Proposers With Fewer Resources Considerations

Objectives

Provide increased support to proposers who have less resources to compete effectively in making high quality proposals.

Considerations

• Inclusion list - If a category was to solve this problem it should define who should be included when making proposals. This could be taken from an existing list such as United Nations least developed countries or usage of another suitable data source.

• Capped proposal funding request - The purpose of this categorisation, if the category was established, would be to support those that need more support in the funding process. To maximise the number of people that this category supports it may make sense to have a cap, such as $30,000 to $50,000 per proposal. This ensures that many proposals are funded from different people who face this problem of it being more difficult to get access to funding.

• Proposal types included - As this category would aim to support those with less resources to competitively propose solutions it will make sense to allow all forms of ideas and solutions. This means that any type of proposal can be submitted and proposers compete on the strength of their proposal. These same proposers would also be welcomed to use the other categories as well as an alternative if necessary.

Implementation complexities

There are a number of complexities in trying to solve this problem of supporting proposers with fewer resources at the funding categorisation level.

Who should be included?

• It is complex to determine who should benefit in this categorisation and how to enforce it. Where is the line drawn between someone who should and should not receive be included in the categorisation?

• One easier way to select this grouping of proposers that require more support could be to use existing official data sources. The united nations currently maintains a list of the 46 least developed countries.

• This approach however does not support those people outside of this list of countries who may also have fewer resources. Using a list of countries would not help everyone who would be disadvantaged.

Proposal team

• Should the proposal be from a team that all require the extra support? Can some of the team members have more resources than other team members and still use this category? Can proposals teams with more resources propose solutions in this category if it was aimed at less developed countries?

• Where is the line drawn on who should be included in the proposal team?

Moderation

• If the proposals are from a team that requires more support how does the community moderate that this is true? Proposers would be able to easily hide whether they do in fact have sufficient resources to compete with other proposers. The intention of the category may be easy to abuse by the difficulty of vetting those who propose.

Increased justification and budget weighting complexities

• By introducing another category to try to solve the problem of supporting proposers with fewer resources there is an increase in complexity around the justification of the category. How does the community prove whether this categorisation as a short term solution was a net benefit to the ecosystem and whether it in fact increased or decreased the speed of evolution, adoption and community growth in the ecosystem?

• The complexity around budget weighting is also increased where the community must determine what amount should be used for that category.

Catalyst priority alternatives

• Catalyst helps to fund innovation and ideas that drive the ecosystem forward and bring in more solutions for the community to start adopting and using.

• The more valuable the ecosystem becomes from innovation, adoption and use cases the more resources the treasury will have to distribute to a wider amount of participants in the community to continue its evolution.

• Another priority for Catalyst could be to prioritise more equal distribution across the world for different proposal teams from different countries.

• The issue with these two priorities is they are conflicting. The strongest innovation solutions don't arrive at an equally distributed time between every country within each funding round. Ideas and proposals can come from any source and naturally can be more concentrated in one location over another in each funding round. The source of innovation will often change regularly.

• If Catalyst as a funding distribution process wanted to prioritise more equal distribution across the world as the most important factor it would come at a cost of not being able to fund some innovation that the community believes is the most promising.

• Although both priorities can exist for the ecosystem one must take precedent to determine how the Catalyst funding process is developed and maintained.

• To have better distribution across the world as a secondary priority this could mean providing the support needed and applications of how to direct funding that helps to encourage distribution to as diverse amount of proposers as possible.

• The community can promote the importance of this priority but providing innovation is the number one priority it would still leave the decision to the voters on which proposals they believe will provide the most impact.

• Further analysis is needed on the potential benefits and drawbacks that different priorities could have on effectiveness of funding distribution. Considerations are needed on what it would mean if each of those potential priorities was the number one priority.

Summary

• Supporting proposers with fewer resources is an important problem the Catalyst ecosystem can solve to increase diversity and innovation across the world.

• Solving this problem at the categorisation level introduces a lot of complex questions, justifications and governance requirements to consider in each funding round.

• It is hard to fairly determine those who should be included, how to moderate the proposers are part of the inclusion list criteria and whether this extra categorisation brings better outcomes over the use of a simpler collection of categories.

• Capping the maximum budget for proposals on its own instead of also trying to moderate who can and cannot use a funding category is more scalable and maintainable. Small & early stage ideas helps to achieve the objectives without introducing the complexities of trying to allow and prevent certain people from participating.