FAQs

Frequently asked questions and misconceptions about the suggested funding categories

Who has control over maintaining these categories?

Elected and accountable community members would be a one approach to maintain and continue work on funding categorisation over the long term. Catalyst contributors as a category if initiated offers one solution. This work is completely open source however an elected group of community members like Catalyst contributors could host and manage this GitBook themselves.

Why is there only a small participation in the budget weighting vote?

You can find the number of voting participants in each budget weighting vote in the funding categories documentation. These budget weighting votes are a best effort attempt and invite all community members to participate.

Currently existing challenge teams self determine the budget for the categorisation unilaterally. This is an issue as it means a small challenge team have a high influence over the funding allocated to certain areas in the ecosystem. The community votes for funding categories currently provide the most open and democratically conducted votes so far within Catalyst to determine budget weightings for different funding categorisations.

The intention for this in the future would be to integrate the budget weighting vote into the voting app so that the budget weighting process becomes part of the official process along with funding categories.

Why are there so many focus areas in each category?

Using broad categories that accept a wide number of ideas makes funding categorisation more flexible to different scenarios and easier to handle in terms of budget weighting. Specific funding categorisation adds significant complexity in governance and effort required by the community. This is outlined in full in the broad vs specific categorisation analysis.

Who will be managing Catalyst and Cardano contributors?

No individual or group manages the Catalyst or Cardano contributors. Once elected through the Catalyst governance process they will be paid to work as a collective group to support either the Catalyst or Cardano ecosystems. Contributors are autonomous in how they organise themselves and make decisions.

How will category teams be effective when there are bigger budgets and more focus areas?

There will be only so much that a category team can do to support a wider range of ideas and innovation with an increased amount of proposals. To resolve this concern we've highlighted the impact of having less specialised challenge teams which describe how category teams can be used along with experts or topic focussed community groups to support more specialised issues around a certain topic area.

Why cant we use both broad categories and challenges?

Using broad categories and challenge settings means not removing the complexities on governance and budget weighting and the increased stakeholder effort to manage the funding categorisation. We documented the impact of using both categories and challenges.