1️⃣Funding Categorisation Analysis V1.0

Work from Sep 2022 to Oct 2022

The following is the work completed to get the funding categorisation analysis to a version 1.0. This work will be continued in the future after working on other more important areas in the short term.

1. Funding categories & Funding categorisation analysis

• ✅ Funding categories focus area grouping refinements - Improvements can be made on how clear it is where specific proposals should be placed into funding categories. This refinement is important to reduce any remaining ambiguity of where to submit certain proposals into the funding categories.

  • Sources - GitHub commit 1 & GitHub commit 2 or for viewing final result see Funding Categories

• ✅ Combining or separating contributor and idea categorisations - Analysis looking at whether proposal or contributor proposal types should be in separate or combined categorisations.

  • Sources - Combining vs Separating Idea & Contributor Categorisations

• ✅ Contributor model refinement - Further improvements to the contributor analysis can be made in better defining the goals of the contributor model in general and for Catalyst and Cardano ecosystems and the differences between idea and contributor based funding approaches.

  • Sources - Achieving Ecosystem Goals, Contributor Responsibilities, Contributor Desirable Attributes, Catalyst Contributor Shared Responsibilities, Cardano Contributor Shared Responsibilities, Community Contributor Responsibilities, Catalyst Contributor Roles, and Cardano Contributor Roles.

• ✅ Contributor risks and mitigation - Analysis to outline some of the concerns and risks of using a contributor based funding model and how those risks can be mitigated.

  • Source: Concerns, Risks & Mitigation

• ✅ Introductory explainers for analysis - Add some explanations about what contributors, the contributor funding model funding categorisation are about in the analysis documents

  • Source: What is a contributor?, What is funding categorisation?

• ✅ Contributor product development environment - Add analysis highlighting how suggestions such as Catalyst and Cardano contributors create a more effective product development environment to get work completed in the ecosystem.

  • Source: Advantages Of A Contributor Model For Product Development

• ✅ Improve proposal guide and example contributor proposals - Improve the proposal guide and improve example contributor proposals to better reflect what a completed proposal should look like.

  • Source: Catalyst Contributors proposal guide, Ada Lovelace example proposal, Gerolamo Cardano example proposal, Cardano Contributors proposal guide, Charles Babbage example proposal, Leonardo Bonacci example proposal

• ✅ Improve analysis around addressing concerns and add analysis about handling challenging funding situations - Improving the existing analysis on different concerns that need to be addressed relevant to funding categorisation and also adding some analysis going over potential solution options for handling challenging funding situations.

  • Source: Approaches for directing funding (updated), Addressing concerns & challenging funding situations (updated existing content), Not Enough Proposals Submitted, Low Quality Proposals, High Quality Proposals Cannot Be Submitted, Excessive Funding Requests

• ✅ Brief review of funding categorisation content in IOHK treasury paper - IOHK has a paper called “A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies: Enabling better collaborative intelligence” that mentions categorisations however not in much depth. A brief review can be added to outline what was mentioned in this paper, what similarities the paper has with the suggested funding categories and any improvements that could be made.

  • Source: Review Of Paper: "A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies"

• ✅ Fund 9 data funding categorisation update - Based on the fund 9 results the historical data in the funding categorisation analysis document can be updated to reflect the most recent data.

  • Source: Previous Categorisations Selected, Categories & Previous Selected Categorisations, Fund 10 Funding Access For Each Focus Area, Categorisation Overall Cost Comparison

• ✅ Scaling funding categories - Add analysis outlining how funding categories can be better scaled in the future with automation of budget weighting and a reduction in the number of categories if the voting infrastructure can support a higher complexity and keep the experience easy to voters.

  • Source: Scaling Funding Categories

• ✅ Alternative idea funding categorisations - Suggestions towards different categorisations that could be effective in the future such as reducing and combining some of the funding categories which have been suggested.

  • Source: Alternative Idea Funding Categorisations

• ✅ Incentives & game theory for open source development - Add analysis outlining the impact that the suggested categories can have on incentivising open source development. The guidelines for the categories have an impact on what incentive are produced by the categories depending on the budget weighting that gets set for each category.

  • Source: Incentives & Game Theory For Open Source Development

• ✅ Catalyst community priority and proposal supply dynamics - Analysis can be made on the community priority and proposal supply dynamics that exist in Catalyst that change each funding round. Priorities comes from what the community wants to see proposals for such as from setting goals and objectives, supply comes from the proposals that are submitted to cater for that demand or that tries to create its own demand.

  • Source: Community Priorities & Idea Proposal Supply Dynamics

• ✅ Improve categorisation analysis structure - Refactored the documentation to add clarity and separation between general funding categorisation analysis and idea or contributor based categorisation analysis.

  • Source: Funding Categorisation Analysis, Idea Categorisation Analysis, Contributor Categorisation Analysis
• ✅ Comparing categorisation types - Comparing the differences and use cases between idea, contributor, task and community based funding categorisations.

  • Source: Comparing Funding Categorisation Types

2. Catalyst product development

• ✅ The importance of standards - Analysis covering why standards are important for project catalyst and how they can lead to interoperable systems with a wider number of different applications as the ecosystem grows.

  • Source: Importance Of Standards