Funding Categories Analysis

[IMPACT]

The solution is live and available at - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-funding-categories/

The intended audience is for anyone interested in improving the Catalyst process. More precisely, it is targeted for people who are interested in how Catalyst categorises the funding between different areas of the ecosystem and the implications of how that categorisation impacts innovation, ideas, access to funding and the options given to voters.

The documentation is open source and stored on GitHub - https://github.com/projectcatalyst/catalyst-funding-categories

This documentation helps provide impact by helping to provide support, improve conversations and lead to guidance on how funding categorisation could be improved. The analysis outlined in the documentation has led to attempts to make actionable change to the process. You can find all the category proposals here - https://linktr.ee/cardanopace

Another way that impact has been created is by organising community discussion on the topic of funding categories to find ways in which it can be further improved - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-funding-categories/community-discussion/discussion

The more effective that Catalyst is able to categorise funding so that it’s fair and open to all forms of idea and innovation the more proposals that can be submitted each round. This means there is a potential impact of increasing the number of proposals submitted to the Catalyst funding process. More inclusive categorisation can also help create more options for voters to decide between. This helps increase the chance for the community to find the most promising solutions and support for the ecosystem.

The challenge looks to help with creating ‘accessible knowledge’ and ‘education for development in the Cardano & Catalyst ecosystem’. This proposal helps address the need for more analysis and open source contribution to the available knowledge base on how Catalyst could do funding categorisation.

Analysis shared to the community around the issues with funding categorisation and potential solutions helps to achieve the outlined success criteria - ‘A growing number of experts join forces to build collaboratively on community owned infrastructure, tooling, standards, libraries and docs’.

The outcome of this analysis has been shared on Discord, Telegram, Twitter, in after town halls and directly to community members to receive feedback and provide value to the ecosystem knowledge base. Also a democratic vote was initiated to get feedback on the budget weightings of the categories.

Another way this proposal helps address the challenge is how the impact of improved funding categorisation can lead to increasing the number and the quality of Cardano Open Source projects due to having better access to capital through more open and flexible funding categorisation. A key benefit outlined in the documentations is how broad categories more effectively cover a wider range of ideas and innovation meaning more open source projects will be able to compete for funding to bring their solutions to the ecosystem.

The proposal has already been mostly delivered which means there is low risk on the actual delivery of the project.

Some further improvements will also be made. They include illustrations and improved explanations to help more fully articulate some of the information covered. Secondly as more feedback comes in from the community the documentation will be updated to reflect any new insights or information.

An outcome based risk for this proposal could be if the analysis led to any bad outcomes in the short term in terms of funding categorisation changes. These risks should be small as the funding categories have been created to accept all forms of ideas and innovation which will help prevent any stifling of innovation. You can see the inclusion of the proposal types in each of the categories listed to showcase this. Secondly funding categorisation is never final and if any given approach was not preferred by the community it can be changed in future Catalyst funding rounds. To mitigate any risks we have been looking for feedback on the concerns and issues already around categories and incorporating that feedback into the analysis and categories that are suggested. Feedback from the initial version has already led to the introduction of ‘Nurture Ideas & Teams’ to help ensure diversity of ideas and teams.

[FEASIBILITY]

The deliverables are included in the documentation which is freely available here - https://github.com/projectcatalyst/catalyst-funding-categories

The only remaining deliverables will be improvements to the existing documentation with better illustrations and explanations for the benefits of broad categorisation as well as the amendments based upon feedback and insights from the community.

The remaining improvements and amendments work will be completed in under two months from proposal submission.

The work for this proposal focussed on doing analysis to improve the Catalyst ecosystem. The analysis focussed on the Catalyst ecosystem including the challenge settings and funding categorisation. 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 of the PACE team in the Catalyst ecosystem we have applied the $40,000 6 month term budget. This equates to $307.69 daily or $38.46 hourly. For simplicity this has been rounded up to $40 per hour.

The initial research for categorisation started with the Catalyst Contributors in fund 7 that was submitted on 21st November 2021 - https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/381894

Since 21st November and the 13th March there have been 16 weeks, of which 13 have been working weeks on the analysis. On a given week there has been around, on average, 25 hours of work completed. Hours completed = 25 hours per week * 13 weeks = 325 hours

Total compensation for PACE (up to 5th March) = 325 hours x $40 = $13,000

A request for further funds to distribute to different community members that have provided vital feedback to the improvement of this analysis which should be compensated.

Community contributions - $3,000

Funds to support the community vote that was organised, conducted and presented that created the final budget weightings for the categories. Voting execution can be found here - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-funding-categories/community-votes/fund-8-categories-budget-weighting

Budget weighting vote preparation, execution and recording - $1,000

Finally we are requesting a further 100 hours of compensation to facilitate any the remaining deliverables of improvements to illustration and explanations and amendments where required over the coming weeks from more feedback and community interaction.

Further refinements budget = $4,000

Total requested budget = $21,000

PACE has produced the initial versions of the documentation. Upon initial completion feedback was requested by the community and further analysis and updates were made based upon all feedback. Some community members have been actively involved in supporting the improvements and compensation has been added. PACE team details can be found here - https://cardanopace.notion.site/Team-partnerships-6d1a8bc8a5474b63ade005ab3cdacf21

[AUDITABILITY]

The proposal is already available and open source. Final changes for improvements will be shown in the documentation changes and Github repository change history. The history of the project deliverables can be seen on GitHub commits as the analysis was produced over the last number of months. Please refer to the following repositories:

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

Success for this project is finding funding categorisation solutions that will help improve the funding process for Catalyst. This part has been delivered and proposals suggesting those improvements can be found here - https://linktr.ee/cardanopace

If any of the categories are voted in and used in future funding rounds another part of success will be ensuring these categories functioned as intended. Further refinement and feedback will likely result in the evolution of these categories. However, any refinement and improvement beyond the 50 hours of added compensation mentioned above for these categories would not part of the scope of this proposal. Funding may be requested in the future or work continued by full time contributors.

This proposal is a continuation on the initial analysis for Catalyst Contributors which was a challenge setting proposal in fund 7. You can find the Catalyst Contributors history here - https://github.com/projectcatalyst/catalyst-contributors.

This previous work was not funded and this is a continuation of that work with more refinement and thorough analysis on wider funding categorisation.