Governance & Identity

The need for effective governance and identity tools to support making it easier for application development and evolution of Catalyst

Evolution of the governance and identity ecosystem tools, processes and resources to improve Catalyst and applications building on Cardano

Tracking success for this category will mean:

• Increasing the number or quality of tools, libraries & SDKs that help improve areas around governance, identity and DAOs.
• Improvements to the Catalyst process based on community feedback that improve the overall process, tools being used, decision making, ability to deliver rapid funding or auditing of proposals.
• An increased amount of support in the forms of research, educational resources, hosted discussions, mentors or accelerators that help support and improve areas around Catalyst, identity or governance.

For individual success metrics for the different types of proposal that can be included please refer to the suggested challenge brief success metrics ideas.

—--- FUNDING CATEGORIES BACKGROUND —---

Funding Categories is an approach to doing funding categorisation that will welcome all ideas, maximize the amount of ideas submitted and reduce the effort for all stakeholders in the Catalyst process.

Funding categories also help remove the existing issues with challenge settings. They help to prevent duplicate challenge settings, remove challenges created by self interest, reduce the need for deep knowledge of the ecosystem from challenge proposal teams and also removes an easy entry point for malicious actors.

The full documentation for Catalyst Funding Categories can be found here: https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-funding-categories/

7 funding categories have been documented to cover all forms of ideas and proposals. All proposals can be found here - https://linktr.ee/cardanopace

The budget weighting for the 7 categories has been determined using a community governance process. The voting results for this process can be found here - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-funding-categories/community-votes/fund-8-categories-budget-weighting/voting-results-fund-8

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Overview

Governance & Identity is focused on the following areas:

• Tools, libraries and SDKs that help with improving governance and identity around the systems we use including Catalyst or also to be used by wider ecosystem applications.
• Resources, processes, documentation, mentors and accelerators that make it easier to participate and engage in the Catalyst governance process.
• Research, analysis or reports that help drive novel or improved approaches for governance or identity that can be used in the Catalyst or wider ecosystem.

Why this category is important

Catalyst provides the governance process for the distribution of Cardano treasury funding.

To maximise the potential of the ecosystem there is a need for effective and robust governance and identity tools to help distribute treasury funding. Achieving this will create a thriving community, an easier to use development ecosystem and nurture a growing list of products and integrations.

The better that Catalyst is able to effectively help with governing and distributing funds the faster the ecosystem can create the innovations and adoption needed for Cardano to thrive. The better open source tools are made available for governance and identity within the ecosystem the faster interesting and novel solutions can be deployed.

Types of proposals to include

• Governance tools, libraries & SDKs - Tools that help with governance participation and decision making that can be used by Catalyst but also could be used by other teams building in the ecosystem. Tools for governance will help the Catalyst function more effectively as a DAO.
• DAO tools, libraries & SDKs - Development that helps the wider community to build DAOs for their own projects.
• Identity tools, libraries & SDKs - Identity tools that help with Catalyst governance or that could be used in other applications in the wider ecosystem. Identity solutions could be Atala PRISM focussed but could also be integrations of other identity systems into the Cardano ecosystem.
• Rapid funding mechanisms - New rapid funding mechanisms looking at improving the distribution of funding of the Cardano treasury.
• Auditing tools or processes - Tools and process improvements that help with auditing funded proposals to help ensure they have the support needed to maximise the impact produced.
• Catalyst accelerators & mentors - Tools, guides, mentors and programs that help people with going through the Catalyst funding process and working on their project.
• Resources, processes, hosted discussions & documentation - Proposals aimed at helping improve understanding and engagement with the Catalyst ecosystem or around governance topics such as improving decision making or processes for how the community reaches consensus.
• Governance research and analysis - Research and analysis projects that will help improve how the community can approach governance. This can include exploring existing or new governance models that could improve how the community approaches distributed governance.
• Education - Demos, guides, videos or documentation for improving the education resources available about the different governance and identity tools, libraries and processes available in the ecosystem.

Potential success metrics for proposal types

This list is not exhaustive but does provides some ideas for proposers to consider.

• Governance tools, libraries & SDKs - Amount of adoption from other projects, improvement metrics from any adoption in Catalyst ecosystem.
• DAO tools, libraries & SDKs - Amount of adoption from other projects, improvement metrics from any adoption in Catalyst ecosystem.
• Identity tools, libraries & SDKs - Amount of adoption from other projects, improvement metrics from any adoption in Catalyst ecosystem.
• Rapid funding mechanisms - Number of participants involved in governance process, speed of funding distribution, number of projects supported through mechanism.
• Auditing tools or processes - Amount of adoption from other projects, number of projects being audited, number of projects receiving extra support, number of projects having funding halted due to lack of execution.
• Catalyst accelerators & mentors - Number of projects onboarded onto support programs, number of projects supported.
• Resources, processes & documentation - Number of viewers on content, reduction in common questions support due to better resources or documentation.
• Governance research and analysis - Number of citations, number of projects utilising research or analysis in their execution.
• Education - Number of viewers or participants of education resource, testimonies on the quality of the resources made from community feedback.

Considerations for proposers

• Open source plan - Any tools, libraries or SDKs are encouraged to be open source either from the start or as soon as possible. There is no requirement to be open source immediately however proposers should include the details of their plan towards open sourcing the project.
• Commercial projects - Development projects most suited here will be open source with the aim of the work executed being available for the benefit of other projects to use and build their applications with. Commercial projects looking to build a network or DApp suited for an end user should use the Products & Integrations category for proposals. Projects are welcomed to make proposals in this category for any specific parts of their project that would be open source and should have benefit to the wider ecosystem for helping with governance or identity.

Challenge amounts should only be proposed in increments of $25K. Other amounts not in these increments will be rounded up. E.g. $27,500 will be rounded up to $50,000.