Budget Weighting Considerations

Some considerations for helping to decide on an initial budget to use for a first round using funding categories

The following are some reasons for and against having a larger or smaller initial budget weightings for each of the funding categories.

The following are suggestions to consider when voting on the budget weightings to use for each of the funding categories. These suggestions are completely up for debate and currently only help to provide a starting point for the discussion.

Feedback and thoughts

If you have some suggestions for other factors to consider for budget weighting please send them here and they can get added to the document: https://t.me/catalystfundingcategories

Infrastructure Contributors

Reasons for a larger budget weighting

  • There is a limited amount of scripts, tools, libraries and SDKs to make it easier to develop and deploy applications onto the Cardano blockchain. Contributors can help with developing these and supporting community initiatives.

  • Contributors have an objective to help with collaboration. Contributors can help to reduce the amount of duplicated efforts for development efforts across the Cardano ecosystem.

Reasons for a smaller budget weighting

  • Increased risk as the contributor funding model has not yet been tested with a first round of contributors.

  • An overly large budget may make it difficult to fill up the category with enough contributor candidate proposals in the short term.

Catalyst Contributors

Reasons for a larger budget weighting

  • New tools and processes are needed to help the community take more ownership of the Catalyst process.

  • The Catalyst process is labour intensive and requires more people to support its operation.

  • Contributors have an objective to help with collaboration. Contributors can help to reduce the amount of duplicated efforts for development efforts across the Cardano ecosystem.

Reasons for a smaller budget weighting

  • Increased risk as the contributor funding model has not yet been tested with a first round of contributors.

  • An overly large budget may make it difficult to fill up the category with enough contributor candidate proposals in the short term.

Development & Infrastructure

Reasons for a larger budget weighting

  • New scripts, tools, libraries and SDKs are needed to make it easier to develop and deploy applications onto the Cardano blockchain.

  • The developer ecosystem will become the backbone of what DApp developers use to build on top of the blockchain. Secure, scalable and maintainable open source code is needed to support other teams to effectively build their applications.

Reasons for a smaller budget weighting

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Governance & Identity

Reasons for a larger initial budget weighting

  • Catalyst is currently very centralised relying on IOG and Ideascale. More tools and processes are needed that can help the community operate this process and move more governance control over to the community.

  • There is a lack of governance and identity tools, resources, processes that can help either Catalyst or applications building on Cardano to use and create more effective ways to govern their applications.

Reasons for a smaller initial budget weighting

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Products & Integrations

Reasons for a larger budget weighting

  • Cardano needs more use cases through applications and integrations that will help drive adoption.

Reasons for a smaller budget weighting

  • Developer ecosystem currently lacks a wide range of tools, libraries and SDKs. This makes it more difficult to develop applications on the Cardano ecosystem in the short term until more of the development ecosystem is implemented.

Community & Outreach

Reasons for a larger budget weighting

  • Need for community wide discussion around how the ecosystem innovates and operates and also around impactful topic areas.

  • A need for outreach to new collaborators or community members to help grow the number of people involved in the ecosystem.

Reasons for a smaller budget weighting

  • It would be beneficial to have more products and integrations in place to form communities around to iterate on problems and community goals.

  • Limited functionality and applications in the short term could cause increased churn for any outreach efforts to attract new community members.

Small & Early Stage Ideas

Reasons for a larger budget weighting

  • Increased budget weighting for this category would mean increasing the number of teams and ideas that can be funded for more experimentation.

Reasons for a smaller budget weighting

  • The small budget cap on proposals means that many proposals can be funded with even a modest total budget. If the total funding is too high it increases the difficulty to fill the category with quality proposals. A less competitive process would likely lead to a reduction in the average proposal quality.

  • Product or integration related proposals would benefit from more development ecosystem, governance or identity tools for them to execute a lower budget proposal. Proposals can be of any idea and type for this category so this factor only impacts some proposals.

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