Catalyst Compass

Cardano's Government system is the largest decentralized voting system in the world, counting about 250,000 active voters within the Fund5 period (regarding a number of voters from Fund2 period counting 24,000).

The number of active participants is steadily increasing and the system is more and more widely recognized by the community. However, it is becoming apparent that it is too difficult or even impossible for the average voter to make a good selection or even just to get a reasonable overview of all the projects and their potential value - that is where we kick in.

Imagine that someone has already been addressed to the troubles of pre-selection from the incredibly large offer and sorting it. What if someone eligibly analyzed and prepared this selection for all the voters to get insight on a general and above on a deepened level? This would give all users of the Cardano Government system a tool of understanding to select projects which they really want to support and which they really understand through our general and in-depth analysis.

As an independent non-profit organization (which shall be merged with the excisting voting structures by the Catalyst Community Advisors (CA's and vCA's) using an edited incentive system), we stay neutral and follow the philosophy of making the Cardano ecosystem easily accessible to all users and allowing them to participate in the voting system in the best informed way as possible. To achieve this, we use sophisticated evaluation keys arranged in more evaluation categories than before. We also focus particularly on communicating the results of our analyses to users and/or voters as coherently as possible while providing further in-depth information for more advanced users and/or voters.

So, why did we decide to establish a non-profit organization? We are utterly aware of the great responsibility entailed by the growing scope of necessary evaluation and classification of the projects. In our eyes, only a non-profit organization might be in the position to act with the right mindset coping with these tasks on the one hand and on the other to be able to represent the claim of acting on behalf of the entire Cardano ecosystem - without having to represent any own economic interests.

It is one of our principles that every project participating in the Catalyst voting is analyzed carefully, unbiased and fairly.

The projects available for voting often require advanced technical knowledge and hence, are not comprehensible for everyone. Project details are limited when using the Catalyst App or further information require to log in to Cardano Ideascale. Unfortunately, the Ideascale website is not easily accessible and not clearly structured. It is hard to keep an overview of all the projects available and more often only those which already received a certain amount of feedback will show up on the first pages. Furthermore, the Ideascale website with all its projects is not clearly structured by subclasses of projects, which would allow for a better access for users and voters because of better categorization. It would be a lot easier to find a preferential project when implementing the division into subclasses and the assignment of the several projects to it.

The aim of our "Catalyst Compass" project is to provide a more detailed evaluated and categorized overview of the current Catalyst fundraising projects for the people. We want to reform the Catalyst project's assessment system by providing a more in-depth analysis composed of a coherent summary and a broader spectrum of evaluation categories. This means we will make the Catalyst projects accessible and comprehensible for all potential users of the Cardano blockchain and for all the voters of the projects, depending on their level of technical, structural, economic, social, etc. understanding.

Hence, the general project's overview, evaluation and summary are to be followed by an in-depth analysis regarding the individual project's challenges, claims and aims. Being as diverse as all the projects are, we will keep in mind the necessary wide spectrum of potential experts (Community Advisors and evaluating Community Advisors) to competently assess all the aspects of the several projects.

Our moderators (composed of the vCA's) will provide a selection of the most promising projects, after the projects were assessed by the CA's. For this, evaluation keys have to be more detailed, e.g. in form of a classified scale to evaluate the economic, social and perhaps even political benefits, the estimated initial and ongoing costs and others like the already excisting category of feasability. Therefore an own point of view has to be defined concerning the community's attitude torwards decentralization, wealth distribution and who might benefit or suffer from a project's outcome. So, the assessement will have a broader classification and hence, will be more significant.

To stay with the thought of decentralization, the rules of becoming a CA and vCA/moderator will stay the same as they already are so, everyone can register as a CA and will not be excluded, as long as he/she is providing proper assessments according to the rules of assessment as there is.

To implement our "Catalyst Compass", we will issue and maintain a standalone website which is intended to be linked to the Catalyst Community and the Cardano-ideascale websites.

Our analyses intend to ensure that every participant in the Catalyst voting system is provided with coherent enough explanations and information of his/her preferred projects so that everyone is able to compare the projects with each other and by that, vote for the very project which in his/her eyes deserves it the most.

We aim for an understanding of the several projects, no matter what the educational or technical background of the voters might be, so that everyone can give his/her vote with the highest possible level of awareness.

Therefore, to underline our claim to provide coherent access to the several projects for all participants, we further aim to implement our website as a multilingual platform to reach even more potential prospects. Everyone should have the opportunity to dedicate his/her valuable vote to the project that deserves it. Our general and in-depth analyses and a clear presentation of them with many comparison parameters are key in the process.

We as Catalyst Compass offer a web platform which describes and evaluates the different projects for each current fund. The evaluation will be done rolling from fund to fund.

The evaluation methods like the analysis method will be standardized and given to the community advisors.

so that a comparison of the projects will be possible.

The following will be the tasks of Catalyst Compass team:

- Provision, maintenance and upkeep of the website

- Manage / pay staff (moderators / community advisors)

- Create / predefine / analyze and if necessary adapt evaluation methods

The members, staff and helpers stay in contact with each other via internet. For collaboration we will use platforms and services like e.g. Discord. This type of networking is completely sufficient for the demands of our work and as a result the acquisition and management of a central office is unnecessary.

The staff is composed of about 10-25 moderators who are taken from the pool of vCA's, CA's and/or others. Furthermore, experts will be needed who assess the projects and above that, give a coherent summary of the evaluated project. The experts act much like the already excisting CA's.

The tasks of the moderators is to assign and register the experts (CA's) to the projects assessed by these experts. Moderators also ban or remove experts in case of gross violations of agreed rules and/or inappropriate formulations (the basic agreements are to be taken from the already established Catalyst Community agreements).

In addition moderators are to formulate a single, aggregated summary of a project based on the information/summaries provided by the experts assessing the specific project. The summary is to be formulated as coherent as possible for the Catalyst Voting participants and it shall be broken down according to criteria like e.g. economic, social, political benefits, costs, technical and personal requirements, beneficiaries and disadvantaged parties, environmental issues, aspects of decentralization, and others.

Another task for the moderators is to place the projects according to individual topic into groups, so that voters and potential users of the Cardano blockchain projects can access them in the easiest way possible, without having to navigate through an opaque and confusing jungle of projects like there currently is.

The experts registered and assigned by the moderators are given the main task to assess the projects by the mentioned criteria which are organized in more than the already excisting categories (impact, feasability and auditability) and above that, experts will give a coherent summary of each assessed project which is to be aggregated by the moderators to form a single summary which will be presented on the "Catalyst Compass" website. The summary must be comprehensible in general and furthermore give a detailed explanation concernig information in regard to technical, economic, political, etc. requirements.

The summary will be to give the Catalyst voters sufficient information about the specific project in order to let the voters make their vote with the highest possible level of awareness.

The incentives for experts (former CA's) and moderators (former vCA's) shall be processed through the fund raising budget and have an upper limit. This should prevent the number of potential experts to rise too high by limiting the payment for them either by an absolut maximum of payment or an absolut maximal number of engaged experts.

We aim to reform the Catalyst Community's assessment system based on the Cardano-ideascale website, to provide a more detailed and thus more accessible evaluation and presentation of all the upcoming projects set to be voted for by the Cardano community.

Hence, we want to merge with the Catalyst community and all the dedicated vCA's and CA's from there, to process the projects on an own website, but still keep the Cardano-ideascale website as a basis from which all the on our website assessed and presented projects are to be picked.

The internal collaboration shall be processed by the common and already established gateways via internet like for example: Discord.

Thus, we expect to get our project working within the first 1-3 months after the current Fund6 period. It only depends on the speed of the transition process adopting and appointing the moderators and experts from the pool of the current vCA's and CA's to our Catalyst Compass projects assessment system. A preliminary website has already been established (https://github.com/Catalyst-Compass).

We are currently cooperating with the Cardano Smart Voting proposal (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Cardano-Smart-Voting/367168-48088) and try to merge both our ideas into one project. By implementing the proposed Smart Voting the assessing CA's shall be clustered into groups formed by consensus of interest and know-how. This would give rare assessment classes (e.g. because assessing a certain proposal needs knowledge which might be pretty rare) a higher value than others, which are more common and coherent for most advisors. By that, positive assessments of proposals, which suffer from a lesser attention only because the technical insight might not be as coherent and easy as those of other proposals, will become more valuable and thus receive a greater attention.

The number of participants in Catalyst voting is increasing rapidly, thus there is a need for user-friendly processing of the projects' evaluation and presentation which continues to grow accordingly. The benefit of our project is therefore beyond question and our "Catalyst Compass" team is working diligently and dedicatedly on its implementation. Basically, there is no question whether the project can be successful - it is an absolute must and will be a very useful tool for all users of the Catalyst Voting to orientate and appropiately evaluate the presented projects for themselves.

With 70 proposals funded in the Fund5 period and about 250,000 total votes from about 33,000 unique wallets (compared to 12 projects funded with about 24,000 votes in the period of Fund2), we have already reached an extent which needs to be managed by a dedicated group of people, specially composed for this very reason.

We are looking for active members who would like to share their ideas of how to make the voting easier for everybody. Thus, we would like you to become a member of our team if you are dedicated to support our project either with your ideas or by implementing our ideas. There is a lot of work to do and we are currently incapable of doing all this on our own. We need more active members who are willing to contribute to our project by co-creating, leading and supporting the ideas and the processing of this proposal. Every member will receive an allowance for any kind of useful input. To join our project, simply write a comment down below and we will invite you to our Discord channel, which is arranged for this very project. We are already looking forward to any additional kind of cooperation and support from you!