Please describe your proposed solution.
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Overview
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 people, mechanisms, and/or tools that suit each team’s individual needs.
Our goal is to offer a suite of tools and services to diverse groups or 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.
Revisiting the Problem
Cardano requires more training in the implementation of distributed collaboration tools for governance that are open source, inclusive, and adaptable to a variety of community intentions and actions. While many tools exist to support DAO community collaboration, creation, operation and governance, there is very little training available that is based on real-world implementations.
As the Campaign Brief for F9: DAOs <3 Cardano indicates most of the current options are based on the Ethereum blockchain. Native Cardano tools do need to be built and must be done in a manner where DAO tool development is informed by real world use cases.
Solution
Our proposed solution is to implement the Cardano Governance Services Guild on the Web3-native dework project management platform and integrate this tool with our existing working practices on Discord and GitHub. Our team has already been providing services to the community as the CC Admin Team, however, as we have progressed in our operations it has become clear that our services are not only limited to supporting the Circle. In fact, we have chosen to branch out on our own to provide our services to a broader array of groups and projects.
In order to achieve this vision, we need to set up the proper tools and infrastructures to support our endeavours. Through this proposal we will migrate and integrate our current tools and products to the Governance Services Guild Dework, Discord, and Github platforms. To help further drive the legitimacy of our team, all of our working processes will be documented as learning materials on the Canvas Project Based Learning platform, in collaboration with Gimbalabs.
Through self-paced Project-based Learning (PBL), community members can learn critical governance skills, how to use effective tools and mechanisms to drive good decision making and transparency, and complete course work that will bring value to roles that they play within their communities and ecosystems.
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 DAOs <3 Cardano challenge because we propose to develop a network of individuals interested in governance across the entire ecosystem. We will begin by creating a suite of products and tools that allow teams to reach their maximal potential. We intend to catalyse the power of the Cardano community’s knowledge and skills to avoid every team needing to recreate their own in-house governance models and services. We model, in our practice and nature, a vision for the decentralised virtual office management processes of the future. We are interested in governance for a decentralised ecosystem where all are welcome, not for the purpose of control.
We believe that our proposal aligns perfectly with the challenge criteria Additional not yet existing tools to give Cardano a distinct advantage. Rather than developing a one-size-fits-all solution uniformly applied to all groups, we will develop open-sourced and community-focused products and tools which each project can implement on an as-needed basis. We will also provide training and support services to equip teams. Our goal is to provide support in a variety of areas that can be tailored to a team’s needs.
Our proposal also aligns directly with the challenge criteria Effective Collaboration Management Platforms to Organize Community Intentions and Actions. Each individual or team has their own strengths and weaknesses, we aim to assist clients with building and implementing their own processes while maximising their efficiency and the effectiveness of the GSG. We believe that this approach will appeal to a broad range of groups and provide significant value to the growing ecosystem.
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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Risk 1: Insufficient human resources
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.
Mitigation 1:
Our mitigation strategy to address human resource availability is to maintain a level of redundancy in our resource allocations and 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.
Risk 2: Not being funded
We are not funded and are unable to pay our members to develop the necessary tools and products.
Mitigation 2:
We are here to provide value for the ecosystem and without funding will explore other opportunities where our time and energy is recognized.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.