littlefish - Tools of DAO Work

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

A dedicated team of technical researchers, to produce up-to-date information about technological developments, documentation, and how-to's about the Cardano ecosystem and tools of digital work.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

A community of 100+ individuals and a dedicated team of 7 (growing) with 20+ years system administration expertise, specialized in highly secure PCI DSS systems. Experienced with learning new technical tools, writing documentation, teaching the technical to the non technical.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

We are the Littlefish Foundation (LFF), a decentralized, global organization, building technologies that align individual actions towards common goals, enabling collective intelligences.

We use blockchain technology to redefine earning relationships between people, work, and organizations, enabling a new model of operation that grants more freedom to participants, while making sure that freedom results in progress towards the goals of the whole. 

Our proposals are best experienced in the Littlefish Vault. There will be multiple links to it throughout the proposal with background information necessary to fully understand the concepts.

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PAs, you will need this information to understand LFF. We strongly recommend reading these before the proposal. 

• The Bleeding Edge of Organizations and the Big Problem
• The Basics - littlefish, colonies and Action
• The Big Picture
• Littlefish Action Model

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The Problem

The speed of technological progress is blindingly fast. This is especially true in the blockchain space and Cardano is no different. New problems arise everyday, along with problem solvers who are tackling these problems. 

DAOs and more generally decentralized communities operating in the space can’t keep up with the developments. Which wallet should one use? What DAO enabling technologies are available? What multi-signature wallets, voting, governance tools are out there? At what stage? Are they usable? What are the unsolved problems? 

That is not all. There is also a mountain of tools that help enable digital work. These need to be adopted by individuals partaking in decentralized work. Decentralized work needs efficient scheduling, collaboration, and communication apps to work effectively. Yet most don’t venture beyond collaborating on google docs.

There’s too much to know. The barriers to entry are too high for most digital communities.

What is needed?

The tools need to be understood and adopted by digital workers. A dedicated team with technical knowledge and practical skills of communicating technical information to non-technical users is necessary to find tools, test them, document them, and teach others. 

At LFF we are a digital community of 100+ with 15+ core team members from around the globe. We felt these needs building our community. We need to adopt these tools and use them widely within our organization. So do other communities. This is why Tech Help Collective (THC) was founded. 

Tech Help Collective 

THC is a LFF colony, a work group of the LFF. It is a community for individuals who want to provide these types of services to the LFF and Catalyst communities. THC will grow over time. This growth will allow it to improve the quantity and quality of the work done, enabling others to stay on top of technological developments. The long term aim of THC is becoming the community in Catalyst to find the most up-to-date information on all things blockchain.

Our Solution

At THC we are a group of expert googlers, technology experts, and quick learners. To tackle the mentioned problems we will take these actions:

• Research 
• Solutions on Cardano: Personal wallets, multi-signature wallets, DAO tools, voting, governance, NFT marketplaces, DeFi protocols, …
• Digital work tools: Scheduling tools, communication tools, collaboration tools, coordination tools, …
• Test
• Learning the tools through use, understanding the capabilities, limitations
• Documentation
• How to X? Wallet comparisons, DAO tools mappings and comparisons, videos and explainers
• Evolving documentation published on Obsidian

Learn more about our approach to evolving documentation.

Who will benefit?

THC acts based on the needs of LFF, solving problems in the domain of digital community building as they arise. The primary beneficiary of the activities of THC is this LFF. But these problems are experienced by all digital communities. Solving these problems for LFF, we solve it for other communities. We will share all of our findings with others, enabling communities in Catalyst and the Cardano space.

Outcome

The outcome of our work will be better functioning communities. Communities will have a better understanding of what tools are available to solve what problems, how these can be adopted, with examples in LFF showing how some are being used. This will increase the adoption of digital work tools and blockchain solutions, improving work efficiency in digital communities and increasing Cardano blockchain solutions’ adoption.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Alignment with the challenge

The challenge states Cardano needs:

• tools with better features and distinct advantages, 
• Collaboration Management Platforms to organize community intentions and Actions,
• tools for prospective organizations to use in evaluating Cardano DAOs

This proposal brings visibility to these needs, answering questions like what solutions are available, at what stage is their development, how do they compare to other solutions, and how to adopt them for internal use. 

The third point is at the heart of this proposal. Mapping out existing DAO tools with an evolving document methodology allows everyone to get up-to-date information about these tools. This helps in evaluating the stage of these technologies and drives adoption of quality projects.

Key Metrics

The proposal improves all challenge Key Metrics:

• Number of Communities engaged in collaboration using Cardano DAO creation tools.
• Better visibility will bring more adoption of these tools
• Better understanding of digital work tools will increase efficiency and effectiveness of digital collaboration and thus engagement
• Amount of ADA coming from DAOs transaction fees
• More knowledgeable communities -> more use -> more TX fees
• Number of DAOs that use Cardano as governance/management chain in 6 months.
• Greater visibility into the Cardano DAO tool stack will enable communities to adopt these tools, increasing the number of DAOs that use Cardano
• Number of DAO toolset/frameworks available 
• Builders will have a place to view the information, seeing what is missing, prioritizing developments according to the needs of the space

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

LFF General - Funding

Littlefish Foundation is a complex organization driven by individual efforts. It only moves forward if individuals drive it forward. The single biggest risk in front of that is financial. A large percentage of the team is based in Turkey, which has been experiencing hyperinflation for the past year. 

Funding is the number one challenge we face. With funding we can pay the team to work on Littlefish Foundation and make their financial burden lighter. This all puts us closer to achieving the LFF vision. We are a global community with contributors from all over the world. Without funding, we will still build the LFF, but it will be more challenging and slower. 

We are mitigating risk through diversification in multiple proposals, increasing the chance of receiving funding. We’re also budgeting for the Action Fund, partly to serve as a contingency. 

LFF General - Technology Risk

LFF is developing a strong infrastructure to be able to scale, for that we need the support of a strong development community. The current team is very strong on tech development, with extensive experience, and we are welcoming more developers to join. We are already engaged with the Gimbalabs development community and have their support. 

This proposal - Marketing 

The success of the proposal depends highly on the spread of the information generated. If we don’t take this into account, all this proposal will accomplish is a better informed LFF and a few other communities. Information will diffuse through word of mouth activities but this will be slow and ineffective in capturing the attention of the larger community, if we don’t make additional efforts.

That’s why we’ll be undertaking additional marketing activities to spread the information we generate. We will share this information in other communities' communication channels. We’ll join meetings and talk about our work and how it can benefit others. 

We’re also growing the team at Love House, the LFF working group in charge of marketing, community building, and engagement. In time, we’ll have a strong team of content producers and storytellers who will create videos, short explainers, and talk to others about LFF and what we’re doing.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Workload Management at LFF

How we make work visible - LFF Modules 

Types of Activities

The proposal consists of 4 categories of activities: research, testing, documentation, and marketing. For each technology researched, this is the order of execution. These activities will be done simultaneously on different work streams. While one work is at the early research stage, another may be at the marketing stage. 

The technologies we plan to research are wallets, DAO tools, and digital work tools. A general function of the proposal is to map out these and other tools. So new areas of exploration will be added to this list and researched in depth with time. Below are details on these specific technology research projects. 

Notes 

Numbers given in Key Metrics are totals. 

Our Discord will be used to collect feedback from readers of our docs. Non-technical persons following the docs will ask us on Discord if they get stuck. We will then update the docs to resolve the issue and evolve our docs in the process.

Module 1: Wallets

Stakeholders: LFF, Catalyst and Cardano community

Primary Work Group: Tech Help Collective

Duration: July - February

Resources: 200 hrs + module operations budget 

Cardano has more than 10 wallets actively being developed. The security, functionality, and usability of these wallets needs to be researched for individuals to make an informed decision about the wallets they’re using. Wallets are our interface with Cardano, it’s critical we all know how to use them, and use the very best for our needs.

Currently if you search for this information you’ll only find outdated documents. A wallet review from January is close to useless in this space. We’ll deep dive into these wallets, write documentation for each of them, keep on top of developments in the future, and evolve our documentation over time.

We’ve already started work on this project. You can see an example here.

Key Milestones and expected deliveries:

• July
• 3 wallet deep dives
• August
• 10 wallet deep dives
• Wallet comparison document MVP
• September
• Comprehensive wallet comparison document
• February
• 50 docs + updates to all wallet docs

Module 2: Digital Work Tools

Stakeholders: LFF, Catalyst and Cardano community

Primary Work Group: Tech Help Collective

Duration: July - February

Resources: 800hrs of work + module operations budget

This is a broad category of tools that enables work in the digital. Anything related to communication, collaboration, and coordination in a digital work environment is included. 

We prioritize research according to the needs of LFF. LFF is a digital global community, so solving our problems will address the problems of many digital communities. Some early problems we’ll look into are: community enabling Discord bots, scheduling tools, and collaboration tools. We’ll also solve the problems of other communities, accepting requests to write docs to solve these problems.

We’ve already started tackling these problems. Discord we feel is a weak communication hub but it’s the place where the Catalyst community is. So we have to make it work the best it can for us. We’re looking into how bots can help with this, starting with creating direct communication channels with other Discord servers from the LFF server. You can find this and some of our other work here.

Key Milestones and expected deliveries:

• July
• 5 digital tool related docs
• August
• 10 digital tool related docs
• LFF Tools of Work MVP: An intro to the complete set of tools we use at LFF. Start work on extensive documentation, how to’s, additional resources to learn.
• September
• 25 digital tool related docs
• 10 community driven requests for docs
• December
• 50 digital tool related docs
• 10 community driven docs done
• February
• Map of decentralized work tools 
• LFF Tools of Work: Complete docs on how to onboard to work on LFF. Anything you need is available as docs.

Module 3: DAO Tools

Stakeholders: LFF, Catalyst and Cardano community

Primary Work Group: Tech Help Collective

Duration: August - February

Resources: 900 hrs of work + module operations budget

DAO tools are a broad category of technologies. A loose definition may also include digital work tools in this category but for us they refer to blockchain based solutions that solve problems DAOs face. Examples are community collaboration tools like dework, colony creation, operation (multi-sigs, wallets), and governance (voting, decision making) tools like aragon, daostack etc. 

The state of similar products in Cardano is not widely known. There is some good work being done by ADAO, Liqwid Labs and others. These will be the types of technologies we’ll be researching in this area. 

We’ll first map out the ecosystem. Existing tools like cardanocrowd and cardanocube will show the way. We’ll also look through past Catalyst proposals to identify tools being developed. Once identified, we’ll categorize solutions based on the problems they solve: governance, operations, communication, collaboration, … and create a map of tools.

We’re also researching similar tools on ETH and other chains to further our understanding of the use cases. You can see our related proposals here. 

Once we have the map, we can start deep dives into the tools. We’ll select which tools to deep dive on by looking at the maturity of the product, the developer activity on the project, and community demand. We’ll prioritize solving problems we face at LFF.

Key Milestones and expected deliveries:

• October
• Cardano DAO tools map MVP: Identify main categories, find projects working on each. Evolve in time.
• December
• Deep dives into 10 different DAO tools
• February 
• The most detailed Cardano DAO tools map available, with deep dives, and links to additional resources. We imagine this as the interface to Cardano DAO tools.

Module 4: Marketing

Stakeholders: LFF, Catalyst and Cardano community

Primary Work Group: Love House

Duration: August - February

Resources: 60 hrs of work + module operations budget

Marketing is a general module, shared by many LFF proposals. Its aim is to broadcast the knowledge generated in other modules far and wide. 

Activities:

• Creating Twitter posts, 
• Tracking engagement on Twitter and Obsidian (through google analytics), 
• Spreading information in LFF and other community meetings. 

Key Milestones and expected deliveries:

• December
• 2500 unique visitors on The Vault
• 10000 Tweet impressions (as of June 15th it is at 718) for LFF account
• February
• 10000 unique visitors on The Vault
• 1000 monthly visitors on The Vault
• 50000 Tweet impressions

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

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All LFF proposals follow the same budget structure. They are made up of the module budgets and the Action Fund allocation.

Module budgets

Each proposal is made up of modules. Each module has a specified budget. The sum of module budgets makes up the first part of the overall budget.

1 - Personnel budget

Each module has a personnel budget and an operations budget. The personnel budget is the total estimated hours * the hourly rate for the module.

The base hourly rate for LFF proposals is 50 USD. This is a living wage in most parts of the world. It will bring financial stability to participants.

The hourly rate for a module may change from this default, based on the expertise needed. 

2- Module operations budget

Each module is allocated an extra budget sized at 1/5th of the personnel budget to enable operations.

This budget is a pooled organization wide resource used to cover expenses. It will be used to purchase digital work tools like Zoom to be used by all members of LFF.

A part of it will be spent with the discretion of the module team. For example, it can be used to pay for transportation, buy personal digital tools, purchase other teams’ Actions, etc.

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LFF Action Fund

LFF Action Fund has two purposes.

1 - Contingency

Proposals may not be funded. The activities in the proposals will still take place if we can account for this with additional funding. Action Fund will provide that funding if and when it is necessary.

The Action Fund can be used to extend a module budget, fund an unfunded proposals’ module, or fund new modules as need arises.

2 - Incentivizing further Action

We are creating a new economy. LFF is the first colony in this economy. Its members are producing Actions, the supply. But who will buy them?

There is a need for stable demand for Actions to bootstrap this new digital economy. Action Fund provides this stable demand.

3 - Admin and other work

There is a lot of unmentioned work that goes into building the Littlefish Foundation. This includes general admin work like setting up meetings, scheduling, scribework, as well as other activities like community building.

The Action Fund will prioritize buying those Actions that aren’t covered by the proposals.

Action Fund Sizing

The Action Fund allocation is sized at 1/4th of the total budget. This is common across all LFF proposals to provide financial safety to the project for the next 12 months, allowing us a healthy runway to create the new earning economy.

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All modules in this proposal have an hourly personnel rate of 50 USD/hr. Module operations budgets are 1/5th the personnel budgets.

• Module 1: Wallets 
• Personnel Budget: 7500 USD
• 50 USD/hr * 150 hrs
• 100 hrs: Research, testing, documentation
• 25 hrs: Tech Help, workshops, sharing knowledge
• 25 hrs: Tracking developments, updates
• Operations Budget: 1500 USD
• Total: 9000 USD

• Module 2: Digital Work Tools 
• Personnel Budget: 22500 USD
• 50 USD/hr * 450 hrs
• 350 hrs: Research, testing, documentation
• 100 hrs: Tech Help, workshops, sharing knowledge
• Operations Budget: 4500 USD
• Total: 27000 USD

• Module 3: DAO Tools
• Personnel Budget: 22500 USD
• 50 USD/hr * 450 hrs
• 350 hrs: Research, testing, documentation
• 100 hrs: Tech Help, workshops, sharing knowledge
• Operations Budget: 4500 USD
• Total: 27000 USD

• Module 4: Marketing
• Personnel Budget: 6000 USD
• 50 USD/hr * 120 hrs
• 120 hrs: Marketing Activities
• Operations Budget: 1200 USD
• Total: 7200 USD

Module Total = 70200 USD

Action Fund Total = 23400 USD

Total = 93600 USD

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

This proposal is primarily run by the THC work group of LFF. THC is a community of expert googlers, technology experts, and quick learners. Its objective is to lower the barriers to technology.

THC’s responsibilities are:

THC is a growing community of Tech Help enthusiasts. You can find more about us and our recent work here. 

THC Team

The job profile for each THC member is the same: research, test, and document technologies. 

Murat Kasar - 5 years of experience as a System Administrator, mainly in PCI DSS and high security environments. Fan of maps, thanks to my background in geology and GIS. Interested in technical aspects of Blockchain technologies. Constantly searching for a subject to focus with passion.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/murat-kasar-8b4157163

Emre Kurt - B.Sc. in Geological Engineering with 4 years job experience in the field. Working as a System Administrator for the last 3 years and Sales Director for the last 1.5 years. Very good knowledge of Linux based systems and Network Security. In the process of excelling in the blockchain technology and currently focusing on organization and community building, marketing strategies. Also using AI tools to create art pieces to be minted as NFTs.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/emre-kurt-617272bb/

https://creator.nightcafe.studio/u/Nautilus

Berk Atalay - 1.5 years of system and network experience. Experienced in computer systems and system administration. Graduated from management and am enthusiastic about graphical design. Learning about blockchain and Cardano Ecosystem for a while. Current focus on researching cardano tools, marketing, advertising and community development.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/berk-atalay-gd28/

Gurcan Citil - 2,5+ years of experience as a System Administrator. Constructing, building and maintaining VmWare, Proxmox, AWS virtualization. Specializing on systems and network security solutions. Geological Engineering Major. Learning within the Catalyst/Cardano ecosystem for 2+ months. Focusing on wallets, DAPP, DeFi, NFT concepts along with gamify, voting and delegation.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/g%C3%BCrcan-%C3%A7itil-996101193/

Engin Gunay - 3+ years experience as a Systems Administrator / Cloud Engineer. Working in cloud orchestration security. Skilled in R language, Ansible and Linux. Enthusiast of emerging technologies and tools in blockchain. Former engineer in Computational Hydrogeology. Littlefish Foundation Tech researcher.

Ural Yalcin - Former Offshore Engineer, current System Administrator. 8 years of total experience in the industry.

As System Administrator: skilled in preventive maintenance, secure network and virtualization architecture both in Unix and Windows systems.

As Littlefish: Research enthusiast, Blockchain technology documentor, community member.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ural-yalcin/

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And many others who contribute to the Littlefish Foundation.

Getting involved with Littlefish Foundation

LFF is an open community. We accept community members who show initiative to join us in delivering these proposals. The only condition is curiosity. If you find something you like, let us know on our Discord server, join our community meetings, and ask questions. 

But first, it’s good to learn.

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Yes, we will return to Catalyst for further funding, until we build sustainable business models around Action. Catalyst allows us to take our time, engineer systems well without rushing to market, potentially risking an event similar to what happened to Luna.

We are an evolving decentralized organization. We expect solid community and contributor growth in the near future. These individuals, along with existing ones who have time from existing commitments, will be starting new initiatives. Until we get to a sustainable business model using Actions, Catalyst will be the place where we come for funding. This allows us to experiment until we can figure our way. Thanks Catalyst!

We aim to become sustainable with the launch of our token on mainnet, which we tentatively aim to deliver by Q3 2023. 

Meanwhile, we will be providing Catalyst and the broader community with ongoing services. We will be publishing all our research (DAOs, governance, economic, technology, tools, ...) on the Littlefish Vault. These will be made sustainable through experiments in Action, in due time.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Where to check our progress?

At Littlefish Foundation, everything we do is public, and we like documentation. We will publish major progress updates on Obsidian, sharing our learning with the Catalyst community. Our Miro boards are open to the community, there they can see our progress, comment, and contribute. Discord will be the best place to find daily updates, and Actions.

All LFF proposals produce Action, work done by individuals to achieve a goal. Until we have a working system with NFTs, we will use Discord to broadcast our Actions. There are many examples already on the #action channel, showing our early work. As our community grows, it will contain Actions taken by many different littlefish who are building the LFF.

We will track these posts specifically and incentivize team members and contributors to share their Actions, preparing them for Actions on the mainnet.

LFF General - Community Tracking

The general success of LFF is dependent on a strong community. We will track it from several sources:

• on Obsidian using Google Analytics: number of visitors, average time spent, and multiple other metrics
• by activity on Discord using server statistics bot: number of members, unique posters on discord per month, Action per month, Action per unique user

We’ll review this data monthly and share updates through our communication channels.

This Proposal - Docs, docs, docs

It’s all about generating knowledge with this proposal. That means lots of docs. We will publish them on our knowledge base. We will track the number of docs generated per module and publish monthly updates through our communication channels.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

LFF General - Solving our own problems through experimentation, building applications the community loves

Our approach to problem solving in this space is experimentation. Trying out new methods of doing business, creating new processes fit for a decentralized organization built from the ground floor.

One example is our Ikigai onboarding model. The bubbles at the top represent work groups and business functions. We walk through the bubbles with newcomers, discussing what they mean in Littlefish Foundation, and ask them to fill their Ikigai board with them. The result is a fun learning experience for everyone.

We create such systems with the aim of turning them into software. First we practice with existing tools, learn, iterate, and experiment, then we'll build it into software that others can use. See our Ikigai proposal here.

Some other experiments relating to publishing Actions by:

• Financial tracking of rewards
• Actions published on #action Discord channel,
• Older Actions published on the Adventures of Littlefish

Success means these experiments turn into learning which turn into applications loved by the community.

LFF General - A strong community of creators and builders

We are a growing community of 100+. Yet pure numbers aren't enough. Growing the number of meaningful contributors is the key to long term success. Since the F8 proposal, the number of consistent contributors has grown from 2 to 10+ and growing fast. Newcomer numbers are also ticking up. Maintaining a sustainable, healthy growth in these numbers is critical.

LFF General - Littlefish Vault is the knowledge hub for decentralized organizations in the Cardano Space

Building a decentralized organization is tough. There are so many moving pieces, and time goes by quickly. By making our learning public we aim to make it easier for others to build decentralized organizations. A successful LFF means our knowledge base has become a popular place for others who are building decentralized organizations. Our target is 10000 unique and 1000 monthly visitors by the end of February 2023.

THC - A technologically able organization: LFF

The success of this proposal is primarily determined by how effective LFF as an organization has become in using digital work and blockchain tools. We need to solve our problems first, so that we can solve others’.

With success, team members feel comfortable using the tools of the work, using Obsidian and Miro extensively to collaborate and communicate. The organization has adopted multi-signature wallets to more effectively control funds. Littlefish feel safe when using their wallets.   

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

Littlefish Foundation Kiva-like DAO - Unfunded F7 Proposal

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384063

Littlefish Foundation was born with this proposal from the Cardano4Climate community [2]. The aim was to create a DAO and build a Kiva like product that would allow the funding of on the ground SDG activities. 

The proposal wasn’t funded, but we kept working. We held weekly meetings, brought in experts for discussions, and worked hard to understand the domain of problems. Through that we’ve developed the idea further and generalized it to what it is today.

Littlefish: Coordinating Action - Funded F8 Proposal

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/404668

In F8 we came up with a new vision for the Littlefish Foundation: littlefish, colonies and Actions. We got to work before it was even funded.

We were relatively new to developing on Cardano and found a steep learning curve. Weak documentation slowed development down, and we realized there was more to building a successful Littlefish Foundation. 

During this time we have completed many important steps:

• Finished the whitepaper
• Built a strong core of contributors from our community
• Created an organizational model to fit our needs
• A Radical Method of Organization
• Why Cardano > Proposals Experiments and Teams
• Formed work groups and started to produce on all of them. See these on the Action Board
• Tech Help Collective - Working on wallet research&documentation, preliminary DAO tools research on Ethereum and Cardano, reworking Littlefish Discord
• Love House - the littlefish AI art collection
• Organization Labs - Research on Teal organizations, determined necessary business functions, created organizational model
• The Forge - Tested out serialization library, lucid, and multiplatform library, created early UI/UX designs
• Dream Engine - Created Littlefish Action Model, User Flow Models, Detailed Action Flow, Organization Funding Model, and more

Here's a shot of that board as of the 10th June:

Our proposals in Fund 9 aim to supercharge this holistic vision of the Littlefish Foundation.