Rapid Funding

Considerations towards how rapid funding is suitable for contributors

Rapid funding is exploring how to make it possible for the both the Catalyst and Cardano community to have faster access to funding compared to the current use of a more slow and laborious proposal process. For rapid funding to be effective it needs to consider where funds can be allocated, who is involved in that governance process and what accountability is needed.

Issues

• Accountability - If community members and projects are funded in a faster speed it makes it less suitable to try and involve the entire community in the decision. If the decision is delegated to a group of people then there’s a need for accountability as to who was involved in the decision and the reasons why the chose to fund or not fund a given request.

• Governance process - The process used for governance for rapid funding needs to match concerns around timeliness and the amount of funding involved. To make well informed and faster decisions the participants who are delegated the responsibility will need to be fully informed on what is happening in the ecosystem and be aware of community members and contributors. Due to this full time contributors will be some of the most effective community members to use for this process due to having the most time being actively committed to the ecosystem.

• Decision complexity - A difficulty for rapid funding is determining which governance decisions should be involved and excluded. Simple decisions such as supporting a local hackathon may be easy to include however when the funding request is larger the governance participants involved need to have guidelines and a feedback process in place to decide when to involve a larger amount of the community instead of executing the decision themselves.

Advantages

• Speed - Providing funding to projects and teams that needs it at a faster rate can help with increasing the speed of innovation and adoption of the ecosystem.

• Simple process - The current proposal process for Project Catalyst is too slow for many small projects which leads to stagnation. By having a simple process these teams can have a governance process that is better suited for the smaller requests that are being made giving them more capacity to focus on making impact over the admin work involved with proposals.

Summary

• Full time contributors are well suited to supporting a rapid funding mechanism for either Catalyst or Cardano ecosystems as their votes can be public and those involved would be made accountable.

• Guidelines and further thought is needed by those contributors on which things can be funded through that process and which can use the process but require a much larger feedback process with the community.