Roles

Roles are groupings of a particular type of work that someone can choose to focus their time on whilst being a contributor

Roles provide clarity to contributors and the wider community by letting everyone else know what area the contributor intends to help with when they contribute to improving the Catalyst ecosystem. Voters get clarity when voting as they will know who they want to fill certain roles within the ecosystem.

Contributors select a role to indicate where they will spend the most time supporting the ecosystem. Selecting a role does not mean the contributor can't help in the other areas. It instead simply means they will look to spend the majority of their time in that selected role.

Budget ranges and minimum thresholds are added to guide contributors when creating their proposals. The minimum thresholds help to ensure there's enough of each role and skill set in each contributor cohort.

Available roles

The following are the initial roles for contributors to select from. Other future considerations are discussed below in the future potential roles.

Development

Objective - Develop and maintain the ecosystem systems and services and also support the community on a technical basis.

Tasks

• Research, analyse and report on technical implementation approaches and best practices

• Create, maintain and improve technical standards, security standards and design patterns that can be used in ecosystem infrastructure and applications

• Define and iterate on technical requirements for ecosystem functionality

• Research, plan and present software architecture approaches for ecosystem applications

• Develop and maintain applications and features, tools, scripts, frameworks and utility code for the ecosystem

• Test, debug and monitor application software changes

• Track and analyse the performance of ecosystem applications

• Support, improve and promote open source projects with technical expertise, guidance and development effort

• Communicate with developers and the community to identify what infrastructure or development issues exist to then be considered and prioritised

• Write and maintain technical documentation about ecosystem systems and processes

• Provide support on how the Catalyst ecosystem operates technically and about any development tools, libraries and processes

• Coordinate technical efforts across the ecosystem and where suitable attempt to align standards, technical implementations and processes

• Host technical discussions and meetings about the Catalyst process, governance and identity infrastructure available in the ecosystem or for giving updates on ecosystem changes

• Provide feedback to technical proposals on their development plans or implementations

Coordination

Objective - Maximise the collaboration and coordination within the ecosystem and support the community with collaboration, organisation, education and events.

Tasks

• Communicate and collaborate with the community to identify areas where more support is needed or where the biggest problems exist

• Communicate with anyone working in the ecosystem to identify and resolve pain points so contributors are able to work most effectively

• Organise and manage an ecosystem calendar for ecosystem events and updates

• Support translations of resources and documentation and coordinate with global communities

• Identify any skill gaps that exist for teams working in the ecosystem and help them where possible in finding suitable contributors for those skill sets

• Write, maintain and aggregate documentation about how to understand and participate in the ecosystem

• Provide community members support to understand and participate in the Catalyst ecosystem

• Review contribution efforts across the ecosystem and identify areas to encourage more collaboration and alignment or more application of standards and best practices

• Host community discussions and events about relevant ecosystem topics

• Review proposals, provide feedback and identify any opportunities for collaboration between projects in the ecosystem

Analysis

Objective - Research and analyse the ecosystem tools and services and produce data points, reports and documentation that help guide the future development of the ecosystem. Help ensure other contributors have the information they need to maximise their impact.

Tasks

• Conduct ecosystem research and analysis to identify problems and opportunities for improvement

• Collect, aggregate and analyse community feedback and overall sentiment about the ecosystem

• Gather, analyse and report on statistics about ecosystem infrastructure usage, performance and outcomes

• Create, maintain and improve ecosystem processes for gathering and measuring data, performance and community feedback

• Conduct market wide research and report on similar ecosystems and their infrastructure or product usage, performance and outcomes

• Write and maintain documentation about processes, research findings and ecosystem statistics

• Provide support to community members in understanding the available ecosystem research, analysis and statistics

• Coordinate efforts towards applying information around research findings, analysis and statistics to the maintenance and improvement of ecosystem systems and processes

• Host discussions and meetings about ecosystem research findings, analysis and statistics

• Provide feedback to proposals that could benefit from considering relevant ecosystem research, analysis and statistics

QA & Auditing

Objective - Help with quality assurance testing on changing ecosystem functionality to ensure releases are to a high quality. Support in the development of new processes and reporting so proposal teams can demonstrate their impact. Help the community with support on auditability and with auditing and flagging proposals.

Tasks

• Review and flag submitted proposals that require further checks and verification

• Test implementation features prior to release and report on any issues

• Research QA best practices for ecosystem development processes

• Research, analyse and improve auditing approaches so that best practices are being used for different types of proposals

• Write and maintain documentation about the auditing or QA processes used across the ecosystem

• Provide support to the community on how to audit funded proposals and test new ecosystem functionality

• Coordinate community efforts towards how to effectively test and audit within the ecosystem

• Host community discussions about funded proposal auditing and the ecosystem QA process

• Audit and provide feedback to progress reports from funded proposals

Marketing

Objective - Reach out to the community, host events and provide support to the marketing efforts across the Catalyst ecosystem. Bring better alignment, data driven results and reporting to highlight evidence of the impact the ecosystem is having and any progress due to community efforts towards improving the Catalyst process.

Tasks

• Promote and share the ecosystem with different marketing initiatives

• Conduct proposer outreach to increase the number of quality proposals submitted each funding round

• Aggregate, analyse and report on marketing analytics data and community efforts

• Support the research and creation of marketing resources and creative content

• Write or proofread marketing copy for use in promotion of the ecosystem

• Identify marketing tools, processes and approaches to increase efficiency in performing any ecosystem marketing and outreach efforts

• Write and maintain documentation about events and marketing processes used for ecosystem marketing and outreach

• Provide support on any marketing or outreach efforts needed for relevant areas across the ecosystem

• Coordinate efforts in the ecosystem around the promotion of different ecosystem events, updates and news

• Host discussions and events about the benefits of the ecosystem and recent successes

• Provides feedback to proposals regarding their marketing and outreach plans and efforts

Product

Objective - Research, collate and get consensus on the highest priority problems within the ecosystem to then help guide solutions that solve those problems whilst maintaining a high quality user experience. Help contributors come to alignment in how to implement solutions and work with the community to bring in feedback and data to support product direction through both contributor and community led governance.

Tasks

• Create and maintain product development workflows that take ideas and problem sensing through to implementation of solutions, outcome tracking and continued iterative improvement

• Conduct research, analyse and report on similar products and ecosystems in the wider market

• Research, analyse and improve the approaches and best practices to use for product development workflows

• Create and iterate user experience flows and implementation plans based on user feedback, usage data and product planning

• Gather, aggregate and report on analytic data points and user experience feedback regarding the different systems and processes used in the ecosystem

• Write and maintain documentation about ecosystem priorities and roadmaps, product processes, feature releases and product workflows.

• Provide support about ecosystem products, requirements, priorities and existing user problems to help others understand the current ecosystem

• Coordinate efforts around product development to encourage collaboration and bring more alignment around problems, prioritisation, suggested solutions, improvements to existing solutions and shared understanding of performance outcomes for recent product releases

• Host discussions and meetings to gather product feedback from the community or showcase existing progress and current product development priorities

• Provide feedback to proposals regarding their product plans and identify any overlaps or opportunities for experimentation and collaboration

Design

Objective - Design graphics, layouts and optimise user flows to create a high quality user experience for the community. Help contributors with maintaining consistency and alignment of the visual design and user experiences of all the ecosystems tools and services.

Tasks

• Create and iterate on design concepts, wireframe designs, user flows and layouts for ecosystem applications

• Create graphics and illustrations for events and online resources

• Create and maintain shared style guides, icons and illustrations

• Conduct research, apply and report on best practices in recent developments of design or user experience being used in the wider market

• Gather community feedback regarding any design and interfaces used to understand the ease of use and user sentiment to help find any areas for improvement

• Write and maintain documentation about any adopted design practices or user experience findings

• Support ecosystem initiatives by reviewing designs and implementations and offering any suggestions for improvements

• Coordinate efforts around shared design practices being used that increase ease of use, consistency and familiarity across the ecosystem in the interfaces and graphics used

• Host discussions about best practices for design that help improve overall usability and user experience quality across the ecosystem

• Provide feedback to proposals regarding their design and interface plans and efforts

Potential future roles

The following are other options to consider that could become roles in the future.

Education

Many of the existing roles can support the education of the core ecosystem. Those tasks include writing documentation relevant to what each contributor is working on and also hosting meetings with other contributors and the wider community. Coordination, design, product and marketing roles are well suited for helping create visual education aids to support education. If there is difficulty maintaining ecosystem educational resources a group of full time education contributors could be considered that would solely focus on educational materials, sessions and generally supporting the community.

Human resources

The role of dealing with who is and isn't a full time contributor will be dealt with by the community governance vote. Initially through general voters and then potentially in the future refined down to engaged community members to make it more scalable and simplify the process. If a contributor does not perform or produces conflict with others they are likely to not secure future funding so managing contributors from a human resources perspective could be fairly self governing. Depending on the issues faced from funding contributors directly in the future a more full time human resource contributor could be considered to resolve and manage these issues. Alternatively this role could end up being achieved under a form of auditing role that is fulfilled by community members at the end of contributor funding terms with the right incentive models in place.

Finance

Contributors would be funded directly from the treasury initially in six month terms. This helps makes the initial process need little oversight. However the core ecosystem will have other costs such as server costs or usage of SaaS tools to help the contributors work effectively. Managing these costs could be done through a governance process done by contributors using a shared funding pot. If the complexity of managing a shared funding pot increases over time it will make sense to explore the usage of a finance role so that these concerns become better managed.