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Stephen Whitenstall
QA-DAO
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Stephen has 30 years experience in organizing academic, community and business projects.
Community Reviews across funding rounds
Funding data last updated
Stephen Whitenstall Proposals (49)
Oversight of Catalyst Circle
<p>Catalyst Circle requires independent oversight.</p><p><br></p><p>A community maintained oversight of Catalyst Circle requires support to be sustainable.</p>
Open Source Training
<p>No open-source training materials in the Entrepreneurship-Toolbox.</p><p><br></p><p>No access to open-source infrastructure for early stage entrepreneurs.</p>
Homeless Hub
Solution: Introduce the Cardano Community to homeless communities in Manchester, UK, through in-person workshops and online sessions.
Challenge: Equip the Economically Excluded
QA-DAO Transcription Service
Solution: Transcribe, time-stamp and summarise the Zoom videos of key community events, making them accessible, searchable, and translatable.
Proposal Workshop
Solution: Coordinated Catalyst community effort to onboard new proposers and give faster feedback
Catalyst-Coordinator Hub
Solution: Implement a collaborative layer, a community hub, to welcome funded proposers to Catalyst and provide support.
Penny Lane Liverpool Philosophy Hub
Solution: Work with established community philosophy networks, to build a philosophy-based Hub and lead philosophy discussion within Catalyst.
Community Governance Oversight
Solution: Survey, report & facilitate retrospectives to improve our governance processes.
Challenge: Improve and Grow Auditability
Liverpool Cardano Philosophy Hub
Solution: Work with an established UK community philosophy network, to build a philosophy-based Hub and develop philosophy discussion within Catalyst.
ABC of Governance
Solution: Provide governance training and research materials to the Cardano community.
Community Governance Oversight
Solution: Provide community oversight of Catalyst governance processes.
Challenge: Improve and Grow Auditability
Open dApp Framework
Solution: Conduct an analysis of existing project management dApps to provide a general, open-source framework and document it as project based learning material modules.
Skin in the Game and Agency Theory
Solution: Research, develop and publish an Agency Theory approach to Cardano decentralization metrics.
Open Source Strategy
Solution: Information, guidance and videos on Open Source Strategy will be provided, what Open Source licenses mean, how to implement them, how to use Open Source tools and build an Open Source culture.
AI RAG Analysis of CIP 1694
Solution: Provide an educational exposition of the development of an open-source LLM (Large Language Model) based on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) for question & analysis of CIP 1694.
Monthly Reports
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We are involved in a few projects and all of them have different approaches when it comes to project management. We are continuesly looking at these different approaches and trying to identify possible automations. We noticed a lot of groups using dework and trying to identify a way to integrate GitHub with Dework and the processes involved to make the automations on GitHub's side effective. Dework has some issues feeding information to GitHub so we need to create a process that feeds from GitHub to Dework.
We are gathering information from the other projects we are involved in. Every project has a different way of doing project management and reporting. We will use the information we gather to identify new automations. GitHub is also receiving new updates which will enable new kinds of automations. We will look at these new updates as they roll out. Once we identified any possible automations we will put them on the project board.
We are involved and doing research in another project (Governance Services Guild) where we are trying to identify automations that can be done on the project board that also integrates with dework. We have seen opportunities for automations, but more iterations is needed to refine the weekly processes. Once patterns are identified and verified to be consistent, we can dedicate to automating those processes. Whatever we find in this research will be brought over to this project to document and use as inspiration for more possible automations. We also closed a few tasks on the project board this month, mostly admin work, making room for more automation work.
The dRep White Paper Working group completed a community review of its White Paper and is preparing to launch the paper in October 2022. Biweekly meetings of Fund 8 CGO resumed after an August break in September 2022 and discussed what governance oversight deliverables to focus on. The areas of interest are likely to be a register of parameter changes in Catalyst and oversight of the upcoming Catalyst Circle Election.
Following our first video "Project Catalyst and the Voltaire Principles" we are commissioning translations into Spanish and Portuguese. Other videos are in research and preparation.
The project is complete; but the team has not had time yet to complete a close out report. We aim to do this in the coming month. Ongoing documetation of Catalyst Circle continues with the F8 proposal 800305
We are working on our final report, which will be shared with homeless organisations in the UK; and on the project website, which will be launched on 3rd Oct.
We took a hiatus for the month of August, as many people in the community are on holiday or away.
This month, we have been meeting to discuss project wrap-up and legacy - given that it seems unlikely, that our follow-on F9 proposal, The Proposers' Hive, will be funded due to heavy competition in the big "dApps and products" challenge, we are considering what we can usefully leave behind which will be of value to proposers long-term; to this end, we analysed the things that proposers have raised via the question below on the monthly reporting form ("Is there anything you would like to communicate… ideas or recommendations for improvements?") We are also discussing what we have learnt from this proposal about proposers' needs, and about team working across communities and time zones, with a view to writing our close-out report; and we are also attending meetings and working with proposers in our various communities, updating our Miro board to collate sensed issues, and contributing insights from here to the main Catalyst docs on process improvement for F9.
We continued testing the new automated Agenda on our project board and so far there hasn't been any errors or bugs. We had to transfer and update our Gitbook with all the changes we made to the project to prepare for work we will do on possible Fund 9 proposals. We created an automation that automatically labels a newly created Issue on the project board with ADA Due. So essentially we will only add items on the project board if they are payable tasks. We started documentation in our Gitbook on these newly created automations.
Further information can be found on our CGO GitBook at https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/community-governance-oversight/ We completed our Fund 7 CGO proposal and gave a presentation at TH Our dRep White Paper working party has started accepting community reviewers
We are working on follow-up videos
We are dropping bounty system for the following reasons.
We struggled to add items to the bounty wish list. We saw that funded projects need help with treasury and project management In order to design automations we would need to research what is needed in these projects as they are all different from each other. Research can be done by helping funded projects and identifying new automations in the process. Decided to shift our focus to doing this research and create automations where needed. We found that our own resources were sufficient to develop GitHub actions and there was insufficient bounty applications
The final report is near completion.
Here is the link to the project GitBook where Catalyst Circle v3 is being documented https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle-oversight-v3/
Here is a link to the Funded Proposers Hub GitBook, where we collate the work that we have been doing https://catalyst-circle.gitbook.io/funded-proposers-hub/
This month, our focus has been on supporting proposers to flag proposals. So we have written a guide to this, and managed translations into 7 languages (translations funded by Circle Rapid Funding Mechanism).
We also produced videos on how to flag, in Spanish https://youtu.be/LBuNE7KIXgY, English https://youtu.be/LzRoI7FnSXA , and Vietnamese https://youtu.be/uZp8U0Kf8NQ
Here is a link to the Catalyst After Town Hall that the project ran on 29th June 2022 https://youtu.be/xVzXwG5Z_lE
Also, 6 of the participants from this project have formed a team called Homeless Posse and have submitted a Fund 9 proposal with support from Vanessa (the facilitator on this project) and from Catalyst proposers SnapBrillia. Here is a link to it https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/421065
Here is the project’s GitBook, which we are populating with documentation of all the sessions https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/homeless-hub/
We finished our old proposals and started planning on the work for this proposal. We will begin work early next month. Please continue to halt the release of funds for this project. We will ask for funding again when work has been done. Here is a link to our project board in GitHub - https://github.com/orgs/Catalyst-Auditing/projects/5/views/1
Our GitBook is here https://catalyst-circle.gitbook.io/funded-proposers-hub/ This was initially created during a previous funded proposal to support proposers; but here is some recent work we have done to create proper guidance notes (in English) for the proposal submission form. https://catalyst-circle.gitbook.io/funded-proposers-hub/help-with-proposing-in-catalyst/proposers-guidance-notes-multi-lingual
The notes were translated into 5 additional languages using fundingfrom Circle's Rapid Funding Mechanism.
The project end date is revised later than in the original bid, because we meet on Mondays, and there have been 3 bank holidays (no meeting) which we forgot to account for, which pushed the project schedule back.
Participants are currently working on a final piece to engage other homeless organisations and people in poverty in Salford, inviting them via a website to discuss questions about wealth and poverty, the financial system, crypto, etc. They are using the slogan "Don't count your chickens - anyone can face homelessness", and using painted images of a chicken (see uploaded images for 2 works-in-progress) which will be placed in several local places such as food banks, credit unions, and homelessness support organisations. The images will bear a QR code linking to a website where people can add comments and opinions. These will also be shared digitally with the Catalyst community in July.
The participants are also going to deliver an ATH session on 29th June; and are also submitting a proposal in fund 9 for a project to engage further with the Cardano blockchain.
Here is the link to the project GitBook where Catalyst Circle v3 is being documented https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle-oversight-v3/
We have mostly just been closing off the old proposals and getting everything ready for this new proposal. Once we have closed the old ones we will start creating the environment for this proposal. This includes setting up dework and a list of bounties that people from the community can take. We have been meeting mostly twice a week to work on this. Another thing we've been working on passively is using the project board and trying to identify ways of automating some of the actions we do every week. The idea is to find a way to use the project board a certain way and then automate a bunch of things and possibly create content that can assist in the monthly and close out report.
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Project end date is revised later, because we meet on Mondays, and there have been 3 bank holidays where we have had no meeting, which we forgot to account for, which has pushed the project schedule back.
4 project participants attended Town Hall and ATH on Weds 18th May, and the group is now planning to deliver an ATH session themselves.
Here is the link to the project GitBook where Catalyst Circle v3 is being documented https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle-oversight-v3/
This is a link to our Gitbook where we document everything - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/training-and-automation/introduction-and-pat-tokens/introduction-to-github-actions - And here is a link to our GitHub repo project board - https://github.com/orgs/Catalyst-Auditing/projects/5/views/1 - We created a project board and discussed and added action items.
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/ekphrasis/
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://catalyst-circle.gitbook.io/funded-proposers-hub/
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-swarm-2022/
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/audit-circle/project-management/overview
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/community-governance-oversight/project-management/overview
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/training-and-automation/
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/training-and-automation/
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Attached is an audio excerpt from a Zoom conversation on 11th April 2022 between the Homeless Hub group and Littercoin, another Catalyst funded proposal, about tokenising what we value, citizen science, and open data. This project does not plan to create a token, but the group wanted to find out more about how tokens work.
Here is the link to the project GitBook where Catalyst Circle v3 is being documented https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle-oversight-v3/
Closing date of the project - in the last monthly report, I miscounted that it was 30th April. Actually 12th May (end of 6th meeting of Circle v3)
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://catalyst-circle.gitbook.io/catalyst-coordinator/
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-swarm-2022/
GitBook Project is complete (https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/catalyst-swarm-genesis) but need to produce closing video
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/training-and-automation/
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/training-and-automation/
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/audit-circle/project-management/overview
Evidence & information about the progress of this project can be found here - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/community-governance-oversight/project-management/overview
I am behind with documentation. By next monthly report, I will have a GitBook available with blogs, session documentation, images and video from the project.
Here is the link to the project GitBook where Catalyst Circle v3 is being documented https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle-oversight-v3/
NB The GitBook is the main "evidence" of the project's progress - it would be great if the "please share any evidence" field also included space for text, where links can be added.