IOG Catalyst Team: Value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

This proposal will realize both near-term value by improving the experience for Catalyst users, as well as long-term value for Cardano by improving the quality and depth of community engagement and dialogue with proposers, that in turn helps to produce higher quality proposals and in turn better outcomes with a more informed voting populace about funding decisions to be made, generated by a unified and seamless experience.

Our team is positioned to realize that value with minimal risk due to established expertise, validated solutions to hard problems, and prior research and discovery efforts. Continuous testing and established community feedback channels give further assurances that the finished product will meet the requirements and empower users. Fully open-source development provides another value, and enhances project accountability and feedback.

We expect to see compounding benefits over time as community contributors leverage our open-source foundations to either add new capabilities to the existing platform, or create entirely new interfaces to the Catalyst backend based on our reference implementation.

Continued refinement in collaboration with the community will best support the evolving needs of Catalyst. We will design and develop the platform in such a way as to support the integration of new modules whether they are developed by external contributors or internally, broadening opportunities for independent experimentation and entrepreneurship.

Improvements will benefit from system-wide solutions implemented with this proposal, for instance, on-chain role registrations and decentralized user authentication, without requiring additional development. Robust user profiles or reputation systems may be built on top of role registrations. The same role-based access control and reputation systems may even be applied outside of Catalyst, similar to how the same OAuth standard is widely used across organizations and applications today.

The outcomes of this proposal will also extend the role-based access control to all future roles in Catalyst without requiring additional CIP changes or other heavy community-wide coordination.

Ultimately, this proposal offers significant value relative to the funds requested. With open-source foundations for a collaboratively built, operated, and maintained community platform that can be both replicated and extended by contributors outside of IOG.

To start, we’d like to eliminate context switching between apps, establish always-on pathways for meaningful participation, and greatly reduce the cognitive load of managing and engaging with complex processes.

With your permission, we’d like to co-build the future alongside you.

We hope you’ll consider voting for and approving the funding of Catalyst Voices.