Please describe your proposed solution

The Web3 Association researches and analyses treasury systems to identify opportunities for experimentation and improvement. The Web3 Association is interested in facilitating any experiments across the industry that can help with increasing the shared rate of learning. Our educational resources and treasury experimentation efforts aim to continuously help with identifying how the management and distribution of treasuries can be improved.

One of the Web3 Association's current suggestions is to start experimenting with open source contributor funding: https://docs.contributors.org/proposal/open-source-contributors

How do you perceive the problem you are solving?

Treasuries will be an increasingly vital part of Web3 ecosystems and play an important role in determining which ecosystems thrive or decline over the long term. Our efforts are fully focussed on understanding these treasury systems and processes that are used in Web3 ecosystems to identify areas of improvements and new learnings. We outline the opportunity of working on treasury systems more in our documentation: <https://docs.web3association.co/focus>

What are your reasons for approaching it in the way that you have?

Educational resources only need to be created once and then can be useful to the entire industry. There is a large return on investment opportunity for the industry if we can increasingly share the costs of these efforts. Even small improvements to treasury systems can represent massive opportunities for a large return on investment. In regards to facilitating experiments the reason we suggest and try to help with facilitating experiments is the opportunity that these experiments create for further learnings that can inform future development efforts.

Who will your project engage?

We actively share our educational resources and experimentation suggestions on the Cardano forum and to the Catalyst team directly. We will continue to do this to initiate more discussion about highly impactful experiments and suggestions. As well as the Catalyst team our resources and suggestions are relevant to any project in the ecosystem that needs to manage their own treasury assets. These teams may want to run their own experiments or adopt approaches that have been suggested by our educational resources.

How will you demonstrate or prove your impact?

We intend to document the outcomes of experiments that we help to initiate through collaboration with the Cardano ecosystem as well as the wider industry. All experiments that happen anywhere in the industry can create learnings that are insightful and useful to the Cardano ecosystem. Documented treasury experiments will eventually be available directly from our treasury website: <https://treasuries.co>.

Explain what is unique about your solution, who will benefit, and why this is important to Cardano?

We have yet to find another project that focuses on treasury systems like we do or that provides the same level of depth in thinking about and comparing about the different approaches that a treasury system could function. There is an enormous opportunity to improve treasury systems and how funding is managed and distributed. In terms of costs we are also trying to split out costs across many Web3 ecosystems to help with generating even higher returns on investment for each ecosystem.

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

In what way will the success of your project bring value to the Cardano Community?

The educational resources provide insightful and actionable information about treasury systems and how they could be approached. These resources can help with identifying highly impactful experiments to trial different approaches. Experiments that we help to facilitate can help with improving the rate or shared learning where the outcomes of these experiments can be better analysed and documented for the benefit of the wider ecosystem and industry.

How will you measure this impact?

The number of experiments are one of our most important metrics as these outcomes lead to more learning. Views and usage of educational resources is a supporting metric that can help to indicate the potential value of our resources efforts.

How will you share the outputs and opportunities that result from your project?

We shared outputs every month on what we have been working on. Each of our contributors keeps a record of their outputs in the form of monthly contribution logs: <https://docs.web3association.co/contributors>

In terms of opportunities and findings we share forum posts across the industry and send emails to the grants and treasury teams that could be interested in reading our resources or trialling our suggested experiments. The Web3 Association is always actively looking to support these teams with any experiments they want to execute.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Please describe your existing capabilities that demonstrate how and why you believe you’re best suited to deliver this project?

We were responsible for the funding categorisation analysis that helped lead to a change to the Catalyst funding process. This analysis can be found here:

• <https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis>
• <https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/catalyst-funding-categories>

Even with conservative estimates this analysis helped lead to an estimated 200% return on investment within a single funding round: <https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/historical-analysis-and-comparisons/categorisation-overall-cost-comparison>

The recent treasury educational resources have helped to highlight a number of approaches that could be highly effective for Web3 ecosystems. You can review our current resources and suggestions here:

• <https://treasuries.co>
• <https://contributors.org>

Please include the steps or processes that demonstrate that you can be trusted to manage funds properly.

Our requested funds will only be distributed monthly based on the completion of a months worth of contribution efforts. Evidence of our previous contribution logs can be found within each contributors page: <https://docs.web3association.co/contributors>

What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone 1: A: Milestone outputs

A months worth of contribution effort. Our efforts can lead to the creation or improvement of educational resources or suggestions for experiments. We can also help with facilitating different experiments across the ecosystem.

Our main current planned outputs are as follows:

• Contribution log evolution plan - Creating a plan to cover how contribution logs could initially developed and how they could evolve over time.
• Contributor evolution plan - Creating a plan to cover how contributor funding could be trialled as an experiment and how that funding process could evolve over time.

B: Acceptance criteria

A monthly contribution log will list out what contribution outputs have been achieved. The current planned outputs mentioned above are part of the current plan however we cannot guarantee this is what we will complete. We also focus on initiating experiments when ecosystems are willing to trial different approaches - these events could prevent us from completing certain pieces of analysis in the same month. We will also update our planned outputs if we believe we could create more impact by focussing on other areas.

C: Evidence of milestone completion

Contribution logs will provide links to the resources and outputs which can then be verified.

Milestone 2: A: Milestone outputs

A months worth of contribution effort. Our efforts can lead to the creation or improvement of educational resources or suggestions for experiments. We can also help with facilitating different experiments across the ecosystem.

Our main current planned outputs are as follows:

• Independent idea system analysis - Exploring the opportunities of adopting an independent idea system within Web3 ecosystems.
• Independent priority system - Exploring the opportunities of adopting an independent priority system within Web3 ecosystems.

B: Acceptance criteria

A monthly contribution log will list out what contribution outputs have been achieved. The current planned outputs mentioned above are part of the current plan however we cannot guarantee this is what we will complete. We also focus on initiating experiments when ecosystems are willing to trial different approaches - these events could prevent us from completing certain pieces of analysis in the same month. We will also update our planned outputs if we believe we could create more impact by focussing on other areas.

C: Evidence of milestone completion

Contribution logs will provide links to the resources and outputs which can then be verified.

Milestone 3: A: Milestone outputs

A months worth of contribution effort. Our efforts can lead to the creation or improvement of educational resources or suggestions for experiments. We can also help with facilitating different experiments across the ecosystem.

Our main current planned outputs are as follows:

• Voting power approaches analysis - Comparing the different approaches that could be used for voting power such as plutocratic, tax contribution weighted, one person one vote or meritocratic approaches.

B: Acceptance criteria

A monthly contribution log will list out what contribution outputs have been achieved. The current planned outputs mentioned above are part of the current plan however we cannot guarantee this is what we will complete. We also focus on initiating experiments when ecosystems are willing to trial different approaches - these events could prevent us from completing certain pieces of analysis in the same month. We will also update our planned outputs if we believe we could create more impact by focussing on other areas.

C: Evidence of milestone completion

Contribution logs will provide links to the resources and outputs which can then be verified.

Final Milestone: A: Milestone outputs

A months worth of contribution effort. Our efforts can lead to the creation or improvement of educational resources or suggestions for experiments. We can also help with facilitating different experiments across the ecosystem.

Our main current planned outputs are as follows:

• Educational videos - Creating informative videos based on the resources that we’ve already created to better communicate our learnings and analysis.
• Employee vs contributor infographic - Creating an infographic to compare employment with contributor based funding.

B: Acceptance criteria

A monthly contribution log will list out what contribution outputs have been achieved. The current planned outputs mentioned above are part of the current plan however we cannot guarantee this is what we will complete. We also focus on initiating experiments when ecosystems are willing to trial different approaches - these events could prevent us from completing certain pieces of analysis in the same month. We will also update our planned outputs if we believe we could create more impact by focussing on other areas.

C: Evidence of milestone completion

Contribution logs will provide links to the resources and outputs which can then be verified.

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

The contributors involved with the Web3 Association include:

• George Lovegrove - Focused on research, analysis and software development. George has been a software developer of over 6 years in web and mobile development environments. Within the Cardano ecosystem George has created analytical resources around the topic area of funding categorisation approaches (<https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis>) that helped with finding more effective solutions. More recently George has made numerous analytical contributions within the Web3 Association. You can find out more about his recent treasury related contributions and professional history here - <https://docs.web3association.co/contributors/george-lovegrove>

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

For this proposal the budget is 6,000 ADA per month for 4 months, totalling 24,000 ADA. 6,000 ADA roughly equates to $2,658 as of 11th May 2024. This funding helps to pay for the contribution efforts involved in researching and analysing treasury systems and any efforts that help to facilitate experiments.

No dependencies

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

George will be working full time for each month of contribution. This proposal helps to subsidise this work but does not fully compensate these efforts. The desired monthly income would equate to 40 hours per week or roughly 173 hours per month at a $50 hourly rate, making a total of $8,650 per month. For this proposal we are only requesting roughly $2,658 per month to help with subsidising our contribution efforts.

The Web3 Association is looking to split the costs of our contribution efforts across multiple ecosystems over the long term. Treasury educational resources and experiments are mutually beneficial to the entire industry. Splitting the cost between multiple ecosystems means we can deliver a higher return on investment for each ecosystem by splitting the cost between them. The Web3 Association will complete our stated contribution efforts that help to improve treasury systems regardless of whether we receive any funding elsewhere.