On behalf of Dor and the project catalyst team, I’d like to share an update.
PROJECT CATALYST TOWN HALL #9
Welcome to the ninth Project Catalyst town hall. As always, we feel honoured to report back to you what we have learned and done during the last week. If you would like to watch the full video click here.
Growing the garden
We are all cultivating an ecosystem of tools, interactions, innovation, exploration, and most importantly solutions to big problems. We want to generate a culture where we are all made better by the virtue of working together. Essentially, sharpening our tools. There are many ways that we can achieve the network effect of making ourselves collectively smarter but the best way is for all of us to develop a robust discussion environment so that we can execute on and measure the impact of our work,
Ultimately, we place a great deal of importance on constant cultivation in three distinct areas:
Innovation
- Challenge exploration
- Proposers
- Discussion culture & channels
- Matchmaking
Governance
- Community advisors
- Assessment tools
- Analysis insights
- Campaigning tools
- Informed voters
Execution
- Fund Cohorts
- Impact tracking
- Implementers marketplace
Weekly Stats
As usual, we bring you key numbers from how we grew this week. We’re thrilled to see that we are continuing to grow across all of our channels. We encourage everyone to join and explore each of our social media platforms. Our Telegram channel is generally used for casual information whereas Discord is perfect for direct collaboration. However, Ideascale is where ideas are being pushed forward into the future of Fund2.
- 50+ members on Ideascale (Almost 3500!)
- 401 members in TG Fund2 chat + ~1000 messages last week
- 294 members on Discord
- 763 on Announcement TG
- 2000 - App downloads
Assessment Stage
Here are some of the key results that we learned from the assessment stage
- 671 registered advisors
- 130 submitted a review
- 54 provided rationale behind their submission
Key learnings from our community advisors
We asked our community advisors about their favourite part of assessing proposals was. We were happy to see that the majority of community advisors enjoyed learning about various projects the most. Meanwhile, others enjoyed the collaboration and helping proposers. Of course, some were more motivated by the rewards and the process in general.
Here are some positive quotes from our community advisors about their experience:
“We’ve got the chance to shape the future of the project. And the responsibility to learn how to do so with our best interest in mind.”
“I am also a holder of ADA and have a vested interest in the project.”
Of course, not all advisors were uniformly pleased by the process and it is important to us to listen to criticism as well as praise. In terms of constructive feedback, our community advisors wanted us to focus on filtering obviously low-quality proposals. They also wanted us to include more robust features for filtering. This could help them find proposals with fewer reviews. Finally, there is a desire for clearer guidelines and user experience. One recommendation was to produce an exemplary review which could be used as a guide for subsequent assessments.
Lack of Notes
Some reviews did not include notes and we have been working to make sure that this crucial step is filled out. So, we asked why some reviewers did not fill out their comments. For the most part, participants felt that they did not have enough time to do so. However, some felt that they didn’t want to waste their time and energy on bad proposals. Furthermore, some reviewers did not realize that this was mandatory. Because of that, we will continue to clarify our expectations for all the community advisors.
Onboarding Community Advisors
We are on the lookout for the best way to find new community advisors. That’s why we asked our current group how they heard about becoming a community advisor. We also asked why they did or did not give a rationale for the assessment they gave. These are the numbers we took away from this:
| Gave rationale 29 | Didn’t give rationale 19 |
|---|---|
| Townhall: 24 | Townhall: 7 |
| Guidelines: 19 | Guidelines: 5 |
| Only Ideascale: 0 | Only Ideascale: 3 |
| Reddit: 2 | Reddit: 3 |
Conclusion: We need to improve community advisor onboarding + Emphasize townhall and guidelines within it.
GUEST: Voting Strategy
The Project Catalyst town hall was then joined by a guest presenter James Dunseith that presented Greg Pendlebury’s work with proposal assessment and analysis. Our presenter specifically focused on finding a framework to make impactful decisions around voting.
Timeline Announcement
There has been a great deal of excitement around the potential timeline of Fund2. We’re happy to bring you our provisional schedule right here. We have had to continue to be flexible throughout this process and we encourage everyone to keep this in mind while looking at the Fund2 timeline. At the moment we are estimating that the voting will occur around Christmas.
Fund-2 Testing Timeline (Provisional)
| Test Iteration | Participants | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Pre dry run stage | devOps/RUST/QA (Atix/Catalyst) | Nov11th - Nov 13th |
| Dry run stage | devOps/RUST/Voting Committee/TSD department/Catalyst | Nov 18- Dec 3rd |
| Voting registration starts | Community | Registration Dec 9th |
| Registration ends | ||
| (Snapshot) | Community | Dec. 14 |
| Voting starts | Community | Dec. 14th - Dec 28th |
| Vote tallying | devOps | Dec 19th - ??? |
Voting Privacy Announcement
In order to increase the change of Fund2 voting to start before the holidays, we decided to postpone the voting privacy feature to Fund3. This means that all voting on Fund2 will be public, so everyone can see which blockchain account voted on which proposals.
Fund3 Announcements
We are thrilled to tell you that Fund3 will control $500K worth of ada. There will also be three separate challenges:
- Dapp challenge
- Dev tools
- Dev onboarding
Increasing the size of the fund was no small decision and was the direct result of your incredible contribution to this process. We take our Project Catalyst funds seriously and it is important that they become a good investment for the ecosystem at large. The reasons that we increased the fund is because of our community engagement. We judged this community engagement on three metrics:
- Because of number and quality of proposals
- Because of number and quality of advisors + feedback
- Because of engagement numbers (~2000 views per townhall + 3500 members + thousands of app downloads)
This is your achievement
The increase in funds is absolutely the result of an incredible community working together. However, we want to take a moment to recognize some of the key leaders in the community who are bringing the Project Catalyst participants together:
-
Discord server
Steve (Adamint), Tevo, James, Greg , and myself. Quickly followed by Maria, Quasar and DC. -
Ideascale + Catalyst improvements
@tevosaks spearheaded work on improving Ideascale and documenting the Catalyst processes (along with, but not limited to Jorge, @rshapir, @mercyt_m -
Documenting the Catalyst process
@Andriy515 @tresseisnove documented the Catalyst process for a wider audience and set an example of how to use their platforms to spread the word about both the Catalyst project and individual proposals -
Leadership
Boone Bergsma, Steve (Adamint), Danny_cryptofay -
Data analytics
Content creator Yuta + Greg Pendlebury
Coming Soon
Here are a couple of key events for everyone to look forward to in the near future.
-
Catalyst roadmap
-
Fund3 timeline
-
Fund3 Community challenge
-
Metrics
-
Catalyst problem sensing challenge
GUEST: CLI tool presentation
Samuel Leathers then joined the chat to present on registering to vote as an SPO.
QUESTIONS
1:12:50 Can Cardano be used to hold a living document like a world constitution?
1:14:17 Are proposers and reviewers required to have ada? Can they be forced to maintain some?
1:16:30 Do you have a mentor?
1:19:00 I’m having trouble getting a structured view of the proposals, is there a guide?
1:21:20 What is the most exciting thing happening for you Dor?
1:24:23 Where can we see how much ada is in the treasury?
