Our first training cohort ended on Oct 7th and was successful, with 9 people completing out of an initial 11 (one dropped out due to illness, the other was unable to make the dates; but both are still involved via Discord). We were very pleased with the completion rate. We have also set up a Discord server for the Facilitatiors' Collective.

Currently, the trainees are planning to deliver "facilitation practice" sessions on a rangle of things from poetry and storytelling sessions to onboarding and job pitching. Once these are delivered and recorded, we'll hold a retrospective for the first training cohort. One thing we have noticed is that the "coooldown" period is inhibiting this work somewhat. There is so little going on in Catalyst at present, that it feels to most of the trainees like a bad time to try to run a session of any kind; so none of the planned sessions have been delivered yet. Hopefully, the energy will pick up once F10 begins in earnest - or, if F10 is further delayed, these facilitated sessions might become a welcome focus for keeping the community in touch.

Also this month, we have been working on scripts for 2 introductory animated videos on core facilitation techniques, to be shared through the Catalyst ecosystem as a starting point for people who did not attend the course but are keen to try facilitation; and we have started creating a series of self-led learning documents on specific facilitation topics that emerged from the training course.

This is a divergence from our original project plan; but,since it has become clear that there is not sufficient interest to run a second training cohort, we have decided that producing self-led learning resources is the best way to fulfil our aim of increasing facilitation skills in Catalyst.

After our initial focus groups in September, we have worked this month to analyse and understand the information we got from them. The core team has conducted open coding on the recordings of the focus group meetings, to identify core themes and issues, and have discussed what our pilot system would need to look like in order to meet the needs that have been identified. In our next meeting, at the end of October, we will draw all this together to create a list of features that our suggested new system will have.

We have also been researching and trialling different possible platforms that Wada project-monitoring and audit material could be held on. We are prioritising open-source tools, free tools or those with a free version, and tools which are either already well understood in the Wada community, or that are accessible and have a relatively shallow learning curve. Several of the tools we're considering are primarily academic and intended for organising one person's research material, so it's important to know if they scale for use by a whole organisation.

By the end of October, we will have made a documented decison on what tools to use, so that we can start adding existing Wada project data to the system to create an archive and check that our proposed system is effective and scales well.

As detailed above, work has paused temporarily, so for this reason we are requesting to pause funding this month.

The project took a hiatus for the month of August, as many people in the community are away or on holiday; so no August report was submitted. This month, we have run 2 out of 3 of our initial problem-sensing focus groups, engaging 10 project managers from Wada projects to discuss issues around their project auditing, particularly with reference to collecting qualitative data. The final focus group, engaging another 5 managers, will take place next Friday (30th Sept). These focus groups will help us design an alternative process which we will trial with current Wada proposals.

Documentation of Catalyst Circle fortnightly meetings; and publicising of the documentation, has been ongoing through August and September. However, apart from this project, QA-DAO took a hiatus during the month of August, so no monthly report was submitted in August.

Note that this proposal funds documentation of fortnightly Circle meetings - but Circle is currently meeting weekly. Documentation of the "working meetings" on the in-between weeks is funded by our F7 proposal "QA-DAO Transcription Service, so as to maintain a complete record.

As planned in the original proposal, we have now begun to include Spanish translations of the meeting summaries; but we need to do more work on promoting this, as yet it hasn't yet had a significant impact on our views. We are also feeling that we wish we had included budget for translation into French and Vietnamese (the other 2 top languages used in Catalyst), and Portuguese (so as not to cement an existing language inequality within LatAm Catalyst).

This month we have also been discussing with the ex-Catalyst Circle Admin team (now called Governance Services Guild) and with DripDropz so we can document the forthcoming CCv4 election.

A note on "oversight": This proposal has always aimed to provide factual documentation rather than editorialising or comment; the concept is that by providing this and publicising it, the communtuy itself is enabled to maintain oversight of Circle. However, this month and particularly, last month (August) have seen so many questionable practices happening within Circle meetings that we were forced to conduct far more direct oversight in the meeting documentation - for example, we have questioned the accuracy of things stated in meetings, raised questions about the validity of decision-making processes used in meetings, and questioned the level of engagement with and reporting back to the community that reps have done. This will be reflected in the proposal's final report.

This month we have focused on dRep material - we documented IOG's second dRep workshops, and continue to cover the dRep White Paper Working Group meetings. Also with the ongoing situation with Catalyst Circle - they have now shifted to meeting once a week (rather than the one a fortnight that our F8 "Oversight of Catalyst Circle" proposal is funded to cover, so we are covering the extra meetings via this proposal in order to give complete coverage of Circle and keep the community up to date with the progress towards CCv4 elections. (Note that although QA-DAO took a hiatus on all other projects for the month of August, we did maintain documentation of Circle meetings).

Additionally, this month we have been writing an analysis of documentation methodologies and approaches in the Catalyst ecosystem together with ideas on best practice. This will be launched at the end of the project, but key takeaway so far is that documentation needs to be appropriate, and there are several good models which work for different types of meeting. To further this work we will be delivering an ATH on "What documentation is (and what it's not) - this is planned for late October.

We took a hiatus for the month of August, as many people in the community are away or on holiday. This month we have been promoting and publicising our first training course. Takeup was very last-minute; but in the end we had 11 applicants. The 3-session course began on 23rd Sept and will run weekly (30th Sept and 7th Oct). It's early days yet, but there is a lot of interest in facilitating creative sessions like poetry and storytelling, to build community; and in asynchronous practices.

Rather than running a 2nd cohort of the course, where there might not be takeup of another 10 places, we are discussing using a more peer-led and async model for the second course, where the current trainees work with us to create training videos, which interested people can watch in their own time.

No thanks

No thanks

No thanks - but does this really need to be a required question? It would make more sense for it to be optional

no thanks

no thanks

No thanks

no thanks

No

https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/qadao-transcription-service/ is the main place where the project's work lives; but it is also distributed through other QA-DAO GitBooks if it is more relevant to them. Planning to copy material to the main "Transcription Service" GitBook so it is easier to track.

https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/qadao-transcription-service/ is the main place where the project's work lives. We have been primarily documenting governance-related events this month.

Not yet

Although work is currently on track, we anticipate either minor delays or perhaps even minor changes of purpose while Catalyst Circle (which has been de-funded in fund 8) works out exactly how it will be operating in future.

At the time of writing, it looks as though Circle will continue, minus one or possibly 2 elected representatives, in which case this proposal will document its activities as planned. But we may also look to undertake some (necessarily limited, due to lack of resources) documentation of other related initiatives within Catalyst, such as the various Sub-Circles - this will become particularly important if Circle itself becomes unworkable, or decides not to continue before the end of this project.

Work is not scheduled to start intil next month

Not yet!

https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/qadao-transcription-service/ is the main place where the project's work lives. We have been documenting IdeaFest, and have collaborated with CATH and ETH to include documentation from their Idea Fests.

We've realised that we want to ensure that events from around the world are covered. The original proposal's focus was not global enough. Originally we planned a vote across the whole of Catalyst for which meetings should be documented - but this will probably lead to "main Town Hall" events "winning" most of the time. So instead, will probably consult in different Town Hall communities, at least initially.