RESEARCH GUILD | Our approach is simple – we offer customised research reports for Catalyst campaigns. However, like software development, research isn’t sexy – it takes grunt work. To achieve this work in a scalable way, we propose forming a Research Guild, or a collective of independent researchers investigating blockchain solutions on Cardano. We aim to do so by building a professional research network within Project Catalyst, through invitation and paid research gigs. The Research Guild can also provide paid support to other proposals and initiatives by forming problem-solving scrums around key issues. If the project is successful, our vision is to build a global research network that draws researchers to Cardano, increases adoption as well as knowledge capital for DLT enterprise development.
In this challenge, the key issue revolves around an identified need for research and strategies to support 'open' ecosystem growth on Cardano.
ECOSYSTEM REPORT | We aim to address issues inhibiting open ecosystems by conducting a feasibility study that investigates ecosystem challenges and solutions across blockchains, and within Cardano and Project Catalyst. This exercise will be delivered in the form of a public report with key research insights and recommendations that can be implemented by the community immediately, or pursued through future Project Catalyst funding proposals.
RECRUITMENT | Our team will begin by extending invitations to our personal network of academic and professional colleagues, and by extending an open invitation to researchers within the community. Our primary requirement is that Expressions of Interest (EOI) include:
- A resume including professional and education history;
- Links to academic work/publications, and;
- A brief bio including your experiences in the blockchain industry.
For the time-being, EOI’s can be sent through Ideascale @rg.admin
RATIONALE | Research and development go hand-in-hand. In the excitement of experimentation, it can be easy to overlook or underestimate the value of founding a project on a sound research base. Effective research helps to scope the lay of the land, and analyse the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and strengths (SWOT) that impact a project. It also removes the guesswork, identifies knowledge gaps, builds future funding cases and supports sound decision-making by challenging false assumptions, misinformation or speculation. To continue Cardano’s research-driven ethos, Project Catalyst needs to invest more into high-value community-driven research at the project preliminary level, through a coordinated and consistent approach.
The Research Guild and Guild Reports are positioned to meet this need across campaigns.
This challenge asks the question: ‘Can we build an Open Ecosystem to drive growth, give equal opportunities to all, and increase the synergies across Cardano projects?’
Along with Scalability and Sustainability, Interoperability is one of the three intertwined pillars of Cardano’s roadmap, and it is what sets it apart from the competition as a Blockchain 3.0 model. However, interoperability is a complex problem with no easy solutions, as evidenced in the methodical and iterative development of Cardano or the gatekeeping and patch-protection that occurs in the proprietary market.
The underlying question this challenge asks is one of feasibility: can it be done? The Ecosystem Report will directly address the challenge by conducting a professional community-driven research project, and drafting a report that investigates ecosystem feasibility from the three pillars of Growth, Opportunity and Synergy. This will be done by exploring cases of “open” ecosystems across the blockchain space, as well as developments within the Cardano and Project Catalyst network. Key word searches will be conducted to further differentiate “open” and “closed” systems, including "Inclusive Communities", "Distributed Modelling" and "Cooperative Organisations". The study will also explore case-studies that support open ecosystems, and uncover what these cases will look like, and how they might be adopted, adapted or replicated.
A list of recommendations will be drawn from the report’s findings, and these will be disseminated publicly so that the community can initiate actions immediately, or use the findings to support or merge future Catalyst funding proposals.
The final report will be disseminated through a dedicated web-portal, and advertised via social channels.
Since research projects can be time-intensive and time-sensitive, the biggest risk facing our project at this stage is the number of research-hours required to complete larger projects (to a high-standard) versus our current team size.
The first iteration of our team is small and involved in existing research work. In order to juggle the potential demands of a slate of research projects, we will dedicate time to recruit atleast three of our colleagues into the network within the next two months. We will do this by maintaining an open invitation for skilled researchers to join the guild so that the research needs of each project, campaign and the community as a whole can be adequately met.
We will also focus our Fund 8 strategy on proposing a slate of smaller research projects that target research-based solutions to niche campaign-problems. This will enable us to begin building research value in the community, and to recruit and incentivise contributions from researchers. As it will also take time to connect and establish with the wider network of researchers, we will also seek funding to better establish the administrative functions of the guild including building a working bounties program, a Guild research standard, collaborative tools/templates and a dissemination portal (such as a website and Github).