Egalitarian

Suggested idea funding categories are more effective at being an egalitarian form of funding categorisation

Why is it important?

Egalitarian funding categorisation means ensuring no person or proposal has an unfair advantage over another. It also means that there should be equal access to opportunity for anyone in the community to being able to submit proposals for consideration. The importance of egalitarian funding categorisation has been documented and provides more information and examples.

Challenge settings

The challenge setting process is open to any categorisation meaning a mix of focus area based categorisation or priority based funding categorisation approaches can be included. This flexibility can often lead to categorisations that are not egalitarian. The following challenge setting types cause situations where funding categorisation is less egalitarian:

• Specific product focuses - Categorisation focusing on one type of product such as 'insurance products' means those proposal types receive an unfair funding advantage over other product areas.

• Demographic focuses - Certain demographic focuses such as poor, rich, young, old, etc would mean giving an unfair funding advantage over ideas from the excluded demographics.

• Locations - Using a subset selection of countries or continents against the total available means some countries receive an unfair funding advantage over the ones that are excluded.

Related challenge setting issues include:

• Unequal access to opportunity - Challenges can lead to examples like mentioned above that give certain proposals or people unfair advantage over others. This can prevent people and proposals from having access to opportunity.

• Challenges created through self interest - This happens when a challenge is created with a certain objective and budget that will benefit the proposer more than it would the community. This can lead to more influential groups getting more access to capital than others even though this may not represent the highest value or impact for the community.

• Higher risk - Using specific objective or topic based categorisations increases the risk of categorisations that do not have enough proposals submitted in a given funding round due to the specificity of the challenge. This increases the risk of lower quality proposals and also increase the risk of missing out on proposals that could have been excluded which would have been more impactful.

• Exclusive categorisation - Challenge settings make no guarantee that all forms of ideas and innovation can be submitted. As a result of this there are situations where certain areas cannot participate in the funding process. This gives certain ideas unfair advantage over others when the excluded ideas could have been higher quality or more impactful.

Funding categories

Funding categories focus on grouping proposals together based on their proposal type or a certain focus area.

• Invites all forms of idea and innovation - All ideas, demographics and locations receive fair access to opportunity using funding categories as they are a form of inclusive categorisation. Funding categories are inclusive to all forms of idea and innovation by ensuring all proposal types are covered. Anyone from anywhere in the world can submit proposals relevant to Cardano using funding categories. By being inclusive the funding categorisation maximises the opportunity to find all forms of idea and innovation.

• Independent objective setting process - An independent objective setting process will compliment funding categories and highlight important focus areas using community consensus. The benefit of having this independent of the categorisation process is it ensures that the funding categorisation stays egalitarian and does not prevent people from submitting ideas.

Summary

• The usage of exclusionary categorisations, such as what can happen with challenge settings, means certain people and proposals are often not allowed even the opportunity to submit proposals. With challenge settings it is easy for there to be unequal access to opportunity where certain areas get excluded or receive an unfair disadvantage. This problem is unnecessary and can easily be avoided by separating the objective setting process from funding categorisation whilst also using inclusive categorisation. The ability for the community to promote and vote on proposals based off important objectives can be fully achieved without excluding people and proposal types.

• Funding categories are more egalitarian than the challenge setting process as they ensure everyone has equal access to opportunity and that certain proposals or people don't receive an unfair advantage over others.