Cardano Hackathon Seasons

- Utilize fund seven funds to rapidly bootstrap the initial number (3-5???) of regional virtual hackathons

  - should target a wider dev community, not just Cardano or blockchain community, although all projects should have a blockchain element with Cardano strongly encouraged.

  - should be one or two weekends in duration

  - prize pools for each region could be targetted to be in the region of 75k - 150k

- Seek sponsorship to bolster prize funds

    - it would not be easy in the current structure, but a prize matching fund from Catalyst where any prize money provided by sponsors was matched by Catalyst would be a fantastic mechanism IMHO

-  Panel of judges should be sourced from experienced blockchain product builders and crypto capital allocators

- winners from each region get to participate in the quarterly season finale with their winning project

  - prize pool for the season finale could be targetted to be in the region of 500k - 1m

  - also one or two weekends in duration

- some number of runners up may be offered the opportunity to also participate in the season finale but possibly with the condition that the project they work on has significant changes or is different from the one that did not win at regionals 

   - this could be useful to encourage continued participation from teams that are identified as high potential, but for some reason, their initial idea did not resonate with the judging panel 

Are submitted solutions of funding mechanisms faster than Catalyst?

• Having regularly scheduled repeated seasons allows more rapid funding for ideas and proposals because there would always be a shortly upcoming regional hackathon where you can participate solo or form a team, build an MVP rapidly and get immediate feedback from the community, experts, and potentially receive initial funding.  

How Scalable is this proposal? How would it scale to 10x? 100x? 1000x? More?

• As a Virtual by default concept with an optional in person component for each event.  This concept should be scalable linearly with the number of resources available and regions that have volunteers / staff willing to run regional events

• Medium term goal should be to have 3 regions (Americas, Europe and Asia) each hosting 1 Hackathon per quarter with a World final Hackathon occurring either 2 or 4 times / year

• This would result in as many as 18 events per year and potentially mid 7 figures of funding / prize money being distributed mostly from sponsorship sources

• Scaling can be done horizontally by onboarding more geographically disparate regions in a different timezone or vertically by adding different cohorts of prizes to each event to encourage wider participation

• The goal should be for Catalyst to fund the administration of the events in the medium / long term with prize money coming from sponsorship thereby leveraging Catalyst funds efficiently and maximizing their impact by utilizing third party capital

How Transparent is this proposal? Is it open, auditable, and enables transparency of decisions, funding, and results?

• All results, prize distributions, sponsorships and capital allocator involvement should be publicly available for audit.

• Results and distributions published on the website

• judging notes potentially published also

• presentations recorded and published

How Accountable is this proposal? What is the reporting requirement? Are funds disbursed over time based on performance?

• I have solicited the challenge team for some clarification on these questions

How impactful is this proposal? Are disbursed funds creating net positive results? Does this proposal see a greater return on intent compared to Catalyst?

• This proposal has the potential to grow the ecosystem of Cardano projects, the community by encouraging new participants and contributors with a financial incentive and the public perception of the Cardano community by providing a locus of interest for media around a community initiative that is focused on building and shipping useful products on the Cardano ecosystem.

• The above combined with the ability to attract third-party funding for each event in addition to any Catalyst provided funds has the potential to greatly multiply the return on intent for Catalyst funds compared to a Catalyst only approach

Further inspiration could be taken from the Solana Ignition Hackathon ( https://solana.com/ignition)

Funds Requested: $25,000

Budget Breakdown:

$15,000: Regional 1 prize pool

$3,000: Regional 1 Venue hire & catering

$3,000: Website

$4,000: Tools and Materials

Timeline:

 January 2022:

    - Decide on region and book venue

        - Pick 2 more regions for follow up events to include in discussions with Sponsors

    - Launch website and commence marketing

    - Seek Sponsors to bolster prize pool

    - Solicit potential judges

    - Research tooling for online events

Febuary 2022:

  - Finalize judging panel

  - Finalize tooling 

  - Solicit mentors

March 2022:

- Hold regional event with outline as follows:

    1 week prior - open team formation

    2 days prior - finalize teams

    1 day prior - introduce teams to mentors (teams can now start work)

     Day1 (Friday) - kick off call / lunch time lightning talks / judge 'walk around' / end of day wrap

    Day 2 (Saturday) - kick off call / lunch time lightning talks / judge 'walk around' 

    Day 3 (Sunday) - kick off call / presentations begin at lunch time / winners announced Sunday evening

- If participation pre-judging to determine who presents may be necessary

Definition of Success After:

3 Months: first regional event successfully held

6 Months: second and third regional events scheduled, funded, sponsored and held

12 Months: regionals now occurring on familiar cadence for the community mainly funded by sponsorships. First world finals held - aim for $500,000 in prizes for final

Why Rapid Funding Mechanism Challenge and Not Community Event Challenge:

1. On the surface a Hackathon is an event and it could be treated as such and put in the Community Event Challenge. However, I suggest an examination of challenge goals makes it the wrong choice.

A summary of the community event challenges goals could be said to be 'increase participation in the Catalyst community'.

You could tailor a Hackathon to incentivize community and catalyst participation but I would argue that designing a Hackathon to explicitly target these goals waters down its potential as an engine of creation and value to the wider Cardano ecosystem.

2. The goals of the rapid funding challenge are stated to be experiment with different models for scaling the fair distribution of the Catalyst treasury to grow the Cardano ecosystem in a way that is faster than the current Catalyst system, transparent, auditable, has a measurable impact and if possible increases the return on intent compared to the existing Catalyst process.

Given these goals I would argue that the fundamental goal, of this particular challenge, is how to grow the ecosystem faster. Imo this is best achieved by doing everything you can to encourage people to build something now. In the process of building, they will collaborate and form teams and join communities but the motivation to do these things is the building.

Hackathons can be a great vehicle for stripping away everything that is not conducive to rapid creation as they are strictly timeboxing a time-consuming activity forcing focus and action.

3. Hackathons, when well run, are a tried and tested method of encouraging and facilitating innovation. There are some very interesting proposals in this challenge but they mostly rely on implementing something new and novel. These could have 6 to 12 month timelines before their efficacy could even be tested. If nothing else Hackathons are the 'old reliable' that can be rapidly deployed and tested to see if they are conducive to Catalysts rapid funding goals