Challenge Governance: The next step

With proper guidance, tools and research each challenge can become a small self-contained experiment on the road towards Voltaire

A diverse pool of sophisticated and effective Challenges tailored to their goals making full use of the technologies they enable

Metrics in this should be measured through the adoption of the outcomes  in other challenges:

Challenges using developed systems & tools for: proposing, assessing, voting, fund distribution or auditing

Collaborations between tool builder & challenge teams

Community tools that have been integrated into the Catalyst process

Currently it is assumed that all Challenges follow the same system, which is Catalyst as we know it, defined by its current interfaces, rules and parameters. This makes the whole of catalyst an experiment for this specific system. Preferably their would be a way to create controlled experiments to try out several different systems, in a comparable manner. 

There are a lot of ideas and proposals which aim too introduce changes to the system, related to voting, assessments, the proposal system, and so on. The question is how can they be adopted into the system? If there is only one system governing all funds, changing it comes with a lot of risk. If instead some Challenges use their own system, they can serve as isolated experiments.

Proposals in the Challenge Setting category could introduce changes within their scope by including them in the challenge description. Some changes might be easier to implement than others and some might require entire side chain solutions. Currently the responsibility to deliver these solutions lies with the Catalyst team. This Challenge aims too support initiatives that make these kind of changes possible and to start taking ownership as a community over this part of the infrastructure.   

Guiding Questions:

- Which proposals would allow alternative systems to be used within Catalyst

- Which proposals provide a technical bridge between Ideascale, Cardano mainnet & Yormungander and community tools

- Which initiatives provide support for challenge teams 

Example directions:

- Design alternative models & frameworks for Challenges

- develop models/Tools/Smart contracts to facilitate Challenge specific CA's, voting, fund distribution

- Organising challenge specific groups (experts, mentors, auditors)

- Develop platforms for everyone participating in a challenge to connect & share

- integrations with Ideascale and other Catalyst systems

Success of this challenge would see outcomes from the proposals being incorporated by Challenge Setting proposers and Challenge Teams. Such adoptions can be seen as a means of validation of the quality of the outcomes. In turn, systems that proof to work when they are used in a challenge can naturally lead too adoption by other challenge proposers. 

Budget reasoning:

The challenge focusses on improving the internal governance systems. If we assume a 5-10% budget on improving the governance, this budget fills a recent portion of it, while leaving room for  some other challenges.

To provide an example of altering the rules for a challenge, the following changes are proposed to be included for the scope of this challenge:

Fund Allocation based on voting:

- Remaining funds must match >= 90% of proposed funds or else a proposal is skipped (as opposed to 100%)

Reasoning for the rule: If a proposal receives at least 90% of it's proposed budget, it should be able to deliver on it's intial goals. Although this is not a perfect solution, this should lead to less

Challenge amounts should only be proposed in increments of $25K. Other amounts not in these increments will be rounded up. E.g. $27,500 will be rounded up to $50,000.