Contributor Infrastructure Analysis

[IMPACT]

The background of Catalyst and Cardano contributors can be found here

• https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-contributors/
• https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/cardano-contributors

Catalyst and Cardano contributors funding categories look to become the collaborative glue that brings together the ecosystem to work effectively together. Catalyst contributors help to maintain, analyse, develop and improve the Catalyst governance and funding process. Cardano contributors help to support, develop and analyse the developer ecosystem and node operation for Cardano.

Both Catalyst and Cardano contributors need an effective product development workflow. This flow includes an easy way to identify problems, assess their priority, bring in relevant information towards deciding on a solution path, tracking the progress of executing a solution and ways to measure the outcomes.

Both Catalyst and Cardano contributors also need an effective way to make governance decisions in which the results are made public to the community. Contributors represent the interests of the community by being paid to improve and maintain the ecosystem. Contributors would have governance decisions involving product decisions and any rapid funding distribution such as paying for more contributors and supporting existing initiatives.

This analysis on the initial infrastructure for both the product development workflow and governance for contributors will include:

• Requirements - Outline the requirements for what is needed for contributors to function effectively for both the product development workflow and their own governance.
• Research - Research existing solutions that exist on the market and explore their trade offs and which solutions would match the requirements most effectively initially.
• Initial solution suggestions - Based on the requirements, research and any community feedback what initial solution should be used.
• Future considerations - Considerations for what other solutions may become more effective over time, what tools could be created as alternatives and what might be blocking better solutions in the short term until certain infrastructure is available.
• Initial system setup - Creating the initial setup of the suggested solution system for the contributors to start using once the first round of contributors is funded.

This proposal provides analysis and an initial solution as preparation for when full time contributors are funded to work in both the Catalyst and Cardano ecosystem. As such it needs to be completed before a large amount of contributors are funded so that there is something established and ready to use from day one. The product development workflow and governance process and tools they use will naturally evolve over time. This proposal helps outline and establish an initial version to start the iterative process of supporting and managing collaboration between contributors.

The challenge looks to help with creating ‘accessible knowledge’ and ‘education for development in the Cardano & Catalyst ecosystem’. This proposal helps address the need by creating more analysis and open source contributions that aim to improve the way that people can work and effectively collaborate as contributors when supporting the Cardano and Catalyst ecosystem.

This knowledge and analysis can help lead to initiatives on new tools and solutions that are backed from analysis on what is required. The initial implementation of these solutions will also drive more feedback and data points to influence improvements to the tools and processes used by the contributors to most effectively manage themselves.

By making analysis on how contributors can collaborate and govern key decisions this proposal helps to achieve the outlined success criteria where it encourages having ‘A growing number of experts join forces to build collaboratively on community owned infrastructure, tooling, standards, libraries and docs’. Both during the analysis community members will provide their expertise to the requirements, research and potential solution. Then in regards to the outcome of the analysis, it helps to lead to improve collaboration between contributors in the forms of an initial system and processes that lead to collaboratively improved and owned infrastructure.

The analysis will be shared across the community for feedback to ensure the benefits of it are shared and improved upon as it evolves. Some channels we will ask for feedback on include Discord, Telegram, Twitter, in after town halls and directly to community members to receive feedback.

If the analysis can be completed to a high quality then the outcome of this proposal can help to lead to increasing the number and the quality of Cardano Open Source projects due to having better access to information and data points on what is required by contributors to thrive and more data points as evidence to show how these new systems are used. This information helps to lead to creating better open source solutions that other projects in the Cardano ecosystem can benefit from.

Sufficient community feedback - There is a risk that it may be difficult to get enough community feedback whilst going through the analysis process based on the availability of people in the community and how much time they have available to contribute towards providing feedback. To try and mitigate where possible we will share the analysis at the different stages of its creation across multiple platforms and directly to community members to ask for feedback and to get involved if they are able to. This is important to improve the overall quality of the analysis.

Suggested solution transparency - The governance and product development workflow suggested solutions that come out of the analysis have a risk that they aren’t open source or fully transparent by being hosted on private servers. This could happen if these solutions are the most suitable for the initial version due to being fully functional. The product development workflow and governance process needs to be public to the community so that the contributors are accountable for what they deliver and also so that community can be easily involved. Mitigating this risk will include ensuring that open source tools are chosen where possible. It also means the analysis should be thorough on reasoning behind a given solution choice. Finally mitigation will also mean ensuring there are ways to export data or process decisions into a public place in the event the tools don’t provide this transparency out of the box.

[FEASIBILITY]

The following deliverables are covered in the impact description of the solution. Below we provide the roadmap for these deliverables:

• Requirements - 200 hours
• Research - 180 hours
• Initial solution suggestions - 120 hours
• Community feedback / engagement - 220 hours
• Future considerations - 100 hours
• Initial system setup - 160 hours

Total hours = 980 hours

The hours represent the combination of multiple contributors efforts that will apply to each stage of the proposal. The outcome for the above deliverables is the analysis and a solution made from off the shelf services to create the initial infrastructure for contributors to use that would evolve over time based on changing requirements.

The work for this proposal will start around late March to April and conclude within three months by July. In the above deliverable roadmap there may be gaps between some of the work whilst feedback is gathered during or after completion of any given step.

The work for this proposal focussed on doing analysis to improve the Catalyst ecosystem. The analysis focussed on the Catalyst ecosystem including the contributors funding categories that focus on paying people to support Catalyst full time. The Catalyst Contributors suggests a guidance budget range of $25,000 to $40,000 for a 6 month term - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-contributors/category-proposal/fund-8/budget-ranges

Due to the experience that the team has in the Catalyst ecosystem we have applied the $40,000 6 month term budget to determine the hourly rate. This equates to $307.69 daily or $38.46 hourly. For simplicity this has been rounded up to $40 per hour.

In the deliverables above we calculated approximately 940 hours for the deliverables.

This means a base cost of 980 * $40 = $39,200

Any other community contributions will be paid from the budget for these deliverables. Distribution of funds will be entirely based on who has helped execute the analysis and who has provided insightful feedback to improve the analysis and initial solution used for contributors.

Total = $39,200

This proposal will be a public and open process constantly inviting the community to engage and lead to better analysis and ultimately a better final result for initial infrastructure for contributors.

Team members who are already committing time to this work include:

• PACE team - PACE has been involved since fund 3 supporting the ecosystem with ideas, proposals, development and analysis. PACE team details can be found here - https://cardanopace.notion.site/Team-partnerships-6d1a8bc8a5474b63ade005ab3cdacf21
• Randall Harmon - Randall is an early explorer of UI and database technology while solving for small-business workflow and accounting applications; cryptography at PGP circa 1999, and distributed computing at Yahoo. He’s inspired to connect people in dynamic human process with value-aligned purposes, connecting and blurring the lines between the various roles people want to play in the many organizations of the future. He is also collaborating with ADAO, Web3:4Life, Gimbalabs, Cardano After Dark, and other communities to serve their DAO-manageability needs. https://www.linkedin.com/in/randall-harmon-aa52765/
• Felix Weber - Founder and Coordinator of the Catalyst Swarm, Bridge Builders and Ambassadors Guild. Catalyst Circle v1 Member, Funded Proposer, Mentor & fulltime Catalyst Community Member. https://www.linkedin.com/in/felix-weber-339590209/
• Nadia Hopkins - Nadia has held several roles in her career, both as a business owner and as a Director of Development and Strategic Initiatives in several non-profit organizations, where community engagement was her key responsibility. She is also the Catalyst Circle Representative for Community Advisors, a role in which she is actively collecting perspectives, connecting doers, critiquing the process and communicating the next steps. https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadiashopkins/
• Tomi Astikainen - Master of Science in Economics and Business Administration, who majored in Organizations and Management. He has worked as a Strategy Consultant and a Leadership Trainer, helping businesses, nonprofits and social movements alike. Currently he works as a Business Analyst in an agile team. Tomi contributes to Catalyst development as a proposer, as a Challenge Team member and as a Veteran Community Advisor. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomiastikainen/

An amount of the funding will likely be distributed to other community members based on any contributions and insightful feedback to the analysis. Any community member can come and contribute towards this analysis. In many cases these community members are often experienced members of Catalyst that have been involved for multiple funding rounds and understand the full process and complexities of the ecosystem.

[AUDITABILITY]

The initial documentation around Catalyst and Cardano contributors that this work will be based upon can be found here:

• https://github.com/projectcatalyst/catalyst-contributors
• https://github.com/projectcatalyst/cardano-contributors

The contributor infrastructure analysis will also come in the form of an open source GitBook from the start. All contributions and changes being stored on GitHub available for anyone in the community to copy and use for themselves.

Success for this project is providing thorough analysis that will lead to a strong initial solution for contributors to use for their governance decisions and product development workflows when the initial contributors are voted in and getting paid as full time contributors to work in the Catalyst and Cardano ecosystem.

The work around making an effective product development workflow and governance structure for contributors will never be fully completed. This is important to note as these processes and tools will be constantly evolving and changing. This proposal helps to kick start that process!

A main success for this project is to start that process and provide the initial environment for contributors to collaborate and thrive in. Contributors will take over from the initial suggested solution and make changes and improvements based on their own feedback and experience of working as a full time contributor.

This proposal is a continuation on the initial analysis for Catalyst Contributors which was a challenge setting proposal in fund 7. The proposal was not voted in and was a challenge setting and not a proposal seeking funding. You can find the Catalyst Contributors history here - https://github.com/projectcatalyst/catalyst-contributors

Community feedback on this approach to fund contributors to work full time and more reflection led to this proposal which outlines the importance of having an initial product development workflow and governance systems setup for contributors to use once they get funded and start contributing to the ecosystem.