Funding Community Service Providers

With the community taking over more and more responsibilities, such specific services need to be identified and specifically financed

Identifying high-priority-services to the community and creating more stable funding models, e.g. based on rolling quarterly arrangements

• Identified service segments which the community classifies as important
• Managed portfolio-overview of such high-value service providers
• Quarterly rating score of a service provided to community by a provider (e.g. NPS 1-10)
• Number of experts engaged in total (number)
• Number of experts in the various inter-disciplinary segments (disciplines)

The early CATALYST Challenge Settings were mainly focusing on creating DApps and supportive community tools. 

During the recent funds we see proposals, which are reacting to the community's need for becoming more independent. This requires a multitude of services. In the process of empowering the community to take over more and more decisions and control, such services need to be provided with reliable continuity. This can be services like creation (and lifecycle managing) supportive tools, templates, services supporting events & processes, services like supporting risk-assessment & risk management, portfolio management and many more. 

In order to be efficient and effective, such services require stable teams within these service providers. As a consequence, this needs a more stable funding than the current proposing from one Catalyst fund to the next. New ways of funding will be required, so that we can cover both needs:

1. Accountability and flexibility on side of the community and 

1. More stability for recruiting and keeping highly qualified teams on side of the service provider. 

A industry-proven model for such service agreements are quarterly-rolling agreements with degressive bindingness (always 100%, 80%, 50% 25% quarterly degressive bindingness of an agreed amount for a clearly defined service). Every quarter or fund, this needs to be renewed for qualifying again for 100%, no renewal means fading out of the funding in e.g. a controlled 80%, 50%, 25% way. 

Goals of this Challenge Setting are

1. Providing a funding-home = identifying such valuable ongoing services to the community and at first keep doing this in the traditional Catalyst funding for fund 8

1. Starting a careful process together with this selected group of service providers that is determined to find a new funding-model (e.g. as outlined above) step by step - of course hand-in-hand with the Catalyst / Voltaire progress. This means that everything remains 'funding as usual' during fund 8 and  improved models will be created and piloted e.g. from fund 9 onwards.