Increasing Diversity in Catalyst

To change the world, we need to hear the voices of all cultures and constituents. We need diversity to build a just and equitable future.

Every culture and constituent has a voice in the conversation, and we build solutions that includes and elevates everyone.

• How many new users of Cardano were on-boarded?
• How many new Catalyst community members became engaged?
• How much was diversity increased inside Catalyst?
• How many under-represented groups are better supported in Catalyst?
• How many new countries, languages, and/or cultures are being added to the conversation?

Diversity has been found to increase creativity and lead to better outcomes in every instance where it has been studied and measured. This challenge seeks to foster inclusive and welcoming environments and remove barriers for people from all cultures, backgrounds to join the Catalyst ecosystem and participate in meaningful ways through a focus on increasing the awareness of and building mechanisms to encourage greater diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

This challenge is about human networking, encouraging and fostering communication between groups and individuals, and increasing the diversity in the Catalyst ecosystem through creating safe, welcoming, and exciting spaces for people to feel welcome. There is tremendous value to the entire Catalyst ecosystem in connecting, extending, and growing our human networks and opening up silos to more collaborative engagement.

The value of a network grows exponentially (see: Metcalf's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law)) as more and more connections and nodes are added. Let's grow our human network and bring as many people into our ecosystem as possible. Through increasing diversity and inclusion, this challenge will act as an accelerator for uncovering and fostering creativity, and encouraging serendipitous discovery and collaboration by helping people and projects in the ecosystem connect and collaborate.

Investing sufficiently now, to increase diversity in our community will pay off more and more over time as the community grows. This challenge is seeking $150,000 to ensure that we put enough attention on encouraging projects that increase diversity and inclusion and grow our community to many different parts of the planet and including more and more voices from under-represented communities and demographics. It is envisioned that this budget will help support translations and accessibility improvements, bring in initiatives and projects that remove barriers, ease on-boarding, and welcome diverse participants.