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Funded Proposer Sub-Circle Treasury
The Funded Proposer Sub-Circle is a global group of 5 people which has come together to support the Catalyst Circle Funded Proposers Representative (Mercy A.) with problem-sensing and organising in the Funded Proposers community. The sub-circle is supported until May 2022 using funds from the Catalyst Circle Funding Mechanism <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384249> , to enable it to do initial ideation and set-up work. This continuation proposal will set up a treasury to enable the sub-circle to go on to establish an active Hub for funded proposers.
The treasury established by this proposal will fund administration and documentation of the sub-circle’s activities over 3 months from May to August 2022, including regular coordination meetings, engagement with Town Halls across the world in 3 languages, & an open process of community outreach to funded proposers and challenge teams. The sub-circle will record issues raised by funded proposers from all across the ecosystem, aggregate and cluster them to enable the community to identify patterns and connections, research and collate details of proposed solutions that are being developed in the community, help forge collaborations and interaction between solution-makers, and track progress on solutions. It will also funnel issues towards Catalyst Circle where needed.
Note that a separate proposal, Catalyst Circle - Funding Mechanism in the F8: Open Source Development Ecosystem Challenge https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/403562 will provide $7,000 per elected Circle member which they can distribute to support community-led solutions to problems on the Circle Prioritized Problems board. By contrast, this proposal funds the necessary complement to this - i.e. the organising and documentation of a Hub to problem-sense, foster collaboration, and engage the community with funded proposers' issues.
Catalyst Coordinator GitBook
This proposal is supported by the Catalyst Coordinator GitBook (<https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-coordinator> ) The GitBook was set up during Fund 7 to collate information for Funded Proposers, and its continuation and development will help the Funded Proposer Sub-Circle to do its work. The GitBook provides:
- A useful FAQ for funded proposers - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-coordinator
- A means to gather feedback from Funded Proposers - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-coordinator/feedback
- A reference tool for the Funded Proposer community.
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This proposal addresses the Scale Up Community Hubs Challenge by enabling the Funded Proposers Sub-Circle to build a Hub where funded proposers can organise. Funded proposers are a large and significant community within Catalyst; but because they are distributed so widely across the ecosystem (and also because, for many of them, their main focus is working on their funded projects rather than organising within Catalyst), they have not naturally come together as a group in any existing Catalyst forum. But they nevertheless have a growing sense of community and shared concern, so there is the “readiness” described in the challenge setting; they are a community that has reached a point where a Hub is necessary.
The sub-circle will help to provide this much-needed focus where funded proposers can raise concerns, communicate with their Circle representative, and develop the resilience and self reliance as a community that the F8 Challenge Setting mentions. The sub-circle team are all funded proposers themselves, from fund 5 onwards and in a wide range of different Challenges, so they have a solid understanding of their target audience; and the global reach of the sub-circle’s members (LatAm, Eastern Town Hall, African Town Hall, US, Europe) is also significant in supporting funded proposers to (as the challenge setting suggests) get information that they might otherwise find difficult to have access to, e.g. by using languages other than English.
The intent of this proposal is to sustain communications, and to provide a documentation platform and a means of problem-sensing, for the funded proposer community. It is at a modest scale, offering a “Minimum Viable Hub” covering 1 / 5 of full launch costs, as required in the F8 challenge setting (please see “Budget” section for details).
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- Risk that the majority of funded proposers will not engage with the Hub: This is mitigated by the range of connections and languages amongst the Sub-Circle team, so that a wide range of funded proposers will at least become aware of the Hub. Its existence will be mentioned prominently within Catalyst (e.g. at Catalyst Circle, at Coordinator meetings, via Challenge Teams, and at various Town Halls around the world). But as this is a “Minimum Viable Hub”, in line with the challenge setting’s requirements, we do not hope to engage large numbers of funded proposers to be fully active at first, but simply to create a mechanism, a focal point, and documentation processes, which can then build organically over time, e.g. via word of mouth.
- Risk of communications issues between the Sub-Circle members due to their distribution across time-zones. We are mitigating this by pioneering the use of asynchronous Zoom meetings using this methodology https://hackmd.io/@dhh1128/Sk5_Gb2J9, and by additionally using tools such as Telegram and Miro to communicate and collate information gathered from funded proposers.