Meeting 4 - December 23rd, 2021
Meeting recording
Minutes of Catalyst Circle V2 Meeting #4
Present (in order of first speaking)
JP (initially facilitator, then secretary); Allison Fromm (representing general ADA voters); Matthias Sieber (representing Cardano Foundation); Stephen Whitenstall (representing Catalyst Coordinator/funded proposers); Kenric Nelson (representing Community Advisors); Tevo Saks (representing Toolmakers and Maintainers); Harris Warren (representing IOG); Nori Nishigaya (facilitator).
Apologies: Raymond Mata (SPOs)
Speaker percentages
Tevo (22%), Harris (19%), Kenric (18%), Stephen (11%), Nori (11%), Allison (10%), Matthias (5%), JP (3%)
Abbreviations used / Glossary
API – Application Programming Interface (a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other)
ATH – After Townhall, breakout rooms after the regular Wednesday TownHall meeting
CA – Community Advisor, a role open to anyone in Catalyst, to assess proposals in each funding round
CC – Catalyst Circle
CF – Cardano Foundation
CTC, Catalyst Technical Council, a proposed body that will be appointed by IOG to be involved in bicameral governance alongside the Catalyst community
DID – Decentralised identifiers
ETH – Eastern Townhall
Gimbalabs - https://gimbalabs.com/gimbalgrid
IOG – Input/Output Global
NFT – non-fungible token
QA-DAO – Quality Assurance Distributed Autonomous Organisation
SPO – stakepool operator
VCA – Veteran Community Advisor, a role open to those who have been a CA in previous rounds, to assess the CAs’ reviews
Voltaire – the next phase on the Cardano roadmap to decentralisation
1) Opening, announcements, agenda (0:00)
Opening check-in 1:18
Announcements 3:04
Tevo 3:21 Initiative to map people’s journeys into Catalyst; Google Form and video of the related workshop – everyone is invited to complete the form
Agenda 4:53
2) Circle members' work (5:22)
The "CC Stand-up" - each person says
what they have worked on since last meeting
what they will be working on next
any blocks, or anything they need help with
Matthias (5:45)
Identified a problem with defamation and misrepresentation of facts on platforms including IdeaScale. Met with Ambassadors’ Guild, CF, and Harris and Kenric on this.
Will continue conversation on this and take action.
No blocks.
Stephen (6:30)
Gathered feedback for Community Governance Oversight proposal. Led to After Townhall presentation on Antifragile Success Criteria and some good feedback and debate.
Will continue to collect CA feedback (here, bottom of page) on the Community Governance Oversight proposal.
No blocks.
Kenric (7:28)
Been active on CA boards on Telegram, Discord etc. Many comments on how to improve – including a useful Google doc from Lorenz collating comments
Plan to host ATH meeting on 5th Jan, where that doc will frame the discussion.
No blocks, but anticipate needing to learn what the process is for actually making changes.
Tevo (8:38)
Created “Mapping your journey” Google form. Did a “How to get Cardano technology adopted” Swarm session – lots of feedback from prominent people. Organised discussion on Circle-sponsored proposals. Led a couple of Catalyst School workshops; identified issue that although CA assessments have improved, many CAs simply observe rather than actually assessing. Also IdeaFest.
Will create a User Guide from the “Mapping your Journey” data covering what tech and what activities people use.
No blocks.
Allison (11:53)
Office Hours at ATH has gone well; reaching out to ETH less successful so far. Identified issue that some people feel Catalyst is a popularity contest; am trying to reach people who are not “on the inside”, and are also not covered by other CC reps.
Want to set up better infrastructure, e.g. website, email, etc, that can be handed on to next General Voters CC rep; and create a core support group of ADA voters
Blocks – a Meetup or Zoom account; and support on using Reddit.
Harris (19:40)
Planning handover of custodianship of Catalyst to the community. Details will be shared soon. Have discussed using delegation as a mechanism to engage people. Considering using NFTs as a badge of previous participation in Catalyst, to show that someone is trustworthy. Discussion of defamation and creating a better Code of Conduct for IdeaScale. Also planning improvements to IdeaScale UI, which will go live Dec 24th.
Want to improve participation – currently only 10% of wallets actually vote. Deeper discussion on Catalyst parameters – there will be a short doc on this to be discussed by CC. Open API set of requirements for e.g. voting tools. May create a pilot election to test this. (25:26) Exploring idea that some CC roles might run for longer than 3 months – perhaps SPO and General Voters reps should change, and other roles not?
No blocks.
3) Prioritised Problems board (27:53)
See Github Prioritised Problems board
Community Advisors, Kenric (28:09)
Pleased to see that Prioritised Problems board has been updated
Added 2 items to problem backlog (Method for Selecting Catalyst Technical Council and Improving Challenge Continuity) which are both on the agenda later on
Will incorporate problems inherited from CCv1 (reputation/merit system for CAs and VCAs and CAs and vCAs rewarding system) into ATH meeting planned for 5th Jan, and update following that discussion.
Funded Proposers, Stephen (28:58)
One problem, Almost non existing “collaborative layer” to welcome newcomers. Work done to address it - built a community hub for Catalyst Coordinator to gather issues from funded proposers, and submitted a fund 7 proposal to maintain it.
ACTION ITEM: Collect and track Fund 7 proposals that address this issue of creating a “collaborative layer” to support onboarding, and use them to work towards a solution.
(29:48) Discussion of where action items should be put and how they should be tracked.
(31:55) Discussion of how CC reps should add problems to the board; at what level of granularity (high-level vs more detailed); limiting the number of cards; Agile and Kanban methodologies; the board as a tool for accountability and knowledge-sharing.; documentation of how the board was used in CCv1
Toolmakers and Maintainers, Tevo (48:16)
Added Toolmakers to “collaborative layer” to welcome newcomers problem
Re: systems to track and visualize Trust and Participation – watched Atala PRISM credentials video, and video from George Lovegrove about participation in Swarm and ATH being recorded with tokens; so will discuss with George and with IOG.
(Allison, 50:17) Verified credentials would be a good solution to this problem, and I and Kenric have been discussing this for CAs. Harris’s idea of using NFTs could be done now, whereas Atala PRISM DIDs are not available yet; although DIDs would be more flexible and would also promote the technology.
Nori (51:45) Popularity is also a form of reputation.
Tevo (52:27) GitBook and GitHub tracking, as done by Stephen and others, is also a means of tracking participation.
Harris (53:41) Payment, e.g. to CAs, can be a means of tracking participation. There are some potential problems with using NFTs.
Stephen (55:08) Note there’s a difference between tracking participation, and tracking contribution. GitHub is more about contribution. Important to link the two and look at work done.
ACTION ITEM: those interested in this card will meet separately to discus
IOG, Harris (58:09)
On How do we remove IOHK from every decision made in Catalyst? – IOG are actively moving on this, so change status to “shared with community”.
On How does IOHK and Catalyst community coordinate building the developer and governance eco-system effectively? Need to get more background on it; problem may need to be broken down further.
We should keep the board as a focus in future meetings.
ACTION ITEM: Harris to discuss the 2nd card further with Dor Garbash of IOG.
4) Consent Agenda (1:02:20)
Selection process for Technical Council (Kenric, 1:02:20)
Popular vote might not be appropriate. (1:04:03) One idea is, Technical Council could be selected by a group of 5 to 11 people selected at random from IdeaScale, like a jury.
(1:06:53) Discussion of various ideas for how to select Technical Council; IOG’s position; how to ensure the solution includes input from Catalyst community as well as IOG.
ACTION ITEM: This will stay as a card on the board, with IOG co-owning it, and the card will be moved through the board as normal.
Continuity of Catalyst challenges (Kenric, 1:18:36)
RE: Improving Challenge Continuity card. It’s good that the community is now defining all the funding challenges instead of having some set by IOG; but in fund 7 there was concern from some people that some significant challenges which had been in previous rounds, were dropped.
Discussion of possible methods for ensuring some continuity for key challenge settings:
different thresholds for voting for new challenges;
using amount of votes to determine the challenge budget;
dealing with challenges that are poorly-framed, and whether the wording can be edited after a challenge has been voted for;
whether CC itself can influence continuity by promoting or recommending particular challenge settings;
addressing low voter engagement (in fund 6 voters on average voted for only 9 things)
possibly a role for challenge teams in this
ACTION ITEM: This will stay as a card on the board and be tracked.
Veteran Community Advisor stage (Tevo, 1:30:09)
Increased CA guidance has led to much more detail on assessments this round
But a problem has emerged that most CA reviews now look at the guidance and engage in a tick-box exercise of “does the proposal contain X, Y and Z?” rather than actually assessing the proposal or offering any insight. Possibly due to use of closed yes/no questions ( “Does this proposal meet the challenge setting” rather than “WHY do you think it meets the challenge setting?”) ACTION ITEM: tackle these issues in a more focused meeting in January
Discuss website (Allison, 1:37:34) ACTION ITEM: to be discussed in Slack.
CC-sponsored proposals (Tevo, 1:38:28)
Feedback on discussion between Tevo, Allison and Stephen about how to decide which proposals CC should sponsor and promote.
See https://github.com/Catalyst-Circle/Catalyst-Circle-Coordination/issues/1 (scroll down to “Sponsorship of community proposals”)
Idea that CC could sponsor or promote proposals originating from outside CC which aim to improve Catalyst processes. Need to define the process for selecting these and ensure it is fair and involves the community; but a CC endorsement of a proposal, after the VCA process is complete, could offer an additional layer of information for voters.
pay attention to timing, so there is time to involve the community) (Harris, 1:43:49)
Does the community want CC to sponsor proposals? (Stephen, 1:45:05)
ACTION ITEM: created this as a card for further discussion, at a broader level: Circle relationship with Catalyst Proposals
5) Feeback form and close (1:46:28)
Meeting ends 1:47:51
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