Nurturing Ideas & Teams

There is a need for a diverse group of teams and ideas exploring different ways 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 funded proposals for this category help lead to education or further proposals to improve the ecosystem based on any learnings from tested ideas and analysis.

Individual success metrics are added for the different types of proposal in the category brief. These metrics provide suggestions for how different proposal types could be audited.

—- FUNDING CATEGORIES BACKGROUND —-

Funding categories offer an effective approach for doing funding categorisation in the Catalyst funding process. Funding categories if fully adopted can remove the issues and inefficiencies surrounding challenge settings.

Funding categorisation has a number of properties that can be analysed. Categorisation can be broad or specific, inclusive or exclusive and recurring or changing. Funding categories have been created based off the properties which are more effective for funding categorisation. Funding categories focus on being broad, inclusive and recurring - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/categorisation-properties

Using more effective categorisation properties results in a number of advantages. Funding categories offer a more efficient, simple, flexible, scalable and egalitarian approach to do funding categorisation than challenge settings. Funding categories are effective for directing funding and also help to increase healthy competition - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/funding-categories-advantages/overview

Funding categories achieve similar or often better outcomes than challenge settings for ensuring each focus area has access to funding in a given funding round - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/historical-analysis-and-comparisons/funding-access-for-each-focus-area

Funding categories provide a 80% total cost reduction when used as a replacement to challenge settings. The numbers used for this estimation are also conservative - the savings are likely higher! Read more here - https://docs.catalystcontributoars.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/historical-analysis-and-comparisons/categorisation-overall-cost-comparison

The full list of funding categories can be found here - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/catalyst-funding-categories/

—- BUDGET WEIGHTING VOTE —-

The total budget that gets applied to each funding category is determined using a democratic budget weighting vote.

Funding categories are assigned a percentage by each voting participant in the vote. A weighted average percentage is then achieved from the voting results. This percentage is then converted into the equivalent ADA value that will be requested for that funding category from the total amount of funding that will be available in the next round.

To register and participate in the budget weighting vote you can find all of the details in this funding categories documentation - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/catalyst-funding-categories/budget-weighting-votes/fund-9

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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 out something to then show 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. 

Challenge amounts should only be proposed in increments of 25K ₳. Other amounts not in these increments will be rounded up. E.g. 27,500₳ will be rounded up to 50,000₳.