Product Development Roadmap
Ideas for a Catalyst product development roadmap
Roadmap version 0.2
Draft version - This is an initial draft version that aims to just share some initial ideas towards a product development roadmap. It will change and be updated based on community feedback.
Community led - There is nothing official about these ideas or roadmap. It is a completely community led initiative and only a suggestion. This approach has a number of objectives as outlined below. Anyone can choose to ignore this roadmap and any of the ideas presented. Alternatively anyone can also participate as much as they want to.
Work on what you want - This roadmap does not to prevent anyone from working on anything they want to in whatever order they want to.
Roadmap items are derived from existing analysis - Existing analysis on funding categorisation helped to highlight the importance of separating goals and objectives from funding categorisation. This roadmap inherits the results of that analysis.
Increase speed of improving Catalyst - If a number of community members get behind a group of areas to work on it could help to increase the speed in which the Catalyst ecosystem is improved. The faster that Catalyst can improve the more effectively the ecosystem can scale to handle more proposals and voters and more total funding used in each round.
Increase alignment - Discussing different approaches to prioritisation and order of execution helps to bring more alignment in what the community believes are the main priorities. For instance, if many people in the community agree that understanding what makes a good proposal is a high priority in the short term then it will be easier to bring people together to collaborate on doing work in this area to a higher quality.
Increase collaboration - Increasing the amount of discussion on focussed areas to improve in the ecosystem helps to bring the community together and collaborate on how to work on those areas most effectively. This can help to reduce duplicated efforts. The better we can discuss these different areas as a community the more likely it is for collaboration between community members who are able to support Catalyst.
The roadmap focusses more on suggesting a suitable order of execution for important areas in the Catalyst ecosystem that can be worked on.
A list of areas are grouped below into rough time frames that the community could work on to improve Catalyst. The areas that are most depended on by other areas are placed in the shorter term grouping. The areas that build more on top of other areas are placed into the medium and long term groupings.
The time based groupings are rough suggestions and are not a statement that work should only be done on the areas in the short term grouping. Instead, these suggestions are more concerned with where it may make sense to have a higher intensity of focus and effort over time.
As an example, it is logical to have a higher intensity of focus and effort on understanding what makes a good proposal in the short term. The outcomes of that work would be beneficial for other areas such as proposal assessment approaches or proposal infrastructure.
Effort will be needed for all of these areas in the short term. The key question we’re trying to answer is which areas will be the most effective to spend more time on in the short term over other potential areas? Which areas are more dependent on the quality and outcome of work in other areas of the funding process?

Catalyst Product Development Roadmap - Version 0.2
Funding categorisation approaches
Funding categorisations group together focus areas along with a budget to allow proposers to submit proposals in each funding round. Funding categorisations determine what types of funding models exist and what areas in the ecosystem have access to funding. Funding categorisations directly impact the incentives that exist to support and improve the ecosystem. Looking at approaches to funding categorisation for the Cardano ecosystem means finding out what approaches are scalable and effective at incentivising high quality proposals that will create impact for a global blockchain ecosystem and that can handle adverse situations.
- Existing community work: