Nurturing Ideas & Teams

Ecosystems needs an increasingly diverse group of teams trying different ideas to explore how to innovate and support the ecosystem

An increasing number of small initiatives and ideas that provide new opportunities to the ecosystem to learn and benefit from

Tracking success for this category will mean:

• Increasing the number of new teams funded to support the ecosystem or offer new novel innovations.
• Increasing the number of new and novel ideas that help the ecosystem learn about which ideas should receive more attention and funding in future.
• Tracking whether those funded for this category help lead to education or further proposals that improve the ecosystem based on learnings from tested ideas and analysis.

For ideas on individual success metrics for the different types of proposals please refer to some of the other 6 funding categories that have been listed.

—--- FUNDING CATEGORIES BACKGROUND —---

Funding Categories is an approach to doing funding categorisation that will welcome all ideas, maximise 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

Nurturing Ideas is focused on the following important areas:

• New and existing ideas that can benefit from a smaller budget to nurture their initial exploration and growth efforts.
• Support of new teams joining the ecosystem looking for some initial capital to start off their project.

Why this category is important

The ecosystem needs to have a way to easily introduce and nurture new and existing ideas that could provide impact to the ecosystem.

Having a category focussed on nurturing ideas can help to ensure that there is always exploration of new ideas, processes and approaches that could benefit the ecosystem.

Nurturing ideas & teams is a category that applies a cap to the amount of funding a proposal can request. This provides a less competitive environment for teams to find initial funding to nurture their growth and evolution.

This category can be seen as an on ramp for new ideas and teams for trying things out something and showing the community what they are capable of achieving.

The more ideas and exploration the community can nurture the faster the ecosystem can learn from and develop better solutions. The more new teams that can be formed the better the diversity and combined efforts that can be made as a community.

Types of proposals to include

All proposal ideas are welcomed! Proposals must be related to the Cardano ecosystem whether that's a new idea, community initiative, marketing, development, support or any other type of proposal. To get some ideas you can refer to the other Catalyst funding categories!

Potential success metrics for proposal types

Proposers should clearly identify what problem they are trying to solve, how they aim to solve that problem and share the types of outcomes the community should expect after the proposal is executed.

Proposal maximum budget

The maximum proposal budget that can be requested is $40,000.

Considerations for proposers

• Existing initiatives and projects - Proposers are encouraged to share in their proposal if there are similar proposals looking to achieve what they are requesting funding for. Share any information on collaborations with the community so voters are able to see your involvement in the community.
• Open source plan - There is no requirement that proposals that are producing software or digital assets need to be open source. However the community benefits from knowing what plan the proposers have, if any, to open source their work.