QA-DAO Oversight of Catalyst Circle

[IMPACT]

The background : Catalyst Circle and documentation

Catalyst Circle is a initiative started by IOHK to advance governance in Project Catalyst. It is currently (March 2022) just beginning its third iteration, Circle v3. It meets twice a month.

The Catalyst Circle Oversight GitBooks (https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle) have been maintained by QA-DAO since July 2021. We document and track the activities of Catalyst Circle by transcribing, summarising and time-stamping Circle meeting videos, and collating additional material related to Circle activities; and we publicise this documentation widely through the Catalyst community. This makes it easier for the community to track Circle’s activities, and has successfully raised awareness of both the importance of Circle itself, and the issues that Circle discusses.

The Oversight GitBooks (Circle v1, v2 and currently v3) have become a trusted resource for the Catalyst community: they are regularly mentioned in Town Hall and within the community as an authoritative source of information on Circle’s activities.

The documenting of Circle v3 (the current iteration of Circle) is covered by the fund 6 proposal “Oversight of Catalyst Circle” https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/370088 , and is due to end in April 2022. But ongoing documentation and oversight of Circle after this date is likely to become more needed then ever, because Circle is due to gain a decision-making role in the coming months as part of the process of beginning to transition governance of Catalyst away from IOG to the Catalyst community. So continued documentation needs to be resourced.

The solution: independent oversight of Circle, with translation to Spanish

Independent oversight of Catalyst Circle helps support decentralised governance by keeping the Catalyst community as a whole in touch with Circle. Circle meeting videos are 2 hours long, which is quite a time commitment for people to watch; so QA-DAO’s summaries, transcripts, and timestamps enable people to catch up quickly. And our social media posts help to feed the key issues of each meeting into the community, inspiring discussion and debate.

The popularity of the Circle Oversight GitBooks is currently growing, which makes it all the more important that we are able to continue this work. Typical engagement with the documentation of a meeting is now around 300 unique views, a significant increase from the under 40 views we were receiving when we were first funded in Nov 2021 and began to increase our social media engagement. If this continuation proposal is funded, QA-DAO aims to continue to grow views, and to also increase engagement in the form of comments, sharing, and discussion. (This After Town Hall, which discussed details of the Parameters Pilot originally presented at Circle, is one example of the ways we might do this.) As well as a growth of interest in the GitBooks, awareness of and interest in Circle itself is also growing in the Catalyst community. (This is demonstrated, for example, by the large increase in the numbers of people who voted in the Circle v3 elections in January 2022, compared to the numbers who voted for Circle v2 in September 2021). As we move towards the Voltaire era, and to a decision-making role for Circle, this level of interest and engagement is likely to increase even further; so independent oversight of Circle will become even more valuable to support transparency, accountability, and community engagement with governance. Note that this proposal also supports the existing (Fund 7) proposal “Community Governance Oversight” https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/383517 which will maintain high-level oversight of Catalyst governance in the coming weeks via surveys and retrospectives. QA-DAO's approach of making the content of Circle meetings available, searchable and accessible both to the Community Governance team and the wider community, supports this. Also, because the process of documenting meetings verbatim requires a particularly close reading of the meetings, which can lead to very specific insights, we will (if funded) be able to contribute these insights to the Governance Oversight surveys, thus helping to capture information that might otherwise be missed.

Finally, for Circle v5, we will work with a translator from the Catalyst LatAm community's new translation service (which by then will be active), to pilot translating our meeting summaries into Spanish; we will monitor views and engagement that are gained in the LatAm and Spanish-speaking communities as a result.

NOTE: Circle Oversight GitBooks are maintained by QA-DAO in collaboration with the IOG, Cardano & Project Catalyst communities. All content recorded is open-source and licensed under Apache 2.0.

As there is no challenge in this Fund devoted to governance, oversight, supoort for distributed decision-making, or similar, this proposal is being submitted in the Miscellaneous challenge.

Independent oversight of Circle is something for which there is a proven need in the Catalyst ecosystem, and something which people have come to expect and depend on, but for which there is (in this funding round) no suitable challenge other than Miscellaneous. This is one of the key purposes of the Misc challenge – to be a repository for needed proposals that have been “orphaned” due to changes in what challenge settings are available from fund to fund, and to enable needed work to continue.

• Timeliness: QA-DAO needs to receive videos of meetings in a timely manner. So far this has always happened well, and the risk of delays appears to be very low; but in the event of a serious delay, we could release basic documentation based on the meeting agenda and the minutes taken by the Circle Admin team during the meeting itself.

• Recording failure: Again, the risk of this is very low; but in the event of failure of a recording, we have the minutes taken by the Circle Admin team, and we also, if necessary, have the ability to contact Circle members for their recollections, relevant weblinks, etc, so we could theoretically construct written documentation of the meeting.

• Low views: We have learnt how and where to publicise the recordings to ensure around 300 views per meeting, and we hope to increase this. In the event of unexpectedly low views for a particular meeting, we would mitigate this by more targeted posting in the community – for example, posts about specific issues that were discussed in the meeting, and/or inviting relevant individuals or groups to comment and engage.

• Illness/unavailability: as one person (Vanessa Cardui) holds key responsibility for doing the documentation work, there is a risk that if she is ill or unavailable, the documentation for a meeting could be delayed. We mitigate this by ensuring colleagues in QA-DAO are familiar with the documentation methodology and process for Circle meetings, and can take over if needed.

[FEASIBILITY]

Prior to funding (Catalyst Circle Version 3, Feb-April 2022)

Documentation and tracking is already live. The GitBook structure and underlying GitHub Organisation is already in place; and a time-plan and methodology for documenting Circle meetings is already being successfully used.

Funding +3 months (Catalyst Circle Version 4, May-July 2022)

Catalyst Circle Version 4 roughly coincides with the release of Fund 8 (May 2022).

• Publicise and document Governance Day for Circle v 4, including provision of a central place for the community to find the platform statements of the candidates for election. (Our documentation for Circle v2 reached over 400 people; we aim to increase this.)
• Continue to release meeting documentation shortly after each Circle meeting
• Publicise the documentation via Twitter, Discord, Telegram and Reddit, and at Town Hall. We will aim to continue to increase views and will structure our social media posts so as to facilitate increased community engagement and commentary, rather than only views.
• Contribute to the insight-gathering of the Community Governance Oversight team.
• (June 2022) write and share a short insight report on Circle v4 from the perspective of an impartial documenter.

Funding + 6 months (Catalyst Circle Version 5, Aug-Oct 2022)

• Publicise and document Governance Day for Circle v5, aiming to further increase awareness of the elections and views of the candidates’ platform statements.
• Continue to release meeting documentation approximately 4 days after each Circle meeting
• Publicise the documentation via Twitter, Discord, Telegram and Reddit and at Town Hall, aiming to encourage commentary and facilitate engagement with the issues.
• Work with the new LatAm community’s translation service to translate meeting summaries into Spanish, and monitor the engagement that results from this.

Note: QA-DAO has developed a flat “per meeting” rate for this work, based on our experience and on industry-standard fees in the UK and US for transcription, indexing and summary of multiple-speaker meetings.

(Please also note that as we are based in the UK, our calculations were originally in the UK currency, the pound; so translation to US dollars does not necessarily produce “round” figures.)

• Transcript, summary and timestamps of Circle meetings: $663 per meeting x 16 Circle meetings (6 meetings per Circle, plus a retrospective and an onboarding meeting for each iteration) = $10,608
• Documentation of elections for Circle v4 and v5, including collating the candidates’ platform statements, documenting voting results: 8 hours per Governance Day, x 2 Governance Days, @$55 /hour = $880
• Publicising Circle documentation via social media - Telegram, Discord, Twitter, Reddit (6 hours per month x 6 months) : 36hours @$55 /hour = £1,980
• Writing and publicising two short oversight reports, at the end of Circle v4 and Circle v5: 5 hrs @ $55/hr = $275
• Translator for circle v5 summaries: (6 meetings plus 1 onboarding and 1 retrospective = 8 meetings) x $300 per meeting = $2,400

Total : $16,143

Vanessa Cardui (@CallyFromAuron) is a community engagement professional with a background in oral history and archiving. She has 20+ years' experience of accurately transcribing video and audio material for historical record, and of using transcription and summary to make video material more accessible and discoverable for communities. She also has extensive experience of training others in how to transcribe and summarise. She is currently leading on oversight of Catalyst Circle meetings https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle-oversight-v3. She is engaged with the Catalyst community, but is non-aligned and independent, and has never been part of Circle.

Stephen Whitenstall (@swhitenstall) has 30 years' experience in organising academic, community and business projects, and is the founder of QA-DAO. He develops, maintains documentation and provides technical project management support for Catalyst Swarm and several other Catalyst initiatives. https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-whitenstall-166727210

You can support the activities of QA-DAO by becoming a GitHub sponsor https://github.com/sponsors/Quality-Assurance-DAO .

[AUDITABILITY]

We will measure:

• Numbers of meetings and events documented and added to GitBooks (total will be 12 regular meetings, 2 onboarding and 2 retrospective meetings, plus 2 Governance Day elections)
• Unique views and impressions of the meeting documentation, both on Youtube and on GitBook
• Interactions, shares, Likes, mentions, and comments on social media such as Twitter, Discord, Telegram
• Level of engagement with the activities of Circle, as measured by numbers of community issues added to the Circle Prioritised Problems board, amount of posts on Catalyst channels about issues discussed at Circle, attendance at After Town Halls and other events related to Circle.
• Numbers of people standing for election to Circle, and numbers voting for Circle representatives for CCv4 and CCv5, demonstrating increased awareness of and engagement with Circle.

Success would be:

• an increase in numbers of people accessing the documentation of Circle meetings;
• increased discussion in the wider Catalyst community of the issues raised at Circle, and an increased awareness and understanding of Voltaire and distributed governance;
• increased engagement with Circle v5 among LatAm Catalyst members, due to translation of the meeting summaries into Spanish
• increased numbers of candidates standing for election to Circle v4 and v5;
• increased numbers of people voting for Circle.

It is a continuation of the Fund 6 funded proposal https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/370088 Oversight of Catalyst Circle.