any tagging/sorting/categorising users want to experiment with. No need to have it in the core of Catalyst.
What challenges/categories do up to now is something totally different: They pre-assign part of the budget to gated sections where proposals can get funding with a far inferior voting result than in other sections. And it’s not even clear at the time of setting the budgets how large that effect will be.
With this discussion around categories, I sincerely ask that you all try to attend the next Category Scoping workshop. The first two have already happened and each workshop literally had 10 people in it. These people are working towards what categories and their requirements will be and it will affect everyone who submits proposals.
I dont want to hijack this thread but please stay current on the category scoping thread. http://bit.ly/3LXVP5R The next meeting has not been announced but the prior meetings were announced in the Wednesday Town Hall slides.
many here attended countless workshops over the past years with the attempts to improve the system.
I am not surprised at all that attendee list is pretty low, also cause most people feel very much done working for free for IOG Catalyst Team.
The Category discussion itself as well is nothing new and has been pushed on since years already. Also, that IOG then takes community ideas without giving anything back… do they highlight that the categories have been ideated by George Lovegrove with Pace & W3A since years ?
Catalyst Fund Nightmare results again come. Let’s nurse our wounds!
First Congratulations to those funded and those not funded do not lose hope but engage positively to build Cardano Communities.
You are free to correct my obsevations presented. I love Cardano but unfortunately I cannot bottle my observations.
source link used for above is https://www.lidonation.com/en/catalyst-explorer/charts
If we keep quiet then Cardano Catalyst will carry on unchecked and should welcome fact based views
Awesome work.
Only removing the downvotes would change very few of the results. I did recalculate that here:
Only 44 proposals would have had a different outcome, ironically a lot of smaller proposals losing funding, because some larger proposals that were downvoted in reality would gain funding instead.
But this also means that downvoting does not seem to be needed for security against scams, frauds, and grifts. So, we could probably live very well with it being removed. And psychologically, it is probably nicer to just lose against other proposals getting more upvotes than also being voted down.
The next change a lot of people seem to want is to somehow limit the influence of large bags, “whales”. I would not be so sure that that really would change much. Voters with smaller wallets might also prefer projects they already know and trust – especially in a market condition where some of those projects actually need the Catalyst funding to survive.
In the end, a funding scheme that is decided by a vote cannot promise to be “for the small, new projects” or “for innovation” (whatever that may mean), since the voters decide what they want to fund.
There’s also the thing that I have the impression that a lot of those projects did not really do enough marketing to the general electorate before the vote. I’ve never heard of them before they started complaining after the vote. How did they think to stand out enough among 1500 other proposals to be successful?
Finally, as much as I would have liked to see a bit less MLabs and dcSpark and a bit more diversity, their proposals actually seem to be promising and innovative, while all the “Shill Cardano at University X or to Community Y” or “Translate this to that” proposals do not really strike me as innovative.
Somehow bureaucratically limiting the proposals per proposer (or better the requested funds, segmenting into sensible proposals should not be prohibited even if it means more but smaller proposals) does not seem to be a promising line of change to me.
They can just let individual persons propose instead. (Would somehow even be more honest and show that it is maybe not that scandalous if an entity with a lot of persons also puts in more proposals than an individual.)
We could try to fight that requiring that employees count towards the limit of their employer. But should that also count for freelancers? Freelancers working almost exclusively for one company? Or being brokered almost exclusively through one company? At what percentages? Do we really want to set up the (centralised) bureaucracy to check all that at proposal submission time?
Good observation on down votes: they have little impact. Lets not fool common people with rhetoric like unscrupulous politicians.
" Making The World Work Better For All"(source: https://cardano.org/). How can we believe this when in Fund 10 about 20000 wallets have about 1-3% voting power vs 700 or so wallets having about 98% voting power by a voting system created by smart mathematical and scientifical academic Cardanos?
In Fund 9 I observed and complainted when I saw 1 Proposal Assessor being paid over $40000 when over thousands of proposal assessors where paid $0. All for work that did not even last a month.
Why is the catalyst allowing People/companies/communities to field proposals and worse up to 9 proposals getting all of them funded in Fund 10 when the very same are struggling to finish proposals funded in F7, F8 and F9? May you help check that Key Catalyst people and these whales are not one and the same people, plz.
There is a very clear distinction between wallets and Cardano people. We all know many wallets do belong to one person. This means counting the number of unique wallets that voted for a proposal is useless due to anonymity.
I have loved and seen broad based funding coming out of CF and IOG but with this Catalyst? It seems a capitalist instrument. What prevents greedy people from getting funds from bank to vote for their proposals and return those loans after being funded? This can be stopped or mitigated if the Catalyst can do these: a) Stop releasing funds to any entity who did not complete F9, F8, F7 etc projects. b) Forfeit all funds for projects that fail to complete the first milestone. c) Create quotas for different Cardano communities world wide. This will avert this ugly situation we are having now where by about 40million out 50million ada is going to 16 entities(of which 2 are getting 12million). Where is diversity and inclusivity philosophy with this?
I think SingularityNet is a better example of who we should emulate but why are are we not doing so?
We have many non-technical communities in Cardano. They are extremely disadvantaged by Fund 10 whose Challenges are 90% technical.
For those whose proposals were genuinely voted for I say congralualations. Deliver as per your promise and help vote for us also on round 11.
I appreciate the sentiment you’re expressing. I spent twenty years in Corporate America LOL
That said, there are hundreds of people/projects that submitted proposals to seek funding in F10. Those people and people who consider submitting proposals in F11 should go, even if they feel the system has failed them - no, especially if they feel the system has failed them, should go. The best way to evoke change is to be involved. I’m also annoyingly an optimist 
No, that name hasnt been mentioned and I havent seen that site before. I did look it over though. It’s always interesting to see where Project Catalyst came from to where it is now. How would you have envisioned that being raised and discussed?
That’s a mouth full of a marketing statement. I wouldn’t give too much on it.
After all, Cardano is in the first place still a cryptocurrency on a blockchain and, of course, inherits the very capitalistic principles of that.
The belief that capitalism, free enterprise is the “good for all” shines through in the “to create possibility for the many, as well as the few” in the paragraph below that. “To create possibility” … classic dogwhistle for the ideology that you only have to give the people “freedom” and the ones who deserve it will be successful.
Not necessarily what I personally believe. To me, it is an interesting experiment on technology, on funding projects, on implementing certain kinds of transactions with “smart” contracts and blockchain technology. But I would still search the “good for all” elsewhere, in traditional politics and activism, which should also set the borders to the free enterprise and wealth accumulation in cryptocurrencies as well as in all other areas of business.
Some of those smart people believe that plutocracy is actually good, at least in the confinements of a crypto ecosystem, akin to public companies where your voting power is also your share in the company. Some of those smart people don’t actually deem it that optimal, but do not believe that any of the alternatives is really viable. And some do advocate that we try something else.
There’s a quite large “quadratic voting” fanbase and a lot of voices for “one person, one vote”. Without a governance system in place, they’d have to have a very convincing alternative developed to change how it is done at the moment. With a governance system in place in the future, they’d have to win a “one ADA, one vote” vote to change to something else. Not sure what is more promising.
That was changed quite substantially in Fund 10. I do think, it cannot be gamed that easily anymore. Personally, I would have just removed assessments and reviews completely. Don’t see that much value in texts that are read by a tiny minority (given that the proposals themselves are already overwhelming) and ratings that in principle can never really be comparable across proposals.
On the one hand: There is no actor “Catalyst”. There is the IOG Catalyst Team that currently manages the fund. And they do not have a rule that says anything about the realisation of other proposals influencing the funding of one proposal.
For my taste, they already have too many rules that were just invented out of thin air that they do enforce (e.g., moving proposals between challenges/categories, removing proposals completely if they are “obviously” not okay, …). I would leave much more of that to the voters.
On the other hand, not (yet) having finished a previous proposal does not seem like a good rule to exclude from further funding of other proposals to me. The proposals could have had a plan running longer in the first place. They could have legitimate reasons for failing (and then not getting the funding for further milestones of that proposal).
Do you have any indication that those large entities – MLabs, dcSpark, … – are exceptionally bad at delivering what they promised in their proposals? It is possible to raise the problem that they get such a large share of funding without painting them as bad actors.
To my knowledge, they are not at all.
Yes, of course, this is one of the reasons why trying to come up with “quadratic voting” or “one person, one vote” systems that do make sense is so hard. Only way out I see is to accept that some will do wallet-splitting and accept as still being better than pure “one ADA, one vote”.
But up to now, there is no incentive for wallet splitting, so the number of wallets is probably still at least close to reality. It doesn’t have any relevance for the result, anyway, and is purely informational. And it is not splitted in wallets for and wallets against which makes it not that interesting.
As above: Of course, it is. Cryptocurrencies are to a large extent a capitalist endeavour.
At the moment: Nothing. There has even been an offer – I think by Optim – to borrow ADA specifically for the snapshot.
There are ideas to prevent that or make it harder: Take the median of the stake in the last X epochs as voting weight. Require locking the voting weight for the duration of the vote. …
See above: There are legitimate reasons for a project being slowed down or failing.
For the same proposal: That’s exactly what milestones are for. Across all proposals: Same as above, does not make sense to me. There might be legitimate reasons.
And as in the previous message: If you make the rules too hard, proposals will just be proposed by individuals, smaller companies founded especially for that purpose, … instead.
I don’t think a “diversity and inclusivity philosophy” can be promised if the decision is ultimately up to the voters.
But:
There will be no challenges anymore in future funds, but broader “categories” that are currently being designed:
Don’t know how far that process is and if you still have a chance to get the idea of regional categories in or modify that to have more non-technical proposals. The non-technical ones seem to somehow fit in the “Community Outreach and Impact” category. But they’d still have to be about something that somehow evolves Cardano. It’s still not a charity fund.
And I personally would prefer to have no categories at all and just a large competition of all proposals. Don’t see a reason to “protect” some categories when distributing “our” funds.
All in all, it is very intransparent how changes to Catalyst are supposed to work, where to submit ideas, who will decide how etc. pp. That obviously has been a problem for a long time if you read the messages in this thread.
There is always the argument that quadratic voting can be circumvented by splitting up large wallets, but I think we have some sybil resistance due to the difficulty of using the Catalyst voting app. Imagine having to vote many multiples of times with that app 
One argument for not making it any easier to use, haha.
The switch to a voting dApp is already planned. This will hopefully also allow alternative voting frontends.
Moreover, you can already delegate multiple wallets to the same voting key and as far as I understood it that shall become the same functionality also used for dReps.
It depends what the proponents of quadratic voting want to do in that case. If all delegators count as one large voter being scaled down by quadratic voting that sounds like a massive blowback for dReps, doesn’t it?
You seem a beautiful soul tho
Appreciate optimism very much before anything else (well, sometimes a healthy dose of realism is also quite helpful ^^ )
A workshop ideally starts with some intro & context, providing some information and ideally background information etc… and there would be surely some seconds or minutes to highlight the history and community efforts which led to “Funding Categories”
Ideally inviting George Lovegrove who did all that research as speaker at the workshop too ?
Something on that lines to start with.
Okay, I’ll jump in with some thoughts on Catalyst I had in the shower this morning:
TL;DR: 1) Quadratic voting, 2) Proposal budget caps, 3) Alternative funding for the successful
1- I agree with others that we should consider quadratic voting. Maybe the 500 ADA minimum gets everyone their 500 votes, but additional ADA after that is quadratically applied. Danny mentioned in another thread “There aren’t alternative voting methods available to Catalyst for deployment (yet?). For now - it inherits base layer security but I don’t believe it needs to stay this only way long term. Perhaps someone will be able to deploy a working version of alternatives onto testnet to iterate on.” Which sounds like a call for a collaboration to add quadratic voting to the code. Any takers? Socious? Snapbrillia? And any other funded companies that are working on quadratic voting want to work on this?
2 - If the goal of Catalyst is to “explore the highest levels of human collaboration”, and seeing how diverse the Open and Students challenges were, perhaps a cap on 5% of total category funds would have good effect on bringing in more diverse proposals. It would also guarantee at least 20 funded proposals per category. Going further, making the categories themselves smaller might increase the diversity as large fund grabs would no longer be possible and the cost/benefit might deter competitive activity.
3 - Fire up more means for companies that are successful in gaining access to funding through accelerator programs and venture capital. This could also be combined with mentoring and strategic planning support. This could help return Catalyst to the intent of being a seed mechanism for innovation, and giving those that are successful some mechanism to keep growing without having to take opportunity from those that are just getting started. We need the entire ecosystem to be vibrant and innovative, from on-boarding to education to launching ideas, not just those that are already successful.
Awesome detailed replies. Thanks a lot.
I got the Catalyst Spreadsheet that shows who was funded since Fund 2 up to Fund 10. See a snapshot attached. 2 entities scouped almost 50% of the 46million in Fund 10. Is this just? Is this fair? Is this the definition of decentralization?
The counter argument being given now is that these 2 top entities are the best. You cannot compete a financial elephant to an ant : dSpark was fund far back in Fund 6, 7, 9 and now 10 against those who have never been funded.
Were they?
From a purely geographic standpoint, yeah, sure.
But they are mostly just “Problem: X don’t know about Cardano. Solution: We gotta tell X how great Cardano is!” or “Translate this to that”. Is that innovation and development? Is it diverse?
