Content & Insights: Multi-Channel

Articles about Catalyst roles & topics, Interviews w/ Catalyst participants, Community leadership on twitter w/ 100+ live participants daily

We publish Cardano articles weekly, built a Catalyst research tool, & host daily twitter shows. We were funded by Catalyst to found a mentoring & outreach Lab in Kenya, & to translate our Content Library into Swahili & Spanish. Blockchain developer, Tech evangelist, Web designer

[IMPACT]

This project proposes to expand lidonation.com's Articles, Resources, and Community building activities, with a focus on enabling and onboarding new participants to Project Catalyst.

When people experience the innovation and positive community in Project Catalyst, they are naturally excited and want to learn more! At Lido Nation we believe "The Future is for Everyone" and that anyone should be able to learn and participate. However, it can take a while to understand how it all works, and how to fit in, especially as a newcomer.

lidonation.com is a trusted resource for educational Cardano content. We already provide significant helpful resources relating to Project Catalyst. This Campaign challenged us to dig even deeper to think about what we could contribute to Project Catalyst enablement.

We are excited about our plans, and hope you will be too!

First, some quick highlights of what we are already doing:

• The Library at LidoNation.com already includes 10+ articles about different facets of Project Catalyst. these include an intro/overview article, Catalyst "news", and a three-part series outlining the "Anatomy of a Good Proposal". (https://www.lidonation.com/en/tags/project-catalyst)
• Our "Catalyst Proposals" page is a public resource for searching and researching ALL past Catalyst Proposals. You can search proposals by keyword, by Fund #, by funded status, and more. We believe this tool is one of the best out there for both proposers and voters to research all Catalyst proposals and projects.
• We Host and Co-host 8 Cardano "Twitter Spaces" each week (live audio chat shows), most of these shows reach 100+ participants each day! In this community, @LidoNation has been dubbed "The Catalyst guy" because we are always encouraging people to participate, explaining how it works, and sharing out links to the latest happenings and resources.
• We have 5 funded projects so far, which have funded translating our articles into Spanish and Swahili, founding a Cardano Lab in Kenya, and more. We have also participated as Community Advisor, a Veteran Community Advisor, in Catalyst Circle governance meetings -- and of course as voters! There are a still a few roles left to explore, but the point is that we have the hands-on experiences and background to be effective leaders and educators on the topic.

With this project, we propose to capitalize on our experience and success so far, and expand our content and our reach in the following ways in 2022:

1. Expand our resource Library to include 12 more in-depth articles about different facets of Project Catalyst. Article topics will be target to address the key impact areas of this campaign -- See "Challenge Metrics" Section below.
2. Include a new article format by conducting interviews with other Project Catalyst participants from a variety of roles. We will publish these interviews as condensed articles. Through our participation in previous rounds of Catalyst we have built a solid network of Cardano connections with a vareity of experiences, so we definitely have people we can reach out to for interviews.
3. Convert one weekly Twitter Space show to a "Project Catalyst" focus: We will share Catalyst-related news and overviews, and invite participants to bring their questions and ideas about Catalyst to the conversation.
4. Syndicate a "Lido Minute" micro-podcast. Weekly episodes will cover a variety of Cardano topics, but we will devote at least 25% of these episodes to Catalyst-related topics in 2022. We are working with Cardano YouTuber "JCrypto" and community hub adacafe.io to host "Lido Minute" releases on their platforms, in addition to our own channels.
5. Add a "real" website developer to the team to redesign our Website resources to make them more accessible. Currently, our ideas and content have outpaced our web-design expertise. We know that great resources are only as effective as the User Interface to access them, so we have added an experienced web designer to our team. This funded proposal will enable this effort.

Future/Scaling

Being a trusted source of relevant and accessible content in a fast-paced technology ecosystem is never a one-and-done undertaking. Project Catalyst is changing and growing at the speed of light, as is the larger Cardano/blockchain ecosystem. Lido Nation has been providing fresh, up-to-date content every week for a year, and we are just getting started. This proposal is just one of several initiatives that are feeding into our commitment to continue and expand our resources for the Cardano community into the future. Efforts underway that support this include: founding a staking pool, proceeds of which will support ongoing content creation, seeking to hire a "Journalism"-focused team member in 2022, building a team at the Cardano Lab in Kenya to help with content research and writing, and more! As the Project Catalyst continues to change and grow, so will we.

About LIDO Nation

At Lido Nation, our mission is Cardano education, outreach, and global community building: Because the Future is for Everyone!

• Our site invites community involvement by providing an interface to submit new content, comment and respond to existing content, record audio versions of articles, and propose new article ideas.
• We are building new tools to teach blockchain content and promote humanitarian values, by using "real" Cardano blockchain tokens and transactions to allow community members to direct our charitable giving!
• We have 40 articles published, covering a range of Cardano topics. We skip the hype and focus on the real good stuff that is happenning in Cardano, with the aim of publishing content that is understandable to newcomers, and educational for everybody.
• Because we value reaching as many people as possible with content they can understand, we are translating our content into multiple languages - we were funded for Swahili translation in Fund 6, and for Spanish translation in Fund 7. Those translations are currently rolling out on the site and getting great feedback! We also provide audio recordings of all of our content (in all supported languages!) for those who may prefer to learn that way.

Motivation

We see that the next frontier of growth for Cardano won't be confined to Developer forums and GitHub repositories. Instead, it will be among our friends and neighbors, as they start to see and understand the applications of blockchain technology for their own lives and futures. We hope they will see Cardano as the most exciting project out there, and we want to provide a trusted resource to help them learn, get involved, and contribute.

Our Values

We believe that Cardano is a powerful platform paving the way for a future that works for everyone. To help connect that future with "everyone", information and resources must be available to all kinds of people, and written by all kinds of people. So we put a high value on accessibility and cross-cultural collaboration:

• Explain groundbreaking technology in simple terms
• Provide a User-Friendly interface and thoughtful resources
• Meet ADA standards for differently-abled users, including Audio versions of all content
• Provide our content in other languages (so far, Spanish and Swahili)
• Facilitate original content creation from across cultures, via collaboration with our Lab in Kenya, and via content contribution channels on our site.

Above all, encourage people to get involved. We are huge fans of Project Catalyst and are excited to grow our capacity as leaders and mentors helping people to onboard into a variety of roles and participation with Project Catalyst.

How big is the market

• The number of Cardano ($ADA) wallets has grown over 1,200% year-over-year from 190,000 to 2.5 million
• Of these, roughly 300,000 wallets vote in Project Catalyst.
• Out of these, less than 1000 teams submit proposals, and some hundreds participate in other roles, such as CA, Catalyst Circle, etc.

Any way you look at it, there is a huge market for the content we want to create: more that a quarter-million people who VOTE in Project Catalyst, but are not participating in other ways, and more than 2 MILLION people who hold ADA but do not vote. This project seeks to impact both of these large and important markets! With the resources we are already providing, our site is marking steady progress in SEO and Google results rankings, so we believe that with this additional content we can become a top-listed, valuable resource for everyone in the Cardano ecosystem to get involved in Project Catalyst!

Beyond the Cardano ecosystem, we see our potential market as the whole world. So far, our site is in English, with translations work under way for Swahili and Spanish, giving us broad accessibility in at least four continents. The work that is happening in Project Catalyst is exciting and inspiring. I recently shared some things about it with an "outsider" acquaintance, and by the end she was clamoring "HOW CAN I BUY ADA, This is so cool!" We think that's how more people will feel when they hear about Project Catalyst and understand what is happening. These resources will be a small contribution to the overall effort, but we believe the ROI on this project, for Catalyst, could be great.

These are the key metrics from this Campaign where we will have high impact:

Challenge Metric: Weekly sign ups to Cardano Ideascale

Challenge Metric: Growth in the number of voters

--> We will publish article about IdeaScale, focusing on newcomer-friendly orientation and advice, as well as as information about how to register to vote. We will use our leadership platform on Twitter to promote timely reminders to login, register, and vote for each round.

Challenge Metric: Growth in total number of votes given

--> For Fund 7, @LidoNation organized and hosted the first-ever 24 hour "Governance Day" Twitter Space marathon. The event was very successful and was recognized in the next Town Hall meeting. The Schedule included a lineup of other popular twitter leaders as co-hosts, and a number of project proposers presented their ideas. Over the course of the day, hundreds of people logged in to listen or speak. The timing of the show was on the last full day of voting for Fund 7, and the entire focus of the effort was to get out the vote, remind people to vote, help them understand how to vote, and promote resources for researching the proposals. As part of this project and our ongoing committment to Project Catalyst, we will reprise the "Governance Day" marathon for future Funds, taking what we learned the first time around to make it even better!

Challenge Metric: Townhall attendance

--> We will do an article, TwitterSpace promotion, and "Lido Minute" Focused on Town Hall participation.

Challenge Metric: Applications to leadership positions (e.g. Circle),Challenge Metric: Growth in the number of Community Advisors and Veteran Community Advisors

--> We will include interview articles with individuals who have participated in various Catalyst roles to get deeper insights, and include tips and encouragement about how to participate in leadership on "Lido Minute" episodes and in Catalyst-themed twitter spaces.

Challenge Metric: Number of referrers

Challenge Metric: Reduction in the number of unready proposalsChallenge Metric: Growth in the number of 4-5 star proposals/

--> The Lido Nation team has a proven track record of submitting 4+ star proposals, and we are sharing our formula with the world through articles. Further elucidation and coaching via Twitter Space "office hours" give us a platform to share these resources with a wider audience and offer timely help to proposers in future rounds.

Challenge Metric: Percentage of proposals with Excellent assessments

--> Similar to our article series on the "Anatomy of a Good Proposal", we will do a similar expository article on the "Anatomy of a good CA Assessment. We will also share and promote these insights through our other channels (Twitter and Lido Minute)

To be honest, this project is very low risk. Our team already has more than a year of experience executing and delivering high quality content on a weekly basis. We already get lots of feedback thanking and encouraging us that what we are providing is valuable. There is no shortage of topics, content ideas, and people to interview relating to Project Catalyst, so it's just a matter of funding us to do what we do well, with a special focus on Enabling, Encouraging, and Onboarding greater participation with Project Catalyst.

Our biggest risks are probably something like "hit by a bus" scenarios. If we were to lose a team member during the course of this projects due to unforeseen events, it would be a setback. However, we are not single-pronged. We have three core leaders, and a growing team of individual contributors. If we do experience turnover on the team, there are others to pick up loose ends and carry on.

[FEASIBILITY]

Roadmap

• 3 Month Milestones: Have published at least 4 new Catalyst articles, are hosting weekly Twitter Spaces, have distributed at least 2 Lido Minute podcasts, work is underway on new website design
• 6 Month Milestones: New website goes live. Proportional progress on delivering published content, Twitter Spaces and Governance Marathons continue
• EOY 2022: Have completed all deliverables as described in the "Definition of Success"

Milestones & Outputs

• Increase our total published articles about Project Catalyst from 10 to 22
• Host 24 weekly "Project Catalyst" Twitter Spaces in the latter half of 2022
• Publish & Distribute 6 Project-Catalyst dedicated "Lido Minute" micro-podcasts
• Go Live with a new Website UI to facilitate better accessibility to resources.
• Organize & Host the Twitter Marathon to get out the vote for each funding round in 2022

Detailed Deliverable Plan

• Regarding Articles: Our team already writes articles every week about Cardano-related News, Insights, and Reveiws. This projects will mandate us to put a Project-Caalyst focus on that work, which we are already proven capable of doing.

• Regarding Twitter Spaces: @LidoNation is already hosting or Co-Hosting 8 Twitter Spaces each week, with a lively following! This project will mandate us to devote a show each week to Project Catalyst focus. We will have educational content to share, or "Conversation-Starting" questions. It will also be forum for mentoring and support for people who have questions about how to participate.

• Regarding Lido Minute Micro-Podcast/video: We have some experience with creating videos already. We are networking with popular YouTuber JCrypto for syndication potential, and can go to him for help making the videos as good as they should be. We have access to a professional-grade podcasting studio!

• Regarding Website redesign: We are already engaged with a professional web-designer for a whole-site redesign. This project gives us the budget we need to spend time focused on a good UI for all these Project Catalyst resources -- great content is only as good as the audience's ability to navigate and find it!

• Regarding Twitter Marathon: The first Marathon for Fund 7 was a great success, involving many co-hosts, dozens or hundreds of speaker participants, and hundreds more who tuned in to listen. We will learn from what went well and thing about what could be even better for future Project Catalyst Governance Marathons!

This budget allows us to provide the following resources through the end of the year (2022)

$4000 --> 12 New Articles focused on Project Catalyst: Research, Interviews, Writing and Editing

$1200 --> Prepare content and host 1x/Weekly Twitter Space focused on Project Catalyst on boarding & mentoring

$1500 --> Syndicated "Lido Minute" micro-podcast, with monthly focus on Project Catalyst and distribution across multiple channels.

$1500 --> This is a small fraction of our overall budget for website design work, this budget line item will be directed at ensuring that we have good design focus on our Project Catalyst enablement tools.

FREE --> Organize and host a 24-hour Governance-Day Twitter marathon for each Voting Round in 2022

We are Cardano enthusiasts. With are a growing collective of dreamers who believe in providing insightful education about Cardano in plain English, Swahili, and Spanish. Most online blockchain content is written by and for developers and finance geeks. We break down complicated technical ideas for everyday people, and provide relevant news in quick bites, and build tools that everyone can use.

Our website is a resource for anyone who wants to learn what Cardano is, why they should care, and how they can participate. We want to make these resources accessible to as many people as possible.

Darlington is an engineer by day and at all times a dancer, humanitarian, idealist and entrepreneur. Darlington has deep knowledge about blockchain technology and broad experience in the Cardano ecosystem.

Stephanie is a teacher and technologist with a passion for helping non-profits navigate and capitalize on technology. She applies her communication skills at Lido Nation by writing and editing articles, and helping to organize ideas in a way that people can understand.

Dirk is an experienced designer and developer with a lot of love for tech, knowledge and art. He helps machines talk to humans and cleans up the mess the information age produces.

Our team at the newly-founded Friends of Ngong Road Blockchain Lab in Nairobi Kenya helps with research, translation, and content creation.

## Linked in Pages

https://www.linkedin.com/in/phuffyking

https://www.linkedin.com/in/profd2004

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmkraft

https://www.linkedin.com/company/lido-nation

[AUDITABILITY]

Progress tracking for this project is quite easy and transparent:

--> Regarding Articles:

--> Regarding Twitter Spaces:

--> Regarding Lido Minute Micro-Podcast/video:

--> Regarding Website redesign: A Designer has already been engaged and work has begun. A full relaunch/Go-Live is anticipated in q3 if we secure funding.

--> Regarding Twitter Marathon: These will take place with each Catalyst funding round. Recent rounds have been on a 3 month cycle, so I would anticipate that we do 3 more marathons in 2022. (Including for Fund 8 - this freebie will be delivered before it even gets funded!)

--> Regarding Articles: 12 New Project Catalyst-Focused Articles publised at LidoNation.com, and cross-posted on Twitter

--> Regarding Twitter Spaces: 26 Project Catalyst Twitter Spaces Hosted in 2022. These shows are recorded and posted on Twitter.

--> Regarding Lido Minute Micro-Podcast/video: 6 New Micro-Podcasts created and shared on various platforms, including LidoNation.com, Twitter, and we are developing syndication opportunities with other websites and YouTube Channels who are interested in hosting and promoting our content.

--> Regarding Website redesign: New Design includes dedicated attention to to Project Catalyst resources that are newcomer-friendly and educational for everyone!

--> Regarding Twitter Marathon: 24 Hour Twitter Marathon is hosted for each Funding Round of Catalyst in 2022.

Past Unfunded Proposals

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/simple-fund-management-dao-sdk - F7 https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/opensource-php-sdk-for-coti-ada-pay - F7 https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/spanish-news-insights-onboarding - F6

## Past Funded Proposals

https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/treasury-catalyst-proposal-api - F6 https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/newcomer-resources-en-espanol - F7 https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/translation-for-proposal-api-data - F7 https://www.lidonation.com/proposals/cardano-blockchain-lab-in-kenya - F7