Why is it important?

High-quality and decentralized decision-making, will increase treasury ROI and legitimize decentralized governance.

What does success look like?

The community is consciously improving decision-making processes while growing a group of committed and collaborative leaders.

Key Metrics to measure

To assess the ROI of this challenge we will ask ourselves: Did we get better at distributed decision making?

• Number of open source governance models tools (models parallel to IdeaScale)

• Number of participants in new open source governance tools (models parallel to IdeaScale)

• Community confidence: avg rating or % of Catalyst members who approve of overall results of a funding round.

• Community participation: number of Catalyst participants contributing to improving Catalyst decision making systems

• Number of unique wallets participating in the voting stage

• Number of votes cast by unique wallet

• Number of votes cast per proposal

• Number of voting power per proposal

• Ratio of (voting power per proposal/cast votes per proposal)

• Number of tools created by the community for voters, CAs, vCAs and proposers

• Number of community members using alternative tools to those created by IOG

• Number of surveys and survey participants

• Number of surveys related to alternative voting methods

• Number of courses and workshops

• Number of courses and workshop participants

• Number of new CAs, vCAs, voters and proposers onboarded by the proposals created in this challenge.

• Proof of iteration: round over round, is there evidence that "pain points" are evolving? (Failure would look like seeing the same problems emerging each funding round)

• Re-election rates: if proposers receive subsequent funding, this can be seen as a sign of success

  Challenge brief

The Project Catalyst is the incentivized testnet of the Voltaire phase, which deals with Cardano's governance. This challenge has everything to do with the core of governance, as it deals exactly with how to make the governance process distributed, so proposals created in this challenge will be experiments and improvements directly linked to evolution in Voltaire.

Guiding questions

• How do we encourage people to participate in decision making?
• How to qualify community builders(CA/vCAs, Mentors and Proposers) to improve decision making?
• How do we ensure the group of decision makers is diverse and accessible to newcomers?
• How can we ensure that the Catalyst process keeps iterating to improve?
• How can we improve or replace the current experience on IdeaScale?
• How will we include the community in decision making?

Potential directions

• Research on new voting models (e.g. quadratic voting)

• Community surveys

• Research and implementation of alternative open source governance models (alternative or complementary to IdeaScale)

• Software/Platforms/Websites that supports decision making or iteration

• Experiments in social, collaboration, or meeting structures that encourage improved decision making

• Training of Community Advisors, Veteran Community Advisors, Mentors and Proposers

• Low effort ways to engage voters in assessing proposals and tapping into existing insights.

• Voting process improvements.

RATIONALE FOR BUDGET DISTRIBUTION

To encourage greater diversity of funded teams and proposals each team can request up to $60,000 USD (20%) of the total $300,000 USD total budget.

E.g.

Team A with 2 proposals of $30,000 USD

Team B with 1 proposal of $60,000 USD

Team C with 1 proposal of $40,000 USD + 1 proposal of $20,000 USD

It is important to note that 25% is the maximum amount of aggregated budget that the same team can request in this challenge, but any amount below that can be requested. This means that the challenge will have space for at least 4 proposals from different teams, which guarantees greater chances for teams with less popularity and that may be overshadowed by more popular teams in the community.