Catalyst Mediation Treasury

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

As any other community, Project Catalyst and the wider Cardano community face many conflicts and disputes. Some of them become public, especially when they involve public figures, projects that are in the spotlight and roles that are relevant for these communities. Additionally, there are many private disputes that are also harming the ecosystem. For example, disputes among co-workers of a Cardano project could lead to its failure.

Mediation is a conflict resolution process that is widely used to solve disputes, and it is especially useful when the relationship between the disputing parties should continue. This is well aligned with the concept of anti-fragility and solving community disputes, since, as a community, it is desirable that it grows together instead of getting fragmented into smaller sub-communities due to the conflict of two or more projects or community members.

The goal of this proposal is to create a treasury for the community to use and have access to mediation service through mediators.ai, a Catalyst funded project built by Loxe Inc. This treasury would be limited to Catalyst and Cardano community members, since the goal is to positively impact these communities.

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

The institutionalized primary way to solve disputes is to use litigation. Mediation is one of the so-called Alternative Dispute Resolution methods that can be used instead of litigation, i.e. to avoid going through the cumbersome and costly legal process. Mediation is, therefore, an alternative to solve legal disputes as well, even if it’s not limited to them.

The goal of this proposal is to broaden access to mediation to the Catalyst community, including funded proposers, which is a way to provide legal services to them and help them to be successful in their endeavor.

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

The main risk related to this proposal is not to have enough traction within the community and no one requests mediation and uses the treasury. To minimize this risk, we are submitting this proposal with a small budget, as an MVP of possibly bigger treasury in the future, to evaluate the community’s interest and to show the effectiveness of mediation.

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

The execution of this proposal will be quite simple. The treasury will be managed by the Loxe Inc. team, and the process of reimbursement after the mediation takes place will be manual. We will avoid creating smart contracts for this purpose at this moment to avoid extra costs to the proposal. The mediation request will be done using a form in a website created for this purpose, which will also include details about the process, the treasury and mediation in general for those who are not familiar with it.

Our roadmap is:

• 1 month after funding: Website and request form finished.
• From 2nd to 7th month after funding: During this 6 months period, the treasury will be available for the community to request mediations. We believe that it will take less than 6 months for the treasury to be used, but in case this doesn’t happen, this period will be extended.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

• Webpage: $500
• Management and auditability reporting: $1000
• Treasury: $8500
• Total: $10000

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

The webpage, management and auditability reporting of this proposal will be executed by the Loxe Inc. team. The work will be led, and mostly be executed by:

• Matthias Sieber, Masters of Dispute Resolution - CEO
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthiasklaussieber/
• Victor Corcino, M.Sc. - COO, Loxe Inc.
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorcorcino/
• Eli Selkin, MSW & M.Sc. - CTO, Loxe Inc.
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliselkin/

The development of the website and request form might be supported by the Loxe dev team which currently has 2 full-time software engineers, 5 interns, volunteers and contractors. More information about some of the other team members can be found here: https://loxeinc.com/.

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

If this proposal is funded and we successfully help the Cardano and Catalyst communities to solve some of their disputes, we might submit another proposal in the future to create a bigger treasury and continue to provide this service to them subsidized by the Catalyst treasury.

[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?

For the 1st month milestone, we will launch the public website, and this can be used to check that we have delivered the milestone.

For the 2nd-7th month, we will publicly share the information about the quantity of mediations requested and provided each month, as well as the amount of treasury used during that period. We will also request the parties to answer a short exit questionnaire, that’s going to be optional and anonymous, and we will share the results with the community.

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

We will consider this proposal to be successful if the treasury funds have been used by the community within 6 months of funding. We are going to set a maximum cost of $2k per mediation, which means that we will have at least 5 mediations executed through this proposal (one of them would have to be a $500 mediation), but the actual number will probably be higher than that.

[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 a new proposal, although it's going to use a product developed through a previously funded proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/368353

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

100% alignment with SDG 16: Peace, Justice And Strong Institutions