Please describe your proposed solution.

How we perceive the problem

Groups and organizations in the Catalyst space need to know best practices on how to enable and enact community governance. We also need to test the effectiveness of Gimbalabs' new Andamio learning management platform specifically for governance-related learning materials (which generally need to be more discursive than other kinds of learning materials, and to enable learners to share their opinions and ideas). Particularly, we need to test how Andamio's credentialing approaches work on governance-related learning.

Our solution

We propose to solve this by providing project-based learning (PBL) courses on Andamio on governance-related topics; enrolling learners; and collecting feedback.

Our PBL courses will teach people to use AI to help govern decentralised organisations. PBLs will take learners through a hands-on set of modules that will teach them governance principles using real-life projects, in order to learn, test, and reflect on different governance patterns and best practices.

Reasons for our approach

As Governance Guild members, the project team have facilitated and participated in a number of groups in the Cardano, SingularityNET and Catalyst communities and collectively learned many best practices and methods of organization and governance. Because of this, we are in a unique position to share our hard-won knowledge of what works, and share it with the community using the innovative Andamio project-based learning model.

What is unique about our solution, who it will benefit, and why this should be important to Cardano.

The PBL courses we create will comprise basic onboarding materials to the course; building up of background knowledge so learners can discover the concepts and ideas around governance; specialization into specific best practices and patterns; and offering learners the opportunity to contribute back to the course and add their own unique knowledge and skills to further improve the course over time.

We will build these PBL courses on Andamio, an on-chain learning management system developed by Gimbalabs. This will allow us to both host and share the course materials, and also to issue completion certificates on-chain so students can demonstrate ability to prompt GPT with questions that provide solutions to solve governance challenges.

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

By allowing developers to better understand and implement governance methods and patterns that are effective, this tool will help development projects move faster, be more collaborative, and achieve their goals faster and with greater cohesion and harmony between team members.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Governance Guild was funded in Fund 9 to produce several modules of Governance-related PBL (project-based learning) courses on governance topics such as decision-making in groups, and managing a treasury. This was done, and we have released the material as information for self-directed learning. As part of this proposal, key members of Governance Guild will take this existing material and migrate it into the Andamio platform (entailing some restructuring of the material itself), as well as developing certification and incorporating feedback to improve the material for the new Andamio environment. We will also expand our provision by writing 3 new PBLs on governance topics.

The fact that our Fund 9 material has already been successfully written verifies that we have the capability to write effective governance learning material. We have developed a good understanding of how the Andamio platform works, and one of our team, Tevo Saks, has already been working with Andamio in the SingularityNET ecosystem to build a PBL module on how to use Dework; our strong connections with the Andamio team will enable us to manage the cross-team relationship effectively. This demonstrates that we have the capacity to incorporate new Andamio-specific features such as on-chain certification, and to create new PBLs to fit the Andamio platform.

We will be commissioning budget management services from Treasury Guild. They have extensive experience in fund management and disbursement, and are trusted with the management of funds for several projects, including the ones that will use these tools. Our GitHub project boards will feature the ADA amounts to be paid out for specific tasks, helping to ensure transparency and accountability in our fund management.

What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Setup & Migration

Main task & Key Activities - Set up Andamio instance, creation of website; migrate our existing PBL data

Success or acceptance criteria - a successful setup and migration

Proposed cost - 20,000 ADA (18.28 % of budget)

Expected timeline - March 2024

>Producing new PBL content

Main task & Key Activities - Produce 3 new PBL modules

Success or acceptance criteria - successful completion of 3 new PBL modules

Proposed cost - 30,000 ADA (27.4 % of budget)

Expected timeline - April 2024

>Learner onboarding, & conduct PBL courses

Main task & Key Activities - Onboarding learners & conducting PBL courses on Andamio

Success or acceptance criteria - successful On Boarding & Conduct PBL Courses

Proposed cost - 28000 ADA (25.59 % of budget)

Expected timeline - May 2024

>Review and revise content and functionality of Andamio platform

Main task & Key Activities - Review and Revise Andamio platform

Success or acceptance criteria - a successful review, incorporating learner feedback on our PBLs, and our feedback to the Andamio team on how the platform worked

Proposed cost - 14,000 ADA (12.79 %)

Expected timeline - July 2024

>Emergent reputation and governance; project close-out

Main task & Key Activities - implementation and review of Andamio's emergent Reputation and Governance mechanisms (completion tokens for learners) based on feedback from our learners, and our own observations. Project close-out report and video.

Success or acceptance criteria - Our review of Andamio's emergent reputation and governance functionality is shared with the Andamio team. Production and sharing of project close-out report and video.

Proposed cost - 17,400 ADA (15.9 % of budget)

Expected timeline - September 2024

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Jonathan Postnikoff (JP)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-postnikoff/

Twitter: <https://twitter.com/JDPostnikoff>

JP has been a member of the Cardano Community since December 2020 and has been active in Catalyst since Fund4. Originally beginning as a Swarm member, JP became a proposal assessor (previously CA) during F5 and has participated as both a PA and vPA in all subsequent funds. JP has also fulfilled the CC Admin Team’s secretary role since the election of CCv2, and is a funded proposer in F6 and F7 in support of the Circle and admin team. On a professional level, JP’s strongest skills include meeting secretarial services, one-on-one and group facilitation, proposal drafting, editing, and ideation support, and community engagement.

Role: writing new PBLs; publicity and engaging new learners; managing the conducting of PBL courses; overall project management including reporting and close-out.

Tevo Saks

Connecting Decentralised Open Source Services and Contributing to Community Governance Documentation.

<https://linktr.ee/tevosaks>

Role: setup and management of Andamio instance; managing cross-team relationship with Andamio team; writing new PBLs; managing accreditation and completion tokens for learners.

Vanessa Cardui

Community engagement professional with 20+ years' experience of working with communities to help them engage in grounded-theory research, and learn to record and archive their lives. Part of QA-DAO where she leads on documentation (for example, see documenting Catalyst Circle) founding member of The Facilitators’ Collective; part of the SingularityNET archives team; part of the SingularityNET DeepFunding Focus Group.

Role: writing new PBLs; data migration of existing PBL material; project documentation; collating feedback from learners.

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Software Licenses & Services

300 ADA

Documentation

Documentation setup and maintenance (maintaining documentation of PBL materials and commentary on GitBook and Website)

2,000 ADA

Publicity

Publicizing our work to the community via weekly posts on Telegram, Discord and Twitter (80 ADA a week x 25 weeks)

2,000 ADA

Project Management

(Regular reporting (monthly reports and milestone reports) - 3,000 ADA)

(Project management and Co-ordination - 3,000 ADA)

(Close Out Report - 3,000)

Andamio

(Setup, creation of website, data migration - 8,000 ADA)

(Produce 3 X PBL courses - 30,000)

(Onboarding - 12,000 ADA)

(Conduct PBL Courses - 12,000 ADA)

(Review & Revise Andamio Platform - 12,000 ADA)

(Emergent Reputation and Governance - 12,000 ADA)

Treasury management

10,000 ADA

-------------------------------------------------

Total - 109,400 ADA

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

This proposal is requesting only those funds that are necessary to complete the work of running courses on Andamio and collecting and analysing feedback from learners over a seven-month period.

The pay rates given are self-employed rates, so they include the employment overheads of the resources contracted. The rates are based on the low end of US and European averages. The amounts are calculated for each milestone based on the hours to complete.

In addition, all the resources working on this project are taking on the currency risk of being paid in ADA. This means that a fall in the ADA price will result in being paid less or delivering less in each milestone. Any rise in the ADA price will represent a reward for investing in the Cardano ecosystem.

Consequently, given these factors, we believe this proposal offers excellent value for money in a volatile cryptocurrency environment.