Catalyst Swarm 2022 GitBook

Project Aim
Documentation, tracking and publicising of Catalyst activities are vital to support the community - they enable transparency and accessibility, and help onboard new people by making key information available to them, and offering a one-stop place to find a record of Swarm sessions, Town Halls, links to community activities and related GitBooks, all in one place. Additionally, Catalyst is a groundbreaking experiment, and thus it is important that we document its activities for posterity on an open-source, accessible platform.

So in this proposal, QA-DAO wants to document and track Catalyst activities via a GitBook, particularly focusing on Swarm, a self-organising community supporting the success of Catalyst https://catalystswarm.com/

This proposal aims to fund maintenance of the Catalyst-Swarm-2022 GitBook for three months, from February to April 2022. This assumes a single maintainer who collates materials relevant to Swarm and tracks daily activities.

The GitBook maintainer will also regularly post links to updated content on Catalyst and Swarm Discord servers amd on Telegram. In-context links will also be posted in Town Hall chat where appropriate.

Part of the budget has been set aside for social media engagement, so that the Catalyst-Swarm-2022 GitBook can achieve a wider reach and provide insights into Project Catalyst on networks including Twitter and Reddit.

Background to the project
QA-DAO (quality-assurance-dao.github.io) has been documenting and tracking Catalyst activities since April 2021, through GitBook initiatives such as Catalyst Circle Oversight GitBook https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle/ , which documents and shares the work of Catalyst Circle, and Catalyst Coordinator Gitbook https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-coordinator/, a resource for funded proposers.

In particular, QA-DAO created Catalyst-Swarm-Genesis GitBook (funded in Fund 6), which recorded the beginnings and evolution of Swarm (https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-swarm-genesis)

QA-DAO's GitBook initiatives provide useful reference tools for anyone interested in Catalyst and its development and governance, and offer valuable contextual information about the community emerging out of the Project Catalyst experiment.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Economic sustainability
QA-DAO (quality-assurance-dao.github.io) and Catalyst-Swarm are seeking GitHub sponsorship (https://github.com/sponsors/Quality-Assurance-DAO)) and will also explore StakePool Operator sponsorship. The aim is to become independent of Project Catalyst funding. As it takes time to build up sufficient sponsorship, this proposal seeks to fill the gap.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maintenance
Whilst the Catalyst-Swarm-2022 GitBook content is open-source, the maintenance is currently the work of QA-DAO. This is because of the organisational overhead involved in sharing the maintainer role and soliciting and reviewing submissions from the community.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Roadmap and Definitions of success
Prior to funding (June 2021 - present)
The Catalyst-Swarm-Genesis GitBook, the precursor to Calalyst-Swarm-2022, has been maintained since June 27th 2021. A presentation of the GitBook was given at Project Catalyst Town Hall #16 on July 14th, 2021 and is attached to this proposal below. Sponsorships are being sought.

at 3 months (May 2022)
Once funded, Catalyst-Swarm-2022 will document key meetings and community events from Swarm and other parts of Catalyst, and communicate this documentation and tracking via social media to reach a wider audience.
Success would mean increasing pageviews on the GitBook, and increased awareness of the GitBook within the Catalyst community.
Sponsorships are being sought.

at 6 months (August 2022 - after the end of the project)
In the medium term Catalyst-Swarm-2022 aims to be self-sustaining and sponsorships will help achieve this aim.

at 12 months (Feb 2023)
In the long term, Catalyst-Swarm-2022 should be self-sustaining, and sponsorships will help achieve this aim.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Budget
Maintenance
Regular updates over 3 months (21 hours per month) to add content
$50 per hour for 63 hours (21 x 3) = $ 3,150

Engagement
Promotion, engagement and communication on social media (Twitter, Telegram, Youtube, Discord, Reddit).
2 hours per week for 3 months = 24 hours = $50 hour for 24 hours = $ 1,200

Total: $4,350

KPIs

• Amount of material added to the GitBook
• Page views (measured by Google Analytics); growth of page views during project; and where page referrals come from (i.e. is social media engagement working?)
• Dwell time (as a rough measure of how useful visitors find the material)
• Comments, views and interactions on social media
• New Catalyst members becoming aware of the Gitbook (measured e.g. by occasional Zoom polls at Swarm breakout rooms to ask if new attendees are aware of it)

Risks and mitigation
Risk of low levels of engagement with the material: We will mitigate this by enagaing the Catalyst community itself. We will use our understanding of the community to ensure the GitBook captures a range of material that will engage the interest of different areas of Catalyst (stakepool operators, voters, Eastern Town Hall members, toolmakers and maintainers, CAs, etc); and we will capture information that people want to share - for example, we know that leaders of Swarm breakout rooms will propagate the GitBook documentation of their room within their own networks to give it wider exposure.

Risk that the key maintainer (@swhitenstall) is not able to continue to maintain the GitBook: We are mitigating this by the growth of QA-DAO as an organisation, so that someone else can take over if this is ever needed.

Relevant experience
Stephen Whitenstall (@swhitenstall) has 30 years' experience in business, community and academic projects. He set up QA-DAO (quality-assurance-dao.github.io) in April 2021. He develops, maintains documentation and provides technical project management support for Catalyst Swarm; has been successfully funded in funds 5 and 6 for several significant projects around community engagement, auditability, recordkeeping and transparency; and is currently the representative for Catalyst Co-ordinator (Funded Proposers) in Catalyst Circle v2.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-whitenstall-166727210

Vanessa Cardui (@CallyFromAuron) is a community engagement professional with a background in archives and records, and over 20 years' experience of supporting independent communities such as Catalyst to document themselves, collate material and make it accessible. She is currently leading on the QA-DAO fund 6 proposals Homeless Hub https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Homeless-Hub/367891-48088 and Oversight of Catalyst Circle https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Oversight-of-Catalyst-Circle/370088-48088 .

Catalyst-2020 Gitbook is a project of QA-DAO (https://quality-assurance-dao.github.io ), an ongoing open source project that provides support for the Cardano Project Catalyst Community. Catalyst-2020 Gitbook's project documentation will follow QA-DAO ideals of open-source transparency and auditability.