Neona 1on1 Lunar Cycle Mentorship

Videos/Interviews Weekly
Free to Catalyst for 3 lunar cycles (business quarter)
Running workshops, learning tutorials and willing to apply a level-up mentoring structure/connect to relevent projects of interest
Working with Swarm, in the ecosystem and with developers
Seeking everyone!

Looking to combine with existing proposals in the ecosystem - web-weaving

Success after 3mo - self recursional flywheel effect, 6mo - 50% more mentors in the ecosystem 12 mo - self sustaining mentorship structure that builds and grows with swarm.

Team For Me – Crowdsourced remote teams to solve tough innovation challenges

Individual Project Catalyst members don't have enough time to find suitable team members and perfect their proposal simultaneously. The proposers are trying alone to push their half-baked ideas while Community Advisors' time is wasted rating incomplete proposals. Average proposal rating remains low. Work gets piled up: a handful of Community Advisors write the majority of reviews.

Team For Me is an online platform to create and prepare teams to solve innovation challenges. Funding is sought for Stage 1 of a three-stage development process (detailed below). The outcome will be a 4-person team ready to create a minimum viable product in the next stage.

The platform allows like-minded individuals with complementary skills and personalities to form a professional team – even before they know what they are going to work on together. They are trained to understand and to appreciate each other's differences. Diversity of personalities is the key. Each team will ideally have a fast-paced Driver to ensure things get done, a detail-oriented and analytical Problem Solver, an expressive Communicator to handle partnerships and marketing, as well as a caring Peacemaker to bring the team together and to guarantee a good working climate.

Diverse teams that have had time to brainstorm and to learn to work well together are more ready for collaborative innovation and decision making. They can propose implementable solutions that can be funded more confidently, allowing Project Catalyst to emphasize quality over quantity.

MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT (MVP for Project Catalyst in 2021) — Proposers have good ideas but find it hard to compile a suitable team around them. Initial focus should not be on the ideas but on the teams that can generate better ideas together.

The developed MVP functions as the basis for a full-scale professional service offered for enterprises and nonprofits in 2022. This, in turn, could find employment for the teams formed within Project Catalyst.

INITIAL REASONING FOR THE PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

Based on years of theoretical and practical exploration, certain assumptions are made that guide the solution design at a later stage:

Recruitment is broken: Job openings call for superstars and miracle makers and, although all sorts of freelancers are readily available, one person hardly ever possesses all the qualifications needed. The costs of headhunting, on-boarding and team building are astronomical and the process wastes a lot of time, yet there is no guarantee of results.
Corporate problem solving: Adding individuals to existing innovation teams always results in down-time and confusion. An external self-managed team can approach the challenge with fresh eyes and get the job done quicker and better. Suggested solutions can benefit from but are not limited to Cardano.
Teams for Startups: Idea-rich entrepreneurs and inventors struggle to find the right team to take their products and services to the market. Startups are measured first by their people and timeliness of their solution – and only then by the plan, business concept and funding. Team For Me can be used to gather an implementation team around a single entrepreneur or inventor.
Human dignity is in danger: Rather than solving tough innovation challenges, freelancers and contractors are often used only for trivial micro-tasks and simple one-off projects. People are not just disposable cogs in the machine; they seek for autonomy, mastery and meaning in their work.
The promise and demise of remote teamwork: Connecting remote team members with each other and matching them with the right challenges benefits everyone involved. More often than not, however, virtual teams tend to fail unless they have a strong sense of purpose, understanding of each other's unique potential and a facilitator/mediator to guide them into high performance.

TEAM MEMBER PROFILE

Team members can find each other and be matched together based on the diversity of their:

Personality
Background (video introduction)
Skills
Knowledge
Interests
Learning diary
(Later: tokenized reputation)

THE PROCESS IN A NUTSHELL:

Team For Me hand-picks enthusiastic doers with complementary skill-set and personalities.

Team gets to know each other virtually and decides if they'd like to work together.

Necessary adjustments are made to guarantee the right fit. Team is formed.

Team picks a proposed innovation challenge and they start brainstorming solutions.

Team roles are decided and intimacy is built in a facilitated introductory meeting.

Team starts their work and they are guided through stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing (and adjourning). The solution takes shape.

The team documents their journey, utilizes available support materials and communicates openly to face challenges together.

Each team member benefits from facilitated peer-to-peer feedback and goal-oriented development.

Once the team has solved their challenges they can either a) go different ways, b) accept another challenge to solve or c) come up with their own business idea to work on.

Every time someone leaves the team or someone joins, this change is facilitated to guarantee smooth transition and continued high performance.

Stage 1: PREPARATION (Fund5)

At first stage the deliverables are:

Team formation: 3 new people with complementary personalities, interests, skills and knowledge are required to tackle the next stage.
Research into possible partnerships and good case practices
Detailed process description and supporting materials for team formation
and budget for the MVP
Wireframe for Mobile & Desktop User Interface
Brand identity and marketing materials for internal promotion within Project Catalyst

Stage 2: MVP FOR PROJECT CATALYST (Fund7)

In the second stage the deliverables include but are not limited to:

Integration with other initiatives / solutions developed within Project Catalyst
Mobile and web UI: functioning online tools to run the team formation process
Proof of concept: testing with 3-5 teams, collecting feedback and incorporating changes
Fully developed marketing materials to start gauging external interest

Once the MVP is ready, we can invite participation by launching Team For Me internally to Project Catalyst members in e.g. Cardano Live and/or Town Hall meetings.

Stage 3: PROFESSIONAL SERVICE (2022)

In the third stage, if there is demand, the deliverables include:

Mobile and web UX ready to demo externally
Full business plan, budget and communication plan
3-5 additional team members and/or partners to execute the plans

Teams created in the MVP stage and other interested Project Catalyst members will take precedence when introducing potential solution teams to the enterprise clients.

BUDGET

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Cs94euPc8goLQfO0qbM_JFH0QtXMD9Q6JnLQkOqXMbY/edit?usp=sharing

The budget for Stage 1 includes an incentive worth $500 (of the budgeted ADA) for each of the three selected core team members and no other compensation is paid at this stage. The proposer's involvement is capped at $7,500 (in ADA). Stage 2 budget will be made according to the actual work plan and responsibilities within the team.

COMPETITION

There are established solutions like Toptal and Upwork Enterprise for finding, onboarding and remunerating freelancers. However, they are focusing on individuals, not teams. The closest competitors are X-team, a new initiative called Teamstack that, however, focuses mostly on teams for IT projects, not for wider innovation challenges. Freelancing Teams is a cool service but it assumes that the proposer already knows both the challenge and the solution. We will get in touch with some of the smaller players to see if there would be synergistic opportunities for collaboration.

DISCONTINUED PROJECTS

Previous attempts have been discontinued for various reasons (usually it's just not the right time and environment or the approach has been too local or narrow). Startup Startup matched talent with startups based on personality and skills. CollabFinder allowed one to find cofounders, collaborators and other makers to help build a project. Elevator helped recruit teams. We will get in touch with all of these and, to avoid the same destiny, pick their brains to understand what went wrong.

AVAILABLE DOMAINS

TeamForMe.io

TeamForMe.cc

(Not registered yet because the team might suggest a better name.)

ABOUT THE PROPOSER

Tomi's an expert in innovation, diversity and team leadership. He was a Community Advisor in Fund4. Tomi holds a Master's degree in Economics and Business Administration. His major was in Organizations and Management, minors in Purchasing Management and Knowledge Management. His thesis (link below) explored how diversity and the nonprofit nature of an organization can drive innovation through high performing teams.

Tomi's specialties are leadership, coaching, facilitation, strategic consulting, team and organizational development, service design and social innovation. Tomi is a designer, kick-starter, connector and storyteller who can help with branding, marketing, writing, editing, innovation, ideation, public speaking, training, project management, sales, partnerships, networking, business development and experience design. He thrives in complex multi-stakeholder projects, aligning everyone to the same direction. It is natural for him to see opportunities to connect people according to their strengths and passions. He has given training and facilitated team building experiences in some 400 assignments in Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa and Australia.