# Cato Partnership Strategy Brainstorming

###### tags: `Parternships`

## Background

[Cato's Notion Docs](https://www.notion.so/Details-about-Cato-Lab-82fce4a5f7f544cfb7246f796c839966)

Catō (pronounced as /ˈkay.toe/) is related to the [Latin root word](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cato#Latin) "catus" which means "clear-sighted”, “intelligent”, “sagacious”, “wise".

Cato believes, the goal of any education system should be to help people achieve the bare minimum intelligence in all spheres of life so that they can live upto their true potential. Cato is a collective of individuals who are passionate about improving our education system through public good software.

[Read Cato's Full Manifesto here](https://hackmd.io/@arsalagrey/cato-manifesto)

[Visit Cato's Notion here](https://www.notion.so/Details-about-Cato-Lab-82fce4a5f7f544cfb7246f796c839966)

[Visit Cato's Figma here](https://www.figma.com/file/aw1Wd4CGsrsiPSrwLQstQa/Cato.tv-App-%2B-Web?node-id=401%3A509)

## Questions for Cato

#### 1. Is Cato a registered company?

::: spoiler Answer
**Rahul:** Nope not yet. We plan to do that later next year. As of now we don't feel the need to incorporate and have the legal overheads.
:::

#### 2. How important is it to Cato to build publicly with open source software and transparent development practices?

::: spoiler Answer
Context:


**Rahul:** It's quite important. Right now our Notion is not really in a shape to be shared publicly and we want it to be more polished to be shareable. But most useful resources within our Notion are link sharing enabled and our workspace has floated around a lot of folks as a result. Which is good. We plan on making a public facing website or page which houses all our insights, projects, and critical details such as financial transparency, etc.
:::

#### 3. Are all the recipients of Dr. Malpani's grant developing OSS Ed-Tech products for Cato?

::: spoiler Answer

**Rahul:** Nope. There's no compulsion or mandate for this. You could be developing independently too. We just feel that doing it together can amplify the efforts and collaboration is the best way forward.
:::

#### 4. What is meant by Cato's core learning platform? Is it Cato.tv?

::: spoiler Answer

Context:


**Rahul:** That's correct but this is outdated. So I will remove the words within the brackets. Thanks for pointing it out.
:::

#### 5. Does beyondexams.org and Cato.tv have the same vision? Have there been discussions about collaborating?

## Suggestions for Cato

### Version Control

At Grey software, I have found Gitlab to be the most effective software to manage multiple projects.

I suspect that most Cato team members would be inclined towords Github, but I would like to make the case for using both in the manner Grey Software does.

:::spoiler Discussion

**Rahul:** Happy to listen to this. We discussed this earlier in our devops team and decided to stick with GitHub as it's the best for OSS.

**Arsala:** Personally I have found that with limited resources, an open source maintainer can be far more productive across multiple projects on Gitlab than Github.

You may often find that maintainers who primarily use Github are using another integrated software to help them track issues across multiple repositories in an organization.

One approach I have been thinking of recently is doing software development work on Gitlab, maintaining synchronized mirrors on Github, and having a special forum repository on Github where we can enable the discussions tab and get a structured community forum.
:::

### Project documentation

At the moment, I have found that using HackMD for a collaborative markdown editing has been great for me and my collaborators.

**Rahul:** What do you think about Gitbook?

::: spoiler Answer

**Arsala:** I like HackMD since it allows for realtime collaborative markdown editing, and I recently found out that they can be used to publish books like GitBook.

Then again, we could use Notion to allow for live collaboration and then move final versions to Gitbook.

The shortcoming there would be that we would be limited by not being able to have dynamic documentation websites with custom React and Vue components like Docasaurus or Grey-Docs allow for.

In my experience, I have found that the brainstorming content that is written collaboratively often makes its way to issues content in source control and then published content on websites.

My primary focus for my organization was choosing a docs stack that allowed me to collaboratively edit Markdown in real time, and that could easily allow my team members to move Markdown to source control issues and Markdown documentation websites.
:::