PA/vPA Side-Treasury Weekly Update

Week Ending Nov 18th

Looking back to look forward: We hope everyone is finding ways to surface essential Catalyst feedback in order to ring in a positive Fund 10 experience. For our part, PA/vPA side-treasury has been funding members of the community to convene, discuss and build in hopes of improving both the conditions of our self-organization and participation, as well as healthier relationships between roles and processes that steward great proposals from start to finish. Check out the highlights below and follow this link for full details in our Weekly Update.

• Catalyst Improvements Task Force is meeting regularly and has begun to take sensed issues with the PA/vPA process and build consistent, actionable "Problem Statements" (with bounties!) around them.
• The side-treasury has added a new trustee to its governance model, and in true Catalyst fashion, it was an intriguing and highly emergent decision
• Assessing the landscape for Documentation updates to the PA/vPA guidelines (and broad integrity concerns across all documentation alignment) is an upcoming focus area in the community and there is a working group effort ongoing to build tools to help with that process when it moves forward.
• A dialogue will be happening at some point between IOG and the community around specific improvements involving PA/vPA role, including reputation systems. How do you imagine this conversation happening? How should it happen? And how do we get there?

Any questions? Suggestions? Let the community know via PA/vPA telegram chat or discord channel here.

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General PA/vPA Side-Treasury Community Updates

Framework: Side-Treasury, Working Group, Task Force
The PA/vPA Operations Treasury research resulted in a hierarchical framework designed with principles of decentralisation, accountability and flexibility in mind.

Under this model, Side-Treasuries can apply and win funding from Project Catalyst. Each one should have a charter and a clearly stated purpose. For example, to improve the PA/vPA process.

Under each Side-Treasury, Working groups can be set up. These have an even more limited scope, for example to improve the Proposal Assessor Guidlines, or vPA incentives model.

Within each Working Group, temporary Task Forces can be spun up. These focus on something even more narrow, for example Criteria for Excellent Assessments. All of the above groups have some form self-defined membership or onboarding process. Currently, Task Forces are the ones that define Bounties, and a person does not have to go through any type of membership application process to explore bounties or submit work for a bounty.

If this framework proves to be useful, the hope was that more community members can spin up their own Side Treasuries, Working Groups, and Task Forces. Each with freedom to choose their own purpose and governance model.

• Migration of documentation has been progressing and there is now a wide variety of material available when browsing the Side-Treasury portal. All this documentation is in a versioned repo and is open to community comments and feedback "in-page".

How to get involved

• Do you want to build something for the QA community or are you contributing in other ways? Check out Section 6 of the Treasury Governance Framework to see if your efforts might overlap with the funding objectives of the PA/vPA Treasury.
• All claims against the Treasury begin as discussions, and you are encouraged to run ideas by community members, and get tips and pointers on how to structure or submit claims, or just design your own claim and submit it in the main discussion thread. Community members will help you from there.
• The side-treasury is designed to support working groups and committees that aim to steward concrete, actionable ideas from the drawing board through execution and retrospective. If you have ideas for such working groups and think that others might join in to help follow through, lets start those discussions as well!

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Working Group Updates

The vPA Process Working Group is a chartered Governing Body of the PA/vPA Side Treasury. The main purpose was to set up and maintain a bounty driven workflow to organize work around vPA process improvements. The initial design can be found here.. Due to the experimental nature there is some flexibility - especially in light of the many urgent issues facing Project Catalyst. You can read the vPA WG charter to get details about the policies. For an overview of the Governance model, check out the Governance section of the Treasury docs.

• As part of the governance model of this side treasury, working groups such as this one elect stewards, or as we call them "Trustees" to distribute the governance to the participants.

  • The WG has elected a trustee to represent them, and in true Catalyst emergent fashion, who and how they chose was interesting: 4 members will share responsibility in pairwise groups by month. Check the arrangement out here.
  • These trustees will be sharing their discussions as they onboard to the role in this read-only discord channel, but they can be contacted in any other channel in Discord to widen the conversation and share in their learning for this new and evolving role.

• A recently surfaced issue was brought up by this Working Group and may require larger community involvement: the forthcoming rollout of vPA process improvement suggestions from IOG researchers, including reputation models and "vPA bylaws". For a wide and broad discussion to take place reach out to those around you to connect with others who might also be thinking about the background behind these types of ideas, and keep an eye out for forthcoming efforts to establish some bridges and documentation to create a robust background to help steward such improvement paths in a healthy, co-productive, way.

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Task Force Updates

Right now, there is a "Catalyst Improvements f10 Task Force" convening regularly to make space for surfacing and addressing sensed issues in the PA/vPA ecosystem leading up to the start of Fund 10. This is experimental and broad in scope because we are developing this model, but we are actively addressing:

• Gather feedback and identify priority issues
• Turn feedback and issues into actionable items in a bounty workflow
• Propose changes to Catalyst process based on the identified priority issues

The most recent meeting of the taskforce addressed:

• Discussing and establishing standards for stewarding bounties in dework via a new "Bounty Manager" role.
• Looked at an example of a "Problem Statement Bounty" and discussed how these statements could be large or small, broken into smaller subtasks when too large, and overall used as a valuable step in "repo-ing" sensed issued as problem statements that could accrue input and background as they iterated toward understanding and possible solution statements.
• The meeting also made space to welcome several new participants and get to know eachother.
• Next meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, November 22nd. Full agenda and times here.

The work of the Task Force is coordinated using the Catalyst United discord and Dework (currently using the vPA WG space). The next meeting is scheduled here.

Ready to get involved?! JOIN THE CATALYST UNITED DISCORD or DIVE in to the Task Force DOCS