Catalyst Governance Tooling

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

We build a modular environment based on the Done Collectively platform, where the community can try and test objective setting, proposal prioritization and co-development, and other novel approaches.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Veteran product and engineering team dedicated to enabling decentralized organizations, actively collaborating with the Catalyst GPS core team. Deep engagement with the Catalyst community over the past 12+ months.

[GENERAL] Requested funds in USD.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Setting Context

Catalyst GPS* stands for “Global Participation Solution”. It is a collaborative strategy framework that helps visualize why we exist, where we are headed and how we might get there. It allows people to step in, take the lead and drive positive change, focusing on what they are good at and what brings them joy. It helps in improving comprehension, communication, coordination and collaboration within and between different community-led initiatives to drive the growth and adoption of the Cardano ecosystem..

Done Collectively delivers the most important tools for decentralized organizations to get things done together in a transparent manner. These tools will support getting organized and being organized, allow shared planning and reflection, create good incentives and invite participation for that work to be done, putting emphasis on accountability and trust between the members of the organization..

This Proposal:

In consultation and in active collaboration with GPS-affiliated working groups, we will configure, further develop and deploy a version of the Done Collectively DAO management platform dedicated to Project Catalyst, further develop it and support its operation under guidance of the GPS team and related initiatives.  

We believe in sharing progress and getting feedback early and often, especially since this project will have a wider impact on the community. Nearing the end of each design and development phase, we’ll release something the proposal team has high confidence in building, so everyone can help point out exciting parts and potential flaws. 

*Check this slideset to learn more:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13mkM6bg8QRcPXc9tDHuHQTXOfuNHZSbl8Mkf5b6IKPk/edit?usp=sharing

See also introduction and discussion from After Town Hall breakout room on June 22, 2022:

George Lovegrove’s analysis and suggestions regarding Funding Categories:

https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/catalyst-funding-categories/funding-categories/overview

This version will be a working installation or sandbox to support a test environment. Which will allow for a small part of the catalyst proposal to be submitted, accessed and voted on. The process will allow for GPS objective setting and funding categories. The intention is to run this test in parallel with catalyst fund 10.

To make that possible we will further develop our application's existing mission / values / objective-oriented workflows as needed to align well with terminology and general process proposed and further developed for GPS groups, and Catalyst sub-circles.  As a result, those groups will have access to a functioning framework and application for facilitating cooperative, decentralized decision-making, project prioritization and objective setting.

Each of these deliverables will help the community and GPS Advisors gain insight and clarity before moving to the next step of delivery.

Collaborating with the GPS project team, we'll enhance and test workflows for evolving the  Catalyst proposal governance process.

Using the workflows established in the first phase, we'll prioritize objectives and projects together with the GPS team, including community input, to decide which areas best deserve further work.  According to those selected objectives and projects, we will continue enhancing workflows for Ideators, Designers, Advisors, Mentors, Builders, Project Managers and other contributors to be more collaboratively developing their ideas together.  

We seek to shorten the time between proposal and kickoff of funded effort, and increase the connection between consensual effort toward those proposals & projects vs payment for those efforts. Through experimentation we aim to show another way to a more fluid funding model where each proposal is being worked on individually, only submitted for final review when ready and then evaluated against the precise demands of the particular funding category and the objectives the proposal relates to. Through this approach we can increase the amount of high quality proposals, build readier teams and alleviate the process management burden currently carried by IOG.

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MORE CONTEXT

This effort is a direct result of conversations with the Catalyst GPS team, after hearing their passion and challenges of transitioning to an even more decentralized process.  Their vision of community-led objective setting and prioritization would eliminate the inconsistencies and slow pace of the current Challenge-setting process.  We too see this as a positive development, but one that can only be realized by significant improvements to process and tooling.    

The cooperatively owned and organized Done Collectively team, will benefit from on-the-ground experience of the GPS team and the community to ensure our application's effectiveness and applicability.  The Catalyst ecosystem is a great source of inspiration for us.  

The plan is to develop the Catalyst Governance Tooling in stages, with iterative experiments and input/feedback from the users.

THESE ARE SOME THINGS WE WOULD LIKE TO EXPERIMENT WITH, in alignment with community-based prioritization process.  

• Fluid funding mechanisms.
• Collaborative sizing of treasury for objectives.  For example, "Developer Friendly" might be worth $10 million after considering community input.
• Question and answer templates for proposing and evaluating different types of proposals
• Workflows for proposing and certifying skills and credentials for various community functions within Catalyst 
• Administering workflows for human-based escalation & review after 90% automated processes (PA filtering, PA/vPA petitioning)
• 
  

Our roadmap includes a process for releasing portions of our platform as open-source tools, in part to enable DAOs and ecosystem participants on our platform to customize their DAO instances.  This will also allow ecosystem developers to create and monetize plugins for specific vertical markets, advanced workflows, business-process management. 

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

Done Collectively is a platform to coordinate impactful work while sharing meaning, influence, rewards and trust.  We believe when decentralized organizations are easier to manage, everyone—even those in regular-world organizations—can get these benefits.

Our intention is to enhance the community-led governance capabilities of the Catalyst process, as well as to continue developing top-tier tooling for decentralized management of organizations of all kinds. This will double the impact of our efforts.

The workflows proposed by Catalyst GPS framework and powered by the Done Collectively platform will enable more complete proposals to be submitted to IdeaScale or other decision-making tools the community decides to utilize in time to come. We are not yet including voting as part of the platform, but it is a likely future direction; meanwhile, we can integrate with other tools currently in use and being developed by the community.  We can also enhance the proposal evaluation process in ways that IdeaScale has been unwilling or unable to do.

Identity tooling can be a dependency for this kind of platform.  We have implemented a minimal form of identity based on cryptographic keys (like a mini-wallet), and we are also planning a more advanced integration with DID solutions as our platform matures.  

Our platform and proposal addresses Catalyst Funding Categories: Community and Outreach, Products and Integrations, Governance and Identity, along with the following goals and metrics from the challenge brief:

• Increasing the number of dapps and products available for the community to use that help to enrich the ecosystem with new use cases. By delivering the “Done collectively” platform.
• Creation or improvement of different Dapps, products, and integrations that provide value to the Cardano community and wider ecosystem. By delivering the platform creating a space to experiment for Cardano community-led governance and by pushing the platform adoption with decentralized organizations across Cardano ecosystem.
• Metrics: Marketplaces - Total number of users [on Cardano], number of transactions performed by bringing the members of decentralized organization on the platform and by being their success enabler.

By creating a platform and ecosystem for decentralized organizations, we are expanding the face of useful applications in our ecosystem.  We are also grateful for this opportunity created by the Catalyst GPS team to support our journey into community-led governance.

 We are seeking to impact the Catalyst community.  We take these same innovations to our DAO platform, with a broader target market in mind, as a solution for any business, non-profit, cooperative or social enterprise wanting to improve their organizational capacity through decentralization to do the right things the right way to get successful and bring brother Cardano adoption.

If our platform is successful, it can stand together with Discord as a primary tool people use to plan and work together, to provide publicly-visible outlets for people to find paying work and to find talent to fill gaps in their organizations.  This will work in part like a decentralized talent agency, and in part like a social network (minus all the adverts).

We expect our proposal and platform to significantly increase the utility of Cardano, bringing impactful use cases to the ecosystem. With better tooling for decentralized organizations and Catalyst specifically, we intend to enable more community-led governance, be more responsive to changing conditions in our unpredictable environment an

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

Scope risk would normally be a critical consideration for a project such as Done Collectively.  Our prior work in platform development is making application development reliable and efficient.  See more about technical risk below.

Staffing and funding are probably our greatest current risks as an organization. After winning two Catalyst Fund 8 grants, we have been able to attract and lightly fund multiple dedicated contributors with graphic design, product and market research, UI-development and project management skill sets.  This additional funding will help us pay fair rates to our staff, while supporting our community and creating great tooling for decentralized work.

Note: Some of our contributors are also serving other projects (DEMU Decentralized Music Protocol, Redis State Channels, Done Collectively Gitbook & Discord) from Catalyst Fund8 and possibly from Catalyst Fund9. Most of these projects are closely aligned with the Done Collectively proposals, timelines and roadmap. The people who are working on more than one project are generally serving in a supportive guidance role, not on a full-time basis.

The rates selected for our budgeting reflect the need to pay market rates to skilled technical staff.

Technical risk is naturally a key consideration for such a project as this.  That said, our application framework has been under continuous development for some years, in the context of developing a software-requirements-management application and a relationship-management SaaS application for churches. New features are typically quick to create and work very reliably.

Our platform includes facets of deployment-management, system-operations, lightweight virtual private networking, decentralized system operations, and SaaS infrastructure.  These details mitigate operational risk, helping to ensure we have good support for production-time practicalities.

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

Overview/Milestones

Phase 1 (July-Sept 2022)

In preparation for funded work, we will begin delivering on Phase 1 milestones prior to end of Fund 9:  

• [in progress] Apply the Catalyst GPS  terminology and process to existing Done Collectively workflows.
• 20h product management
• +GPS team (see below)
• Developed graphic design and general UX refinements to our current prototypes
• 20h product management
• 30h UX design
• 60h UI development
• UX designs are iterated and approved for target workflows, driven by Done Collectively staff in active consultation & feedback with the Catalyst GPS team and the broader community. 
• 80h design
• 40h product management
• 30h project management
• +GPS team 
• UI development work complete for any needed iteration to align closely with GPS team’s vision & needs for prioritizing objectives
• 30h UI development
• 15h server/API development
• Done Collectively platform installed at a location dedicated to GPS initiative, with any customizations needed for GPS terminology
• 50h system administration & operations
• Scenario trials, user testing & validation of essential workflows 
• 12h UX designer
• 12h project management
• +GPS team 
• Implement workflows for project-proposal development and Assessment process 
• 10h project management
• 40h UI development
• 30h server/API development
• +GPS team 

Phase 2  (Sept - Oct 2022)

• Prioritization trials for Objective-setting with GPS team and community (results of Phase 1, put into practice in the catalyst sandbox)
• 5h product management
• +GPS team
• Presentation to the community and collaborative prioritization of further process & feature development in the GPS Platform
• GPS team
• Scope of further iterations planned, with UX designs complete (details as determined through prioritization above)

Phase 3 (Nov 2022 - Jan 2023)

• GPS core team experiments with community, supported by data analytics and light development work

• Ongoing iteration as prioritized by GPS team and community
• 50h product management
• 100h design & UX
• 25h project management
• 125h development
• 
  

The Catalyst GPS team is currently working on Fund 8 proposal which has already presented the initial GPS framework design to the community and is now startingnow is starting new GPS initiatives and training for future GPS champions to help others to find their role in Catalyst and contribute to growth and adoption of Cardano ecosystem. The work is scheduled to be completed by the end of August.

James at Gimbalabs said,  "Navigating all of my multiple DAOs and feeling organized about the experience? … aw, f*** yeah!".

Dan Mercurius said "it's like a more clear / coherent version of what I tried to do with Zenhub".  

George Lovegrove said "make[s] it nice and easy for people to move their way inwards toward full time contribution".

•  Tom (TCT) of ADAO said, "It is the platform that is going to make Cardano THE blockchain for DAOs.  [it] will allow ADAO to onboard new members and contributors efficiently and effectively."

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

For the Catalyst GPS Team (Guidance, Direction, Community Management)

$20,100 

$4,000    Initial Process Consultation (Nadia)

$2,700 Ongoing Consultation x 9 times (Nadia)

$4,000 Initial Innovation and Design (Tomi)

$2700 Ongoing Consultation x 9 times (Tomi)

$2,700 Ongoing Consultation x 9 times (Ondra)

$2.000 Issue and process analysis

$2,000 User Acceptance Testing and validation

For Done Collectively:  $77,615

Rates:

$120/h for high-skill contributors 

$75/h for project management

Promotion and Marketing: $2000

    (incentives, giveaway, twitter-space hosting)

135h product management = $16,200

222h design = $26,640

225h development x $120h = $27,000

77h project management x $75/h = $5,775

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

DONE COLLECTIVELY TEAM:

Randall Harmon - Application architect and member of technical staff in Done Collectively, Catalyst community member since Fund4.    

Adam Lorentzen - Product leader in Done Collectively; 10 years in product development and user-experience design, with experience in both software and physical products. Will focus on user-journey & user-experience to enhance democratic collaboration and decentralized management.

Maija Grudule - Software developer with chosen specialty in web UI; additional graphic design background. Will focus on presentation, styles and user-experience.

ADVISOR:

George Lovegrove - Catalyst Community member, project contributor, advisor and champion for Funding Categories and Catalyst Contributors. Will collaborate on planning and user-experience design aligned to championed projects.

CATALYST GPS TEAM:

Ondřej Hálek - GPS Core Team member, Catalyst Community member. He is a senior consultant, enterprise architect and analyst, who is experienced in customer-focused and culture-oriented design as well as in agile development.

   https://www.linkedin.com/in/ondra-h%C3%A1lek-15107744/

Tomi Astikainen - GPS Core Team member, Catalyst Community member. He is a 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 and has four years of experience working with multiple Salesforce clouds and ten certifications.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomiastikainen/

Nadia Hopkins - GPS Core Team member, Catalyst Community member, Community Advisor.  She 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 has successfully collected perspectives, connected doers, critiqued the process and communicated the next steps.

   https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadiashopkins

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

Using the platform created in this proposal,we will ask for funding to test run the GPS framework in Fund 10. That test run will need an independent funding budget to enable several small proposals to be funded and proposal assessment to be rewarded accordingly.

This Fund9 proposal can sustain tool development until the end of December 2022. If the test run is successful and the community wants to further develop the tool, additional funding will be proposed in future funds. 

We plan to fund efforts to release parts of the Done Collectively infrastructure with an cooperative-open-source license so the catalyst community can actively participate in future development of the tool.

[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?

We will report progress in public channels the Done Collectively and Catalyst United/GPS discord server.  

We will also measure progress on our planned milestones and deliverables.  

We will present in community sessions to show progress, showing and applying intermediate versions to the iterative process.  

The number of Catalyst experiments done on the “Done collectively” platform and the number of decentralized organizations using the “Done collectively” platform will be the key measures of our success.

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

We will deliver the test bed for all Catalyst experiments, any new idea of new processes and organization on the catalyst will be testable in the “Done collectively” platform. Specifically the platform will be optimized to test the Catalyst GPS framework. Once the Catalyst GPS framework is adopted, various community-led initiatives can then utilize the built tools and platform to more efficiently work together. We aim to increase comprehension of where we are, where we are headed and how to get there. We help communicate direction and show how different initiatives all contribute to the same dream. We make coordination within and between initiatives easier and, finally, we enable efficient collaboration.

The Done Collectively platform will function as a test bed for a new kind of Catalyst process. We will have based that process on meticulous experimentation of the entire proposal writing, evaluation and funding system and its parts. New ideas for Catalyst will be testable on the “Done collectively” platform, there will be +-5 smaller experiments done and tested using the proposal budget and any future proposal will be able to budget in a test on the “Done collectively” platform.

Furthermore, “Done Collectively” will be used and implemented in 5 Cardano based DAO organizations to organize tests and try their “Catalyst” process to do the right things to get ahead on the market, create strong use cases for the world which is really the main thing that will grow the Cardano ecosystem.

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

Not a continuation of previously-funded work.

Done Collectively has been largely a bootstrapped project. However it did get funding in Fund8 for Github and Discord integrations, on a totally different scope from this proposal.

The foundations of Catalyst GPS were built as part of this proposal funded in Fund8:  https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398299