Training dReps with Cardano4Climate

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Cardano4Climate will become a dRep as a community and use our weekly meetings, Discord and Telegram channels, to explore how to be a good dRep through an experiential process and community decisions.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Cardano4Climate has community members from many different countries, funded proposers, CAs, vCAs, Swarm veterans, and members deeply involved with governance and dRep activities. We are a global community of regenerative impact-focused individuals. We bring diversity to dRep-ing.

[GENERAL] Requested funds in USD.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

What better method of learning to be a good dRep than by actually reading and discussing the merits of proposals with others? Cardano4Climate is a community of over 250+ individuals from many different countries, nationalities, and communities. This diversity will give us a solid base from which to have conversations and collectively decide which proposals we should vote for. 

Cardano4Climate will sign up with a community wallet in order to be a dRep as a community. We will meet, discuss proposals, and decide collectively on which proposals to vote on. Through this process and conversation, we will raise our collective knowledge of how to be an effective dRep and allow community members the opportunity to learn how to be an effective dRep in a safe and welcoming environment before stepping out on their own as an individual dRep.

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

Through this proposal, Cardano4Climate will bring a diverse group of people from many different countries and locations together to discuss proposals. Our community of 250+ people is highly diverse and passionate about changing the world. Through this community participation in the dRep process, it is our hope that individuals can then gain the knowledge, skills, and confidence to be their own individual dReps to help represent people in diverse locales and communities. Being a strong community focused on achieving global regeneration, sustainability, and supporting social and environmental impact, we will attract delegators with purposes aligned with ours. This will include individuals, also larger NGOs and institutions with ESG goals that we can help them align with by investing in the Cardano ecosystem and supporting Catalyst in particular.

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

Risk: The C4C community is not interested in participating in governance or dRep activities.

Mitigation: We will highlight the importance of dReps and delegated liquid democracy at our weekly meetups and hold special sessions to generate enthusiasm for and teach the importance of raising voting participation and discussing the governance of Catalyst.

Risk: No one in the C4C community is interested in driving this initiative to completion

Mitigation: We already have many people on the core team that are signed up as individual dReps, and there is strong alignment there that this is an important initiative. The core team will seed the initiative and use the proposal funds to create participatory incentives through bounties to raise the amount of participation from the larger C4C community.

Risk: We are unable to agree as a community on which proposals to vote for

Mitigation: We will use mechanisms for consensus based on sociocratic principles of consent. We won't seek binary yes or no positions, rather, we will work with ranges of tolerance to ensure that we are aligned as a community and vote for things within our tolerance ranges as individuals so we can represent as a group with a high degree of cohesion and alignment.

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

Q3

• Form a core team around this proposal and align on purpose, meeting cadence, coordination methods, and community messaging. Create a plan of community management and engagement around the C4C dRep role.

Q4

• Work with the community and interested members on being a dRep team. Commit to meeting frequently in both face-to-face and asynchronous meetings to discuss and evaluate proposals in Fund 10, and start to build out a set of checklists and best practices around proposal evaluation and voting strategy.
• Project Management: Utilize Dework bounties to incentivize community participation, and track contributions and engagement. Record and maintain logs of best practices. Maintain meeting notes and provide meeting facilitation and agendas.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Project Management: $1000/mo for 3 months = $3000

Community incentives: $1000/mo for 3 months = $3000

Technical and contingency fund: $765

Total:

$6765

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

Cardano4Climate is a global community of over 300 members [270 on telegram) & 370 on discord], grown in 10 months around communication channels, meetings & a shared vision. 8 active core team members. In 10 months, Cardano4Climate has grown into a global community of over 300 members* through communication channels, meetings, events and a shared mission of making the world work better for all people, animals and the planet. We have a growing team of core members.

*[270 members on Telegram & 370 members on Discord] 

Since August 2021, we have moderated a Telegram channel that has grown to over 270 members & a Discord server of over 370 members and multiple channels and categories. We have sub-communities and initiatives forming around impact, education, tokenomics, event planning & community management. Since mid-October, 2021 C4C has hosted weekly 90-minute zoom calls. All 3 weekly planning meetings, weekly community meetups and monthly events are recorded and shared on our YouTube channel. We are regular Project Catalyst breakout room hosts.

We collaborate with other Catalyst communities such as Gimbalabs, Catalyst School, WADA, Swarm, Climate Neutral Cardano SPO group, DLT360, SustainableADA, and more. We are a point of reference to connect impact-related community activities with ecosystem players such as Cardano Foundation, IOG, Cardashift, and Empowa.

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

• Number of community members engaged in the community dRep process
• Number of proposals the community votes on
• Number of meetings help to discuss proposals
• Number of breakout rooms or presentations in community meetings where we educate and discuss dReps and governance.

[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?

Cardano4Climate is tracking proposal progress using Dework and community bounties, as well as experiments using the Littlefish Foundation's process of Actions. We will track all of our activity and progress using Dework here: https://app.dework.xyz/cardano4climate .

Dework is linked to the Cardano4Climate Discord for community conversations on bounties. Dework is also backed by a Cardano4Climate GitHub so we are able to transparently record bounties, bounty completion, and engagement by our community on these proposals.

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

Many community members are engaged in the dRep process and are educated in the process and have strong basic background knowledge of what being a dRep is about, have diverse participation in the dRep process through proposal discussion and discussions on voting strategy and what makes a good set of proposals to vote on. At least 60 proposals reviewed and voted on as a community. Documentation of the process and learnings recorded and shared with the greater Catalyst Community to improve dReps everywhere.

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

This is an entirely new one.