Grassroots Governance Community Forums

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

@governance.services.guild

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Not Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

6

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

Organize and deliver four Grassroots Governance Community Forums to bring together diverse individuals and projects across Cardano and other web3 ecosystems to address pressing governance questions.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

No dependencies.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

All documentation resulting from each Grassroots Governance Community Forum will be made available through our GitBook under Creative Commons License: CC BY-SA-4.0.

[METADATA] SDG rating

n/a

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution.

There has been much discussion this year in the Cardano community on CIP-1694 and the Voltaire governance era. What was largely absent from these discussions was a recognition and appreciation of the significant work already being undertaken by a variety of individuals and teams, each working on and solving their own governance issues. Official CIP-1694 discussions did not address more foundational governance needs, such as team organizational structures, development of roles and responsibilities, process and procedure development, or any process of reciprocal learning and peer support. 

In 2023, Governance Guild addressed these issues by running 3 successful “Grassroots Governance Community Forums” where individuals within Cardano and across other Web3 communities could discuss these issues. In this proposal, we are seeking funding to run 4 more such sessions.

Our solution will help the Cardano, and wider Web3, community as it advances on its decentralised governance journey, by bringing together individuals and teams from across Web3 ecosystems (including Cardano, sNET, the Internet Native Organisation, and more) for a series of grassroots discussions. They will be run on open-space principles, where any interested group can suggest a breakout room; and, as our previous sessions have been, they will be thoroughly documented and shared. It is our hope that this will support blockchain governance, attracting like-minded individuals to work together to address our shared concerns. 

We plan to deliver 4 sessions over 6 months, with groups of up to 50 individuals and teams from Cardano and beyond who are interested in the issues around how we govern ourselves in Web3 spaces. 

Participants in the sessions will be invited to participate through several methods. First, the Governance Guild is well connected with other community groups such as Swarm, SingularityNet, Gimbalabs, etc. and will tap directly into these networks to distribute invitations. Second, participants may opt in through our outreach, such as posting on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord. When invitees sign up, we will ask them to tell us about anyone else they think should be invited. Lastly, we will remain committed to involving other individuals through other Cardano events, such as After Townhalls. 

The “Open Space” approach that we have been successfully using so far means that attendees are invited to run breakout sessions on topics of concern to them, which helps ensure that sessions are responsive and current, and the attendees are co-creators of each event. Each breakout room will be documented using text summaries on GitBook, and our documentation approach will give concern both to crediting people for their input if they wish, and preserving privacy and anonymity for those who prefer it. 

We will continue to share the documentation widely to the community via Twitter, Discord, Telegram, and the Cardano Forum, and will use the documentation from each session as the basis for planning the next. We will also conduct a short retrospective after each session, to understand in what ways it was useful, the key directions and ideas that are emerging, and which voices might be missing and might need to be included next time. All material will be publicly available to help anyone else who might want to run similar events.

Governance Guild is uniquely placed to deliver this proposal effectively because we are all very engaged members of the Catalyst community, each with our own wide network of connections that we can draw on to make these events a success, and each with our own insights on the complex governance issues that face Cardano overall, and particularly Cardano DAOs and communities.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

Currently, each community group or DAO is required to develop its own governance structure but often without the appropriate know-how or tooling available. By creating community spaces for broad governance discussions to take place, these groups can learn from their peers about best governance practices, innovative tooling, and/or community-driven solutions. 

Having individuals and projects working in silos will not deliver the true decentralization of the future. On the contrary, cross community and broad web3 ecosystem discussions on governance will begin to break down these silos and have us learning from each other. 

As stated in a comment from the plenary session in our forum on 31st August 2023: “What I valued about today’s discussion is that it’s bringing people together who are doing the same thing in different ways - helps you feel less isolated. What we’re each doing is not identical - but we are more closely related than we are different.”

In addition, all outputs of the grassroots governance community forums will be open for use by any interested individuals. Groups will also be able to use any of the discussions and outcomes from the forums, including any potential solutions and tooling that are needed to support a project or team, to launch their own governance initiatives. While teams will need to determine their own level of comfort making their solution open-source, the Governance Guild will encourage such behaviour. 

The benefit of open source solutions is that we need to solve particular problems only once as a community.

As we plan to conduct four grassroots community forums over a six month period, we will measure our successes in the following ways:

• Number of different Cardano community groups/projects or individuals who participate in each forum.
• Number of non-Cardano (other Web3 ecosystem) participants at each forum.
• Number of decentralised governance conversations, services, solutions, and/or tools resulting from the forums.

Sharing our outputs:

All grassroots governance community forum outputs will be shared on the Governance Guild GitBook, such as meeting readouts (key takeaways), community position statements on a particular governance issue or question, and decentralised solutions or tools resulting from the forums.

As this is a community-wide proposal, we will also share all outputs with meeting participants, and distribute them through our network of Cardano community groups (e.g. Swarm, SingularityNet Ambassadors, Wada, Gimbalabs, and more).

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Cardano Governance Guild is a network of individuals with a broad range of experience in Blockchain governance, administration, and project management. We support the exploration, development, and implementation of decentralised solutions to help teams govern their own initiatives. We do not prescribe or require particular ways of working but aim to identify appropriate mechanisms and/or tools that suit each team’s individual needs. 

Our goal is to offer nonpartisan and pluralistic services to a variety of groups and teams within the broader Cardano ecosystem. We seek to accommodate and work with a wide variety of individuals, groups, and communities from a diverse range of geographical and cultural backgrounds.

To date, the Governance Guild has held three Grassroots Community Forms on July 15, 2023, August 31, 2023 and December 1, 2023. 

Across these three events there have been 60 participants, with representatives from Cardano-based teams and broader Web3 ecosystem participants. 

As the convening body, Governance Guild was responsible for coordination and organization of the event, including creating and sending invitations, hosting the forum, documenting breakout room discussions, and finalizing the forum document output. 

Each workshop addressed a series of questions by groups undertaking governance activities.

The topics for the workshops were as follows:

July 15, 2023

1. What have been your biggest governance challenges so far? (legal, capacity, resources)
2. What tools, services, or supports would help your team succeed? 

August 31, 2023

1. What is a DAO?
2. Photrek, Cardano Governance: From Open Corporation to Digital Nation
3. singularityNET, Governance Challenges and Collaborative Solutions 
4. Wada, dReps: A critique of representation based on traditional African paradigms

December 1, 2023

1. Internet Native Organization: Decentralised Treasury Management Models and Legal Requirements. 
2. José de Gamboa and Governance Guild: Community, Governance, and Intersect (the Cardano MBO).

The final output documents of all our Grassroots Governance Community Forums can be found on the Governance Guild Gitbook following the meeting. 

To underscore our capacity to deliver future events such as the one mentioned here, we’d like to highlight some of the feedback collected directly from forum participants. 

One hundred percent (100%) of respondents to the feedback form rated the event as “Amazing” or “Pretty good” and also were “Very Likely” or “Likely” to participate in future events. 

Participants described their key takeaways as: “Great insights and knowledge sharing from participants”, “Loved hearing from different communities and had some questions answered”, and “Need to work on confidence building to lift people up to be part of governance”. 

Many participants noted the benefits of these events, including “we need more events like this one to move things around”, “The discussion was well organized and inclusive in terms of ideas and interest”, and “I enjoyed the civility of the groups. High quality conversations.”

When asked about areas of improvement for future Forums, participants noted: “increasing new faces from the broader ecosystem”, “narrowing the scope of focus to specific challenges and identifying a particular solution”, and “building broader networks of community members, particularly from groups where different governance discussions are taking place and seeking opportunities to become more involved”. This proposal, if successful, will enable us to implement these ideas.

While unsuccessful in obtaining Catalyst funding in F10, the Governance Guild members contributed funds from the previous (F9) proposal, as well as providing in-kind services for Forum #3. We did this to respond to the Community requests to continue these events, citing the benefit they bring to different groups working in community governance. 

[Project Milestones] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone 1 - Grassroots Governance Community Forum #1 (1-2 months) (22% complete)

• The first forum will take place within two months following Catalyst voting results. 

Milestone 2 - Grassroots Governance Community Forum #2 (1 month) (42% complete)

• The second forum will take place within one month following the first forum. 

Milestone 3 - Grassroots Governance Community Forum #3 (1 month) (62% complete)

• The third forum will take place within one month from the second forum.

Milestone 4 - Grassroots Governance Community Forum #4 (1 month) (82% complete)

• The fourth forum will take place within one month from the third forum.

Final Milestone - Project close-out (1 month) (100% complete)

• The project will be officially closed-out with a report and video within one month from the fourth forum.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Jonathan Postnikoff (JP) 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-postnikoff/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JDPostnikoff   

JP has been a member of the Cardano Community since December 2020 and has been active in Catalyst since Fund4. Originally beginning as a Swarm member, JP became a proposal assessor (previously CA) during F5 and has participated as both a PA and vPA in all subsequent funds. JP originally fulfilled the CC Admin Team’s secretary role since the election of CCv2, and is a funded proposer from Funds 6 to 9 in support of the Circle admin team and now on Governance Guild. On a professional level, JP’s strongest skills include meeting support services, one-on-one and group facilitation, proposal drafting, editing, and ideation support, and community engagement.  

Role: Publicity and engagement; creating supporting info for breakout room facilitators; overall project management and monthly and milestone reporting

Vanessa Cardui

Community engagement professional with 20+ years' experience of working with communities to help them engage in grounded-theory research, and learn to record and archive their lives. Part of QA-DAO where she leads on documentation (for example, see documenting Catalyst Circle); part of CGO (Community Governance Oversight), where she facilitated meetings and edited the F8 closing report; founding member of The Facilitators’ Collective; part of the SingularityNET archives team; part of the SingularityNET DeepFunding Focus Group.

Role: Documentation; facilitating team retrospectives.

Tevo Saks

Tevo is a long-standing Cardano community member and participates in a variety of activities across the ecosystem, including as a proposer in the last several funds. His focus is specifically on connecting decentralised open source services and contributing to community governance documentation.

https://linktr.ee/tevosaks

Role: Managing Zoom and invitations; co-ordinating session topics and liaising with breakout facilitators; close-out report.

Miroslav Rajh (Treasury Guild)

Miro has 20 years of experience in managing finances. He also worked as a Human Resources Manager (HRM). Currently he is managing transactions for Swarm, Singularity Net, Governance Guild, Catalyst Training and Automation, Community Governance Oversight, Lead Generators, Edify.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miroslav-rajh-94566845

Role: Treasury management; main-room facilitation at forums.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Proposed budget activities and amounts in ADA:

Session admin 

• Managing Zoom and invitations, creating supporting info for breakout room facilitators, coordinating session topics, liaising with breakout facilitators
• 600 ADA per session x 4 sessions = 2,400

Facilitation

• Governance Guild members or people from outside Governance Guild are invited to facilitate a room and are rewarded for their participation. 
• 4 breakout room facilitators per session x 4 sessions x 800 ADA = 12,800 

Documentation

• In-meeting note taking: 
• 4 sessions x 800 ADA = 12,800
• Summarising, organising, adding to GitBook: 
• 4 meetings x 1,200 ADA per meeting = 4,800

Publicity

• Sharing material collated from sessions via Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Cardano Forum, etc: 
• 4 meetings x 200 ADA = 800

Retrospectives 

• Retrospective sessions by Governance Guild to assess where sessions are leading and lessons learned for future sessions.
• 4 sessions x 1,600 ADA = 6,400 

Monitoring and reporting 

• Monthly and milestone reporting, close-out report and video creation & sharing 
• 8,000

Total ADA Requested: 48,000

Given the volatility and uncertainty of macro effects on cryptocurrencies writ-large, including ADA, we have set the above amounts in ADA at a conversion of $0.30 / ADA (~$14,400 USD as the total cost).

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

This proposal is requesting only those funds that are necessary to run four Grassroots Governance Community Forums over a six month period, and a small administrative cost to deliver the proposal. 

As per the budget above, the complete cost breakdown for each forum (in ADA) is:

• Session admin = 600
• Facilitation = 3200
• Documentation = 4400
• Publicity = 200
• Retrospective = 1600

Each forum is planned to cost 10,000ADA ($3000)

These are self-employed rates that take into account the employment overheads of the resources contracted. The rates are based on the low end of US and European averages. The amounts are calculated for each milestone based on the hours to complete.

In addition all the resources working on this project are taking on the currency risk of being paid in ADA. This means that a fall in the ADA price will result in being paid less or delivering less in each milestone. Any rise in the ADA price will represent a reward for investing in the Cardano ecosystem.

Consequently, given these factors, we believe this proposal offers excellent value for money in a volatile cryptocurrency environment

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agrees to Fund Rules and also that data in the submission form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept