Please describe your proposed solution.
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Overview
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Cardano Governance Services Guild is a network of individuals with a broad range of experience in Blockchain governance, administration, and project management. We support the exploration, development, and implementation of decentralised solutions to help teams govern their own initiatives. We do not prescribe or require particular ways of working but aim to identify appropriate mechanisms and/or tools that suit each team’s individual needs.
Our goal is to offer nonpartisan and pluralistic services to a variety of groups and teams within the broader Cardano ecosystem. We seek to accommodate and work with a wide variety of individuals, groups, and communities from a diverse range of geographical and cultural backgrounds.
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Revisiting the Problem
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Since Fund 3 of Project Catalyst there has been great growth in the number of Challenges proposed with over 300 proposals being funded so far. The significant influx of proposals and teams has led to many working in silos yet facing the same governance issues and challenges. While many have begun building and/or implementing, there is a distinct lack of governance, administration and project management support for these teams.
At the same time, such issues are not only applicable to funded proposers but rather apply to many projects within the ecosystem looking to begin or expand on their governance issues.
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Solution
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Our proposed solution is to develop the Cardano Governance Services Guild in order to provide a network for the community to draw on to assist them with their Cardano & Catalyst projects. The services we provide will be designed and adapted to each team’s needs based on their existing circumstances.
The Guild is a supporting service and is focused on getting teams successfully prepared to govern their projects. We do not dictate or decide the approach taken but rather facilitate processes and provide options and suggestions, as well as educational programs and “best in-practice” knowledge transfer. We believe that this approach will allow the Guild to remain impartial and not affiliated with any one group, while providing bespoke governance services to those groups that need them.
It is important to understand that there is no one sized solution for all projects. What we are offering is a convenient place to commission governance, administration, and project management support at a competitive cost. Depending on their development and backgrounds, projects may need more targeted, hands-on support while others may only need tools and resources which they will implement themselves. The benefits of having such a network is that all projects can find the appropriate level of services they need.
In addition, the Guild is not a finite group of individuals, it is an ever-growing, iterative, and self reflective network of people passionate about the practice of governance. We strive to be as inclusive as possible in attracting and retaining new members, while upholding a set of standards that are required to complete the work and mission of the guild. We also believe that such an approach will appeal to individuals outside of Catalyst who may not be familiar with blockchain but have experience in governance and administration. If our core team cannot directly work on your project - we will seek resources from our extensive network of contacts.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
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We have chosen to submit to the Dapps, Products, and Integrations challenge because what we offer is a suite of products and services to allow teams to reach their maximal potential. We remove the need for groups to continually develop their own governance products and services by maximising the power of the Cardano community to avoid every team needing to recreate their own in-house governance models and services. Governance is a subjective application of our product offering. We model, in our practice and nature, a vision for the decentralised virtual offices management processes of the future. Examples of some of the products and services already being provided by this group can be found in the feasibility section.
In addition to the products and services being offered by the Guild, we will also enable integrations between existing services and products. Currently, teams are left to navigate the governance in a vacuum with very little community support. We are a flexible team that can adapt to all sorts of deliverables in the Catalyst Ecosystem and have extensive experience with current processes. We, and more teams like us, can help high value proposers seeking funding from Catalyst realise success. We are interested in governance for a decentralised ecosystem where all are welcome, however we are not interested in governance for the purpose of control.
Rather than developing a one-size-fits-all solution uniformly applied to all our potential clients, each project can identify their required services and commission only those which are needed. Each individual or team has their own strengths and weaknesses, we aim to assist clients with building and implementing their own processes while maximising the efficiency of the GSG by commissioning services on an as-needed basis. We believe that our approach will appeal to a broad range of groups and provide significant value to the growing ecosystem. Our goal is to provide support in a variety of areas that can be tailored to a team’s needs.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
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Insufficient human resources
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A major risk to any project is insufficient availability of human resources. Often the scale of a project is not matched by the human resources supporting it. This can lead to significant delays or failure.
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Mitigation
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Our mitigation strategy to address human resource availability is to maintain a level of redundancy in our resource allocations and commitments. Since our team’s inception as Circle Admin in July 2021, we have paired resource roles such as Facilitator, Secretary, Treasurer and Mentor. Each role has 2 members, allowing for responsible flexibility in delivering on all of our commitments.
We are also part of an extensive Cardano network and have connections to a variety of other “sub-communities” within the community, such as Catalyst Swarm, Gimbalabs, Community Governance Oversight, and QA-DAO. Our participation in these additional community groups will allow us to expand our network and continue to grow our list of products and services. Our intention is to maximise existing tools, such as the Dework bounty system, to incentivize and reward additional contributions from the broader community.
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Lack of groups commissioning services
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There is a possibility of a lack of demand for governance services from the Catalyst ecosystem, resulting in the Governance Services Guild being under utilised.
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Mitigation
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We have consistently discovered a demand for governance support from peers in our network, particularly project management, treasury services, and onboarding, implying that a lack of demand is unlikely. Nevertheless we are not complacent. We are actively seeking governance commissions and plan to market our services through our network and the broader Cardano ecosystem. By offering flexibility in our services, we are prepared to constantly, learn, adapt and iterate in the management of key deliverables that will provide ongoing insights and processes for bridging the gap between our vision and robust implementation.
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Not being funded
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We are not funded and are unable to pay our members
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Mitigation
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Not being funded will impact already commissioned services and could mean that Catalyst Circle Admin services (for example) are not sustainable. In this circumstance the community and IOG will need to assist in supporting any ongoing efforts, or the team’s bandwidth will be reduced until compensation is provided. We are here to provide value for the ecosystem and without funding will explore other opportunities where our time and energy is recognized.
We have separated this proposal so that services which are funded directly through this proposal are to support existing governance bodies, which have already obtained the Guild’s services.
Going forward we aim to no longer be fully dependent on previously commissioned work and will engage in governance work in other areas of the ecosystem.The long term goal of the Guild is to be directly funded by the projects and groups with which we engage and provide services. Because of this, over time, the success of the Guild will not be strictly dependent on Catalyst for funding.