Achieving Ecosystem Goals

How can the contributor funding model help with achieving ecosystem goals?

The contributor funding model analysis points towards using full time contributors with a diversity of relevant skill sets using fluid team structures to help support, maintain and improve the ecosystem.

The Catalyst Product Development documentation outlines some sensible example high level goals for the Catalyst ecosystem to try and achieve. These goals include creating an ecosystem that is scalable, resilient, efficient, simple, robust, maintainable and community owned.

A contributor funding model would be effective at helping with achieve those goals due to it being a recurring funding model to incentivise competent talent to work full time in the ecosystem.

Scalable

The community is able to increase or decrease the amount of full time contributors it needs as the ecosystem evolves. Increasing the number of elected contributors helps the ecosystem to scale when more support, maintenance or improvement is needed.

Resilient

Contributors are elected to work full time in the ecosystem to work on what produces the most impact. This can mean directing their full attention to sudden issues that need resolving. Contributors are not tied to the execution of ideas.

Efficient

Contributors are elected and incentivised to work full time in the ecosystem. Contributors then have full capacity to most effectively and efficiently perform their role. Once elected contributors do not need to constantly write idea based proposals and instead can focus all their capacity on producing the most impact.

Simple

Contributors who are incentivised to deliver impact rather than being attached to the execution of funded ideas have more flexibility and aligned incentives to collaborate and combine efforts. This incentive for collaboration will be important for creating applications and processes that have a more seamless and simple experience by using common standards and approaches that will increase the quality of the user experience.

Robust

The Catalyst and Cardano ecosystems are complex. Due to this using full time contributors with a diverse skill set will maximise the capacity available of those working on each ecosystem to be able to deliver more secure and robust infrastructure to be used in the ecosystem. Full time contributors will also have more capacity to do the due diligence checks or delegation of security audits to external companies where necessary before important implementations are released.

Maintainable

Funding contributors to produce impact rather than ideas means contributors are incentivised to find the most efficient solution to a problem rather than compete over their funded ideas. This incentive for collaboration will help to increase alignment and prevent duplicated efforts. The more that the ecosystem collaborates and aligns on common standards and approaches the more maintainable the ecosystem will become.

Community Owned

A contributor funding model helps to achieve community ownership as the contributors being elected are voted on by the community. These contributors will be elected to help support, maintain and improve the ecosystem meaning the ecosystem remains functional, efficient and resilient but is governed by a decentralized ownership structure.