Catalyst United Week 45 (Nov 7-13)

TL;DR

Outside of Catalyst funding, there are dedicated rapid-funding treasuries to be spent on improving various aspects of Project Catalyst.

The Veteran Proposal Assessor Working Group (vPA WG) is one example of such community-owned treasuries. The purpose of this working groups is to experiment the side-treasuries model. The vPA WG is currently developing a bounty-based workflow to solve high-priority issues. Contribute and get rewards! Anyone can join (you don't need to be a vPA!)

Background

In Fund8, a group of community members lead by the Catalyst Circle v3 Proposal Assessor representative recognised the need to establish a more flexible and rapid mechanism to incentivise improvements to Project Catalyst. This resulted in a proposal aimed at improving the Catalyst Quality Assurance process by creating a PA/vPA Operations Treasury - a rapid funding mechanism to fund improvements PA & vPA processes in a distributed manner. This resulted in a PA/vPA Operations Treasury governing body policies).

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.

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, 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 of membership process. Currently, Task Forces are the ones that define Bounties. A person does not have to go through any type of membership application process to 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.

vPA Working Group experiment

The PA/vPA Operations Treasury decided to set up a vPA WG in order to further develop the details of this framework. 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 work, check out the PA/vPA HackMD.

Right now, there is only the "Catalyst Improvements f10 Task Force". This is experimental and broad in scope because we are developing this model. and is a subset of the aforementioned

The work of the Working Group and Task Forces is coordinated using the Catalyst United discord and Dework (currently using the vPA WG space).

Current work areas

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

Working Group Goals

Primary goals

• Improve vPA/PA process
• Setup & pilot distributed workflow

Secondary goals

• Create side treasuries after pilot
• Create documentation on how to set up workflow
• Problem-based-learning workshops on how to set up workflow