Catalyst Catapult

Background:
This proposal builds on the F4 proposal Guided Onboarding Experience. While that initial effort creates a template for a repeatable onboarding process, this one lays foundations for the structure to support ongoing delivery of that process, in a way that emphasizes conversation, connection, and community curation.
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Guided-Onboarding-Experience/340760-48088

Onboarding Reimagined
What if distributed and non-coordinating content creators and ambassadors could guide new participants to a single, cooperative onboarding ramp

What if new participants could co-create the vision, values, and processes that they inherit

What if we could connect new participants with community-endorsed experts and mentors for guidance through the ramp-up process and beyond?

Load, Launch, Lead: An Overview
Catalyst Catapult aims to create a self-sustaining, community-owned mechanism for onboarding. It contains three discrete but fluid functions: LOAD, LAUNCH, & LEAD.

Content creators and ambassadors LOAD participants through onboarding event promotion. LOAD functions as the funnel for these live sessions. This may be any content creator, and we hope to see an exchange of onboarding participants for ADA ie compensate content creators for promotion of onboarding events proportional to number of participants funneled to sessions. This could be formal like the TH or master landing page. It could be ad hoc efforts to recruit participants in discord. It could be chatting about the effort on a podcast. Most basically, it's about reciprocating recruitment efforts.

Organizers and facilitators LAUNCH participants to the center of conversations. LAUNCH is all about the sessions themselves. Content curators and facilitators are the backbone here. On the curation side, its about deciding which community content best represents and communicates our values and vision as a community, what are the most relevant topics for the target audience in a given session (alluding to the governance co-laboratory here, we see token curated registries (TCR) as a promising avenue to explore on the curation side). Facilitators guide participants through those conversationally designed experiences. LAUNCHers provide the core stewardship and execution of the model. Contributions will be made and compensated based on a 'paid volunteer' model - Ken Adams gave the inspiration here based on his experience as a volunteer firefighter.

Mentors and team-builders LEAD participants to ongoing success. LEAD is like the landing point of the session and avenue to continued success post session. It will be an effort to connect participants with mentors, buddies and team builders in the ecosystem. Interested in being a CA? Chat with Rodrigo! Interested in dev work in DeFi? The Liquid team is hiring! Stuff like that. We see this as a potential ongoing funding source, ie team builders pay a fee to be listed and participate, perhaps fees proportional to actual recruitment results.

Incentivized stewardship and a paying it forward mentality drive a self-reinforcing cycle to continually recruit participants and contributors across all types. As this initiative grows, we intend to explore opportunities to formalize this framework and social dynamics into a DAO / DisCO-like governance structure (see "Governance Co-Laboratory").

Above all, Catalyst Catapult aims to launch teams and individuals out of their own walled gardens, and into the diverse tropics of the broader ecosystem where they might find success through non-rivalrous collaboration.

Use of Funds
Requested funds will be used to fill the Catapult Treasury. Funds will be disbursed from the treasury to reward meaningful participation and contributions to the Catapult initiative. Initially, funds will be managed manually, with a goal of experimenting with various governance mechanisms, so that we might later formalize validated learnings on-chain. Ultimately, we see the Treasury being self-sustaining - we plan to experiment with a number of monetization mechanisms.