Collaboration for Governance

As we approach the Voltaire era of the Cardano roadmap, the community needs to collaborate to take responsibility for Catalyst governance.

The Cardano community is actively collaborating across silos to develop new and coherent approaches to governance, participation, and power.

• Is the proposal a collaboration between two governance-related proposers (funded or unfunded) from a previous Fund? Does the proposal demonstrate this by including links to at least two past proposals by members of the team?
• Does the proposal show evidence that the proposers have thought about why they are collaborating, what they each bring, and how their collaboration will work in practical terms?
• Capability – does the proposal team demonstrate they have knowledge of the Catalyst community, and an understanding of governance issues?
• Who is involved - will the proposal help ensure that decision-making power is more widely distributed, and that structural exclusions (by geography, by gender, by first language, by economic power, etc) are challenged?
• Does the proposal create opportunities for genuinely new approaches? Are traditional assumptions about leaders, hierarchies, the link between wealth and power, and who can be meaningfully involved in governance being challenged, and does the proposal move us towards more decentralised structures and tools?

As we approach the Voltaire era of the Cardano roadmap, https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/voltaire/ the governance of Project Catalyst will be transitioned from IOG to the Catalyst community itself.

If we are to be ready for Voltaire, we need to bring together in a coherent fashion the many disparate experiments that have been launched in Catalyst to develop and test infrastructure for decentralised and distributed governance. We need to develop consensus on how these experiments, teams, and tools fit together and consider how community members get involved and use them.

This kind of cohesiveness demands a novel approach; so this challenge is unlike any other in Catalyst’s history.

The aim of this challenge setting is to create new collaborations between previous proposers (successfully funded or not) on decentralised governance issues. So, to propose in this challenge, your proposal team must:

1. include team members from at least two different decentralised-governance-related proposals from a previous funding round
2. include links to the relevant previous proposals
3. explain the reasons for this collaboration, what each side brings to it, and how it will work.

The aim of this approach is to counteract fragmentation and draw together the existing thinking in the ecosystem to help us build what we need. We can only become ready for distributed governance if we work together.

Decentralised-governance-related proposals from a previous funding round includes (but is not limited to) projects about:

• Strategy and decision-making
• Administration
• Policies, operating procedures, and protocols
• Recruiting, supporting, and resourcing good people to do governance work
• Service array and service delivery systems link to governance
• Information systems and data support
• Evaluation, quality assurance, and continuous quality improvement systems
• Communication systems (for governance with the community)
• Communication systems (external)
• Research, analysis, learning, and reports on distributed and decentralised governance