Please describe your proposed solution.
<u>The need for a proposers' group</u>
Proposers (both funded and unfunded) are what Catalyst is all about, so their interests are important. However, proposers can be isolated by lack of time, or because official meetings (e.g. the Coordinator) are not at the best time of day for proposers outside Europe and the US.
So we need multiple ways, both formal and informal, for proposers to be heard; including via the places they already go (regional Town Halls, proposer-led groupings, or even Ideascale). Proposers need to be able to quickly access small funding to build their own solutions to problems with the proposal process; they also need to be easily able to raise a problem with Circle and IOG where appropriate. Proposers also need access to resources and support to help them manage their projects; and to events and tools to help them showcase their existing work, find collaborations, and promote new proposals to voters and dReps. And because proposers are global, they need approaches that treat different language and time zone needs as a priority.
<u>What's already been done - the Fund 8 Funded Proposers Subcircle</u>
In Fund 8, the Funded Proposers Sub-circle <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398211> has begun to offer some of these things.
You can see the minutes of our meetings, as well as some of the work we have done to translate useful information, on our GitBook https://catalyst-circle.gitbook.io/funded-proposers-hub (Note that its name - funded proposers - is a legacy one: if we are successfully funded, we'll transition it to just "proposers", to welcome and include all people who are proposing in Catalyst whether or not they get funded. )
Examples of issues which the Sub-circle has helped to work on, together with Circle itself and IOG, include:
- the establishing of a predictable date for the release of funds;
- the inclusion of the relevant exchange rate in announcements of fund release;
- the start of researching how possible it will be in future to accept proposals in other languages than English;
- the translation of written material for proposers into key community languages
These are big steps forward; but this kind of work needs funding to continue. The Funded Proposer SubCircle’s F8 funding runs out in August 2022; and due to Circle’s loss of funding in F8, and probable lack of funding in F9, the Proposer community will also no longer have the Circle-related Rapid Funding which has made some of its work possible.
Recent Circle meetings have suggested that individual communities within Catalyst need to submit proposals to support the work they need to do: see
<https://www.youtube.com/embed/bXyHVpCuPEA?start=5820>More than ever, there is a need for an independent proposers’ group - people who are embedded in their communities, and have the time and capacity to do outreach in different languages and different parts of the world, problem-sense proposers’ needs, publicise what the widely-raised issues are, and coordinate proposer-led responses.
<u>The Proposers’ Hive</u>
This is why we (the global group who are currently working as the F8 Funded Proposers sub-circle) are making this proposal to transition into The Proposers’ Hive. We see the Hive as a product, created to address the needs of proposers in Catalyst.
The Hive emerged from the work of the Fund 8 Sub-Circle, and is a group of people with strong connections in their communities, who can do the coordination work that’s needed to support proposers' interests. We enjoy working with one another, and are willing to work to build a sense of community and strength amongst proposers, both funded and unfunded, and to ensure that the issues we have begun to hear from proposers continue to be raised and worked on.
We want to continue to build proposer outreach in LatAm, Eastern Hemisphere, and Africa, to minimise the barriers that proposers face around language and time-zones; and we also want to continue supporting proposers’ needs in the rest of the world. We want to continue with the multilingual problem-sensing we have been doing, so that we can hear and collate the issues that proposers want to change. And we want to go a step further - to create an independent treasury that can be used to pay for community-proposed solutions. This would replace and extend the $7,000 “Rapid Funding Circle treasury” that each Catalyst Circle member held in Fund 8 to pay for community-led solutions, because this will not be renewed in F9. We want to make it independent of Circle, because we want it to cover the needs of both funded and unfunded proposers in Catalyst (whereas the Circle seat is specifically about funded proposers).
<u>Autonomous regions that can work together as needed</u>
We plan to organise regionally (LATAM, Africa, Eastern Hemisphere, and Europe/US) to decide how money will be spent - each community will have autonomy to develop systems that best suit them, whereby proposers can suggest, get funding for, and build solutions to issues that have been propblem-sensed.
But because the Proposers' Hive will also meet regularly (twice a month) as a group, we can also coordinate responses across regions, and bring people together to work on issues. (We note the time-zone issues with posting “first come, first served” bounties on Dework - if a bounty is posted when half the world is asleep, some people never get the chance to take it. So while different communities might decide to use Dework, we will actively pioneer approaches that address this.)
We will also work together to document decisions on spending so they are transparent to all.
<u>What kinds of work might we do or support?</u>
The F8 Funded Proposers subcircle have already done a lot of problem-sensing all over the world, which can be seen on our Miro board here https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOp3c5lY=/?share_link_id=713706823738
From this work, we know that some of the things the proposer community might want to work on in future include:
- Ongoing problem-sensing and collating problems, and publicising them so proposers can think about what dApps, products and integrations could best solve them
- Create products such as translations of proposer information into key languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Japanese, French, Arabic, Swahili and more)
- Outreach and engagement work with potential future proposers in communities that face barriers to inclusion (language, time-zone, or lack of a strong proposer community in their locality to support them)
- Create products in the form of resources, learning materials and tools for proposers on how to manage price fluctuations, how to project-manage more effectively, and how to monitor and record your work as a proposer;
- Create tools to help proposers to find collaborators, and creating products in the form of spaces and events where proposers can publicise their successes more widely
- Create products in the form of events or platforms to help proposers showcase their work, and to help them present themselves to dReps and to voters
- Be a channel to help proposers’ issues to be raised with Circle and IOG
- Work to eventually make it possible for people to propose and be assessed in languages other than English; and meanwhile, build on the system currently being developed in LATAM where proposers can have their proposals proofread and edited by competent English-speakers
- and more - any other dApp, product or integration which addresses the problems that we have sensed across the proposers’ community.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
The Proposers' Hive is, in itself, a product, which we believe will address some of the key issues for proposers (particularly, lack of a sense of community, lack of support, and lack of knowing where to go with problems).
But also, by means of its treasury, this proposal can stimulate the creation of new dApps, products and integrations that address proposers’ needs.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Risk that some proposers still feel left out, or do not hear about the Hive and what it can do for them.
We will mitigate this by the global reach of our team, and the way they are embedded in their particular regions; and by the fact that their connections in their communities will mean they can work in a more personal way to reach proposers directly. We will also mitigate it by making translations and attention to time zones a priority, to reach people who have been excluded so far. Finally, we will look outside of Catalyst social media, to other platforms such as Twitter or even IdeaScale, to reach proposers who don’t engage much on Telegram and Discord. We recognise that engagement is not instant, but a process, so we will not have an “engagement phase” that stops at a certain point, but will continue to work on publicising and engaging throughout the proposal.
Risk of duplication of effort in different parts of the world
We will mitigate this by meeting together, making each other aware of what is happening in different geographical communities, and sharing this with proposers in each community. However, we do recognise that plurality is important, and that a solution that looks superficially similar to another might be responding in distinctive ways to particular issues in that community; so the diversity of solutions might not actually be "duplication of effort", but necessary variation.