Intersect Town Hall by SWARM

Following a Swarm Session discussion on Saturday 30th March 2024 this working document is intended to capture discussion and draft of an application to Intersect of Swarm admin and facilitation of their Town Halls and After Town halls

Application

Email

coreswarm@gmail.com

About the proposal

Which award are you applying for ?

Inclusion and Accessibility - Town Halls
Inclusion and Accessibility - After Town Halls

What is the title of your proposal ?

Intersect Town Halls & After TownHalls facilitated by Swarm

Please create a random 6-digit proposal ID to help identify your proposal.*

(Applicant notes: for example, 532412. To avoid overlap with other proposal IDs, do not use numbers like 100000 or 123456. This ID will be used to reference your application. Please keep for your records)

518133

Summarize your solution in ~250 words or less.

Please use this as your elevator pitch.*

(Applicant notes: please see the award category documents by visiting this page for the detailed briefs)

Swarm, an organisational member of Intersect, would like to lead on both Town Halls *and* After Townhalls, providing a connected experience for attendees. This proposal covers both, enabling us to provide some important elements (publicity, planning, community research) in one. We’ll be building on our extensive experience running Catalyst After Town Halls and SingularityNET spaces, and crucially, in supporting geographical communities in Cardano to develop their own TownHalls.

Drawing on our wide and varied facilitation experience, and our significant skills in community engagement, event design, and event promotion, we will support the Intersect community to build a distinctive identity for its Town Halls that reflects the needs of Intersect members, just as we have successfully done for several communities across Catalyst and SingularityNET.

We will ensure that Town Halls and After Townhalls are engaging, welcoming, well-publicised, and participatory. We’ll achieve this by running 2 open workshops per month to engage the wider Intersect community in Town Hall planning; and with direct outreach to invite involvement, particularly targeting Intersect members who are not yet attending..

One key element of our offer is how we’ll integrate documentation. We see the content of an Intersect TH as community-owned IP; our approach is to open-source this IP by documenting it on a GitBook backed by an open-source repo, supported by Creative Commons licences for any content owned by named individuals.This will enable us to track topics, contributors, decisions, and ideas, so that Town Hall and ATH content becomes an Intersect community asset.

Have you submitted another Community Tooling proposal in any category?

No.

Will your proposed solution be integrated with the work of any other proposals, yours or otherwise?

No. This solution only integrates provision of Intersect Town Halls and After Town Halls.

Amount Requested

What is the total amount requested?*

(Applicant notes: please round to the nearest 1,000 ADA)

40,000 ADA total

26,000 ADA to run Town Halls until the end of 2024

4,000 ADA to run After Town Halls until the end of 2024

10,000 ADA for elements common to both

Details of your proposed solution

Please provide details on how you will meet Minimum Functional Requirements, Minimum Non-functional Requirements and where possible Optional Requirements.

Minimum Functional Requirements

How will we consider the type of content and updates members of Intersect want to hear about?

Members of the Swarm team attend the current Intersect THs, and have a good sense of the issues being covered and the issues that existing attendees are enthusiastic about. But we’re also aware that a comparatively small number of members actually attend.

So as part of our proposed offer, we will conduct outreach to members (via surveys, focus groups, 1-2-1 conversation), particularly targeting those who are not attending THs, and invite them to tell us what they are working on, and what they want from TH and ATH. We’ll do this twice - once at the start of our tenure, and again mid-term (c. end of August) - and finish with a retrospective in November to give insights for the future. This will give us a better sense of members’ plans and priorities, which we can feed in to our plans.

The pathways we will offer members to share their work in THs will include joining our open Planning Workgroup sessions twice per month; giving a quick update asynchronously to be included in the Town Hall slides; giving a presentation about something they are working on; and running a breakout at an ATH.

How will we collaborate with working groups and committees?

Members of the Swarm TH team are involved with, or have links with, several of the existing working groups and committees. We will initially work via contacting working group members directly, and via looking at the working groups’ own documentation, to understand what their focus and priorities are; and we then intend to develop this into ways that working groups can easily keep everyone updated. For example:

Inviting working group and committee members to our regular planning sessions, where they can drop in and give a quick update that can be presented by us if they are unable to attend a TH; or they can share more detailed information and offer to run a featured slot giving more detail on their work. We’d like to rotate this kind of featured slot each TH.
Offering working groups a regular mini-slot at TH, with a slide template that they can update asynchronously to tell the community about their work, which will be presented by us if they cannot spare the time;
Asking working groups and committees to include a standing agenda item in their own meetings to decide what they want to give as an update in TH
Proposing a simple structure for updates, to make it quicker for working groups to create them: such as a) inform the community what you’re working on; b) outline what’s new since your last update; and c) say how people can get involved. This will help them use TH as a focus for more engagement and inclusivity.

How will TH and ATH be promoted?

Swarm members have wide networks that we can use to promote TH and ATH via our own social media accounts; but we would also hope either to use Intersect’s accounts too, or provide content that the Intersect team can post. We’d use Discord, Telegram, the Cardano Forum, Twitter/X, Catalyst’s main TH and regional THs, and cross-chain promotion via our connections in e.g. Polkadot, SingularityNET and others. We feel it’s important for us not to “brand” the Intersect TH as a Swarm venture, but to use our social media skills to work with Intersect’s existing branding and its marketing team.

What tools are needed or used?

At the moment, Town Hall meetings are on Discord. Discord does have some shortcomings, especially in the area of recording, so we would like to explore with the community whether other options, such as Zoom, would work better.

Other tools used will include:

Gitbook and Github for documentation and tracking.
Miro Board for facilitation and planning (especially in our regular Community Planning sessions)
Google Suite (docs, sheets, slides, forms), particularly Google Slides for TH presentations
Dework for bounties
Swarm Treasury Guild dApp for fund distributions.

These tools are accessible and most of them are widely used across different communities, which is why we have chosen them.

How are meetings facilitated?

Initially, TH would be facilitated by members of the core Swarm TH team. But we aim to progress to 1) supporting community members to get involved in facilitating TH itself (with training and support where needed); 2) creating a modular structure where there are a number of regular short slots for the different working groups to give updates, and for different parts of the Intersect community to share news- this gives people a chance to facilitate a short section of the meeting; and 3) a process of developing ground rules that suit this community. We would include this in early Planning Group meetings, and do some outreach to members who are not attending to find out (anonymously) from them if any change to facilitation ground rules would make them more likely to participate.

ATHs, by contrast, will be facilitated by whoever wants to run a breakout room, and they will do it in their own style. The Swarm team will be available to offer support for anyone who needs it, for example, a co-facilitator, or some help in designing or structuring their ATH; and we will manage timestamping and sharing the recordings of breakout rooms, and collating the community IP that comes out of them.

How will we manage support and integration between TH and ATH?

The fact that we are proposing to run boith TH and ATH will help enormously with this integration; and will ensure that the ideas that come up in each are able to cross-pollinate to the other.

How will we collect topics for ATH spaces?

Several pathways for this, to suit different needs:

via our outreach to members who are not attending THs
via regular TH and ATH publicity, which will include a link to a Google form where people can add topics
via our GitHub project board, which will particularly address topics that have emerged from past THs and ATHs
via our regular planning workgroup, where the group might (for example) raise topics that are current in the community, and look for someone who could be invited to run an ATH about them
by directly using a Google signup form (the spreadsheet will be public, so people can see what other ATHs are happening on the day they are considering)
by using an Open Space approach, and always having a couple of rooms available for impromptu discussion, which we can help to facilitate as needed.

How do we promote ATH spaces

They will be mainly promoted alongside TH itself via posting in key channels such as Discord, Twitter/X, Telegram, Cardano Forum etc; and via email to Intersect members.

How do we help Intersect members facilitate ATH spaces

We have budgeted to be able to offer members a co-facilitator and/or support in planning and delivering an ATH. We are also managing things like uploading and timestamping recordings.

Minimum Non-Functional Requirements

Establishing an ‘identity’ for Intersect TH/ATH

In terms of a cohesive visual identity, we would work with Intersect’s marketing team and existing branding (including the Swarm logo alongside for transparency)

But the “identity” of TH and ATH is, of course, more than the branding. First, by delivering them together, we would hope to create a unified identity for TH and ATH together as a place for the community to connect. Second, we would want to use the open nature of the Planning work group to create a sense of something built by the Intersect community for itself; and we would use our process of documentation and tracking of ideas, decisions, action items, changes, people involved etc to establish TH/ATH’s identity as an evolving space, but one where ideas are followed up on rather than sinking without trace.

Vision to evolve TH/ATH into the future

SWARM has always helped to set up Town Halls and After Townhalls, working with a community to share learning and skills,define formats and tools, encourage team-building, etc - but the objective was always to not keep things running by SWARM, but to ensure that the TH/ATH becomes independent and is run by its community. We intend to do thew same with Intersect.

To this end, part of our transition plan is to write a “Playbook” for Intersect TH/ATH (a similar concept to the Playbook https://docs.google.com/document/d/10LumIRMm9dwlg6cGxx6KHYUcZfSB4-DahKE06kit8E0/edit?usp=sharing

we wrote for Catalyst ATH, but specific to Intersect and based on what we have learned during this work in 2024.This will provide a resource for whoever comes after us.

The other part of our transition plan is for members of the regular working group that we will facilitate to be part of putting together a proposal to run THs in 2025.

Optional Requirements

Refer to brief to complete this section.

Who is your solution for?

Can you evidence a community need or desire for it? If you can, please provide supporting numbers or data.

A community need has been raised by Intersect itself in requesting Intersect Town Hall and After Town Hall administration and facilitation support in its inclusion and accessibility Fund.

This application specifically addresses the need for a community provision of a Town Hall and After Town Hall space.

The current membership of Intersect is at least 500 (judging by number of Discord accounts) and current Town Hall participation is around 15 to 20 people at each TH. Intersect has just over 3,000 Twitter followers.

This proposal aims to increase active participation drawn from this existing member base, and increase membership.

Planned Technical Features

Please provide detail on the planned technical features, chosen technical stack and implementation (including why) of your solution

Technical features will include open source tools currently used in administration of other communities. Notably, use of GitHub repos, Project boards, GitBook integration, bounties remuneration using Dework.

Overall the technical stack will favor open source solutions extended to enable Community Intellectual property.

Deliverables

Outline the deliverables in your proposed solution, where possible following the milestone guidance as laid out in the requirements.

Applications are evaluated against timeliness of working MVP and against major Cardano Roadmap events, as well as being well considered.*

(Applicant notes: please number each deliverable and provide a short description. For example, 1. Figma design for the user interface.

Facilitating monthly Intersect Town Hall: 8 monthly Town Halls, beginning in June and ending in December 2024
Summaries and tracking for monthly TH sessions: Comprises correcting AI summaries; adding to GitBook; adding action items and decisions to GitHub Project Board and ensuring they're followed up; analysing and tracking key topics, ideas, speakers and attendees to enable high-level analysis of what is happening in Town Halls and who is engaging; identifying gaps and "who and what is missing".
Monthly planning sessions for the Swarm team: a monthly session the week before TH, for the Swarm team to ensure everything is ready, and follow up any tracked action items and decisions. As we progress towards the Intersect community running THs, we’ll open these meetings to those who are taking on work.
Regular (2 sessions per month) Public Town Hall Planning Workgroup sessions: Comprises:
1. publicising the group and inviting people to it;
2. facilitating the workgroup sessions
3. creating slide decks and other materials for THs from members’ ideas
4. bounties for Intersect members to present short slots on their topics
5. training and support to help new members begin to take over facilitation and planning
6. tracking topics arising in the workgroup sessions (incl actions and decisions)
7. documenting community IP on a GitBook
After TH: 8 ATHs, taking place immediately after each TH. Comprises managing signups for breakout rooms, publicising and outreach, support for people delivering breakout rooms, incentives to key groups to run a regular ATH slot, managing and sharing recordings.
Outreach, research, and engagement to encourage community involvement: Comprises conducting outreach at 3 key points (baseline, mid-term, end), which will include existing attendees, working groups and committees, but also will aim to reach Intersect members who are not attending TH or ATH. Methods will include survey, focus group discussion, retrospective, 1-2-1 discussion. Also collating and anonymising the insights and preparing them for analysis.
Participation reports: Comprises 3 participation reports based on our outreach research at start (baseline), end July (mid-term) and late Nov (end), with recommendations and implementation suggestions derived from our community research and from the work of the Planning Workgroup.
Publicity: comprises creation of and sharing of publicity materials for both TH and ATH across whole 8 months.
2025 Proposal: Creating a collective proposal (or separate proposals for TH and ATH) with the community for them to run Th and ATH in 2025.
Intersect Playbook: Creation and sharing of a Playbook, similar to the Catalyst ATH Playbook here https://docs.google.com/document/d/10LumIRMm9dwlg6cGxx6KHYUcZfSB4-DahKE06kit8E0/edit?usp=sharing that describes how Intersect Town Halls and After TownHalls were run, if anyone wanted to implement similar methods.

Acceptance Criteria

For each deliverable, please explain the acceptance criteria (AC).*

(Applicant notes: the AC for a deliverable creates the checklist for testing completeness. During the project, your AC will be used to review your deliverables and trigger payment. Please number each AC to correspond with the appropriate deliverable. For example: 1. A) Application screens illustrate the interface design and main features for the two main user flows. B) Flow 1: Users are able to comment on proposals. C) Flow 2: Users are able to submit a proposal for discussion)

Facilitating monthly Intersect Town Hall: 8 THs are delivered; each month, new people are present and engage with TH; participation in delivering TH increases; overall, attendance rises month on month; feedback forms and other feedback shows 80% satisfaction or higher; any criticisms given in feedback or surfaced via outreach are addressed.
Summaries and tracking for monthly TH sessions: 8 meeting summaries are delivered; each one is accurate; each one is published within 2 weeks of the TH it relates to; there is a clear process for any corrections, and corrections are made within 2 weeks of publication. Action items and decisions arising from TH & ATH are captured and tracked.
Monthly planning sessions for the Swarm team: 8 meetings take place; they are documented; (deliverables will be captured on the public GitHub project board) they result in the plans created in the public planning sessions being delivered in the TH itself.
Regular (2 sessions per month) Public Town Hall Planning Workgroup sessions: Sessions take place twice per month (a total of c. 16 sessions up to the end of 2024); they are widely publicised; across the 8 months, attendees gain knowledge and confidence on how to run a TH and ATH (as assessed by feedback forms and mid-term/end evaluation sessions); attendance at the sessions grows across the 8 months; attendance includes new people who were not previously involved in TH; sessions are well documented, and community IP emerging from the sessions is logged and trackable; community IP is fed into the “Playbook” produced at the end of the year.
After TH: 8 ATHs take place, with at least 3 breakout rooms in each; room hosts report via feedback forms and informal conversations that they felt supported and had everything they needed; any issues are brought to planning meetings and addressed; recordings are uploaded to Youtube and timestamped within 2 weeks; across the 8 months at least some new people who were not previously involved with TH run a breakout room.
Outreach, research, and engagement to encourage community involvement: A range of sections of the community are reached with our outreach; particularly, we reach people who do not attend TH already; we collect feedback and ideas from them; their feedback is collated and anonymised; we feed the feedback into the creation of the Participation Reports
Participation reports: 3 reports are produced that address levels of participation, feedback gathered, issues noted, recommendations to address issues, derived from our community research and from the work of the Planning Workgroup. Reports are widely shared in the Intersect community, including a slot at a TH itself to discuss them; report content is used to inform the planning workgroup’s activities, and the creation of the Playbook.
Publicity : Publicity material created is distinctive, well-designed, suitable for the channels we are sharing it on, and matches Intersect marketing team’s branding. Publicity for each TH and ATH is not generic, but highlights the specifics of what is happening at each one. Publicity is widely shared.
2025 Proposal - A proposal - or if the community prefers, 2 sepatrate proposals - for TH and ATH in 2025 is produced by the whole Planning work group; the proposal addresses any issues that emerged in 2024; the proposal draws on the Intersect TH playbook and the documentation of THs in 2024; the proposal involves handover of TH to the wider Intersect community, with support from the Swarm team as needed.
Intersect Playbook: A Playbook is produced gathering all the knowledge from the process of running Intersect TH and ATH in 2024; the Playbook addresses the unique issues for Intersect TH and ATH; the playbook is widely shared and open-sourced; the playbook is produced in time for it to be used in writing a proposal for THs in 2025.

Estimated Duration and deliverable rationale

Provide an estimated duration and rationale for each deliverable.*

(Applicant notes: for each deliverable, provide a number of weeks. For example: Deliverable 1. 4 weeks)

The deliverables run concurrently over 7 to 8 months from May/June to December 2024.

Facilitating monthly Intersect Town Hall: 7 months. There will be 7 Town Halls, one per month. Town Halls will take place in the 2nd week of each month.
Summaries and tracking for monthly TH sessions: 7 months. There will be 7 summaries, one per month, shared within 2 weeks of the relevant TH
Monthly planning sessions for the Swarm team: 7 months. 1 session per month. The session will take place the 1st week of each month (the week before the Town Hall itself, to finalise any planning)
Regular (2 sessions per month) sessions for a public Town Hall Planning Workgroup: 7 months. |There will be 2 sessions per month, taking place in the 3rd and 4th weeks of the month.
After TH: 7 months. There will be 7 ATHs, one per month, taking place immediately after the TH session. Recordings from breakout rooms will be uploaded and timestamped within 2 weeks.
Outreach, research, and engagement to encourage community involvement: 3 outreach processes - 1 at the start of our tenure in May, to establish some baselines and initial contacts; one in July/August, a survey plus some 1-2-1 conversations with identified individuals, aiming particularly to reach those who don’t engage in TH; one in late November as a retrospective.
Participation reports: 3 reports based on our engagement research: June, mid-August, and early December.
Publicity : Templates and overall design in May, at the start of our tenure. Checked, and revised if needed, in July at mid-term, and additionally, ad-hoc in response to any overall changes to Intersect branding. Publicity will be shared each month, in the week leading up to TH and ATH
2025 Proposal - 4 weeks - mid Nov to mid Dec 2024. Will involve some asynchronous working, and possibly some ad-hoc meetings outside the regular TH/ATH Planning Work Group.
Intersect Playbook: created as an ongoing process across the whole project, via the Planning Workgroup meetings, and finalised and published in mid November, so it can inform the proposal for 2025.

Cost per Deliverable

Please provide the estimated cost per deliverable in ADA, and detailed rationale of spending.*

(Applicant notes: the sum of all deliverable costs should equal the total amount requested. If one deliverable represents overhead costs, it cannot exceed 15% of the total award amount. For example: 1. 15,000 ADA. 30hrs of design time @ 500 ADA/hr)

See budget at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GNhnzSxtgkVZgjSIRBN8arY9XiY1btaDe1xK0hyk62M/edit?usp=sharing

Facilitating monthly Intersect Town Hall: 3,493 ADA This is the core process of facilitating the events to make a participatory and welcoming space, that leads in smoothly to an ATH session.
Summaries and tracking for monthly TH sessions: 3,056 ADA This ensures transparency and accessibility, and means that people who miss a session can easily catch up. It also ensures “organisational memory” - that decisions, action items and ideas are tracked and followed up, that we are aware of participation and gaps in participation, and that IP and ideas emerging from TH is community-owned.
Monthly planning sessions for the Swarm team: 3,056 ADA This is to give our team a space to ensure that work is going smoothly, and to ensure that community input that we have gathered from diverse networking has been properly collated and incorporated.
Regular (2 per month) sessions for a public Town Hall Planning Workgroup. 15,800 ADA This is the largest chunk of our budget, because it is the most important. The regular workshops are where we create assets such a slide decks for the Town Hall itself, and pull together contributions from across the Intersect community. It’s also where we ensure that the process of running TH and ATH is rooted in community participation; that Intersect members are onboarded and supported to take a gradually greater part in the planning and organisation; and that by the end of the year, the community is ready to take over.:
After TH: 4,501 ADA The core process of ATH, comprising promotion and publicity, outreach to engage people in running a breakout room, managing signups, offering support such as co-facilitation or help with planning; managing uploads to YouTube and timestamping; and small bounties for particular communities to run a regular ATH slot to build their community, in the manner of LatAm’s Sala de Café in Catalyst.
Outreach, research, and engagement to encourage community involvement: 4,366 ADA Whist this work will include liaison with existing working groups and committees,to encourage them to make us of TH and ATH to keep the community aware of their activities, it will focus mainly on reaching the many Intersect members who do not attend TH, to find out what the issues are, and how we can enable them to participate. We’ll use a range of outreach and research methodologies, from surveys, to 1-2-1 conversation, to focus groups; and will aim to meet non-participants where they are rather than asking them to come to us.
Participation reports:1,638 ADA These 3 reports - baseline, mid-term, and retrospective - will keep the Intersect community aware of the work we are doing, what our outreach and research has uncovered, and how the TH/ATH working group is responding. These reports will show how TH and ATH are developing in response to community input, and give a foundation for the work that comes after them. The final retrospective will inform the writing of a community-led proposal for TH and ATH in 2025, and the writing of the Intersect Playbook.
Publicity: 1,136 ADA Most of the cost oof our publicity efforts is rolled into our facilitation of the TH and ATH themselves, and the open Planning Group. This budget line covers design and sharing of meeting publicity notifications in key channels such as Discord, Twitter/X, etc.
Community-led writing of a 2025 Proposal 1,316 ADA This is part of our overall aim to hand over the running of the TH to the Intersect community at the end of the year. The aim is for the Intersect community to be the ones to plan and deliver how they want TH and ATh to go in 2025, based on the experience of running it alongside the Swarm team this year. Writing a proposal is quite a task; so it’s important it is rewarded, to incentivise community members to get involved. We have budgeted for one of the Swarm team to be involved as support.
Intersect Playbook: 1,638 ADA This is part of the handover process: an open, community-owned playbook that details everything we have learnt from this project, and which can be used to support the community to deliver TH and ATH in 2025, and by any other group or subgroup that wants to undertake a similar process.

Total 40,000 ADA

Project Team

Please describe the team who will be executing this project by providing their name and summary of relevant experience with links to relevant work examples if applicable.*

(Applicant notes:. focus the skills and experience information only on what is relevant to delivering this proposal. In addition, please provide links to the Ideascale proposals of any successful Project Catalyst funding for the team members. For example: A. First Last. Full stack development (5+yrs). Example work: https://github.com/JaredCorduan/CIPs/tree/voltaire-v1/CIP-1694)

All members in the team have experience organising spaces, facilitating and documenting outcomes.

We will draw on our extensive experience of facilitating meetings around the Cardano community, and our skills developed in Swarm Network

Facilitators Collective https://thefacilitatorscollective.wordpress.com/
Workshops - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp9omscM4Ko7ZVx6vqvgcsQ
Welcoming - The SingularityNET Onboarding Session Video.
Networking (IdeaFest) - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg-1vAkn8bxXzw2Pk8b2fYSB79A-3NDcp
Open Rooms - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg-1vAkn8bxUOEIxYBDLyFEQIvMJgKT2F
Governance Forums - https://catalyst-swarm.gitbook.io/governance-guild/grassroots-governance-community-forums/what-are-the-forums

Felix Weber - Cofounder of Swarm, and mainstay of creating THs and ATHs across Catalyst, numerous Catalyst geographical communities, and SingulartiyNet

Tevo Saks - https://linktr.ee/tevosaks

Vanessa Cardui

https://github.com/VanCardui Community engagement professional with 20+ years' experience of outreach and community -led research, particularly around documentation and archiving. Part of QA-DAO where she led on documenting Catalyst Circle; part of CGO (Community Governance Oversight), where she facilitated meetings and edited the F8 closing report; founding member of The Facilitators’ Collective; member of Governance Guild, where she facilitated meetings and led on documentation; Catalyst Swarm veteran; active in SingularityNET, where she is a core member of the sNET Archives team and part of the DeepFunding Focus Group.

Stephen Whitenstall LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-whitenstall-166727210/ , Twitter: https://twitter.com/qa_dao) is the co-founder of QA-DAO, https://qadao.io/ , and has provided project management consultancy for many Catalyst projects since Fund 4 including Catalyst Circle, Audit Circle, Community Governance Oversight, Training & Automation (with Treasury Guild), Governance Guild and Swarm. A Catalyst Circle V2 representative for funded proposers. Also engaged in cross chain collaboration with SingularityNET managing the SingularityNET Archives.

We will expand based on active contributors from the Intersect and Swarm Communities.

Risk Assessment

Please provide information about the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and your mitigation plan.*

(Applicant notes: to keep it focused on the most important risks, please limit yourself to five or fewer. For example: 1. Web3 login takes longer than expected to develop. Our mitigation will be to design the architecture to work with a Web2 login as a backup plan.)

Risk - that Intersect members will not engage in planning

Mitigation: planning spaces will be held open in a consistent and dependable manner; planning work will be organized in an open and welcoming way; planning spaces will prioritize listening to members to encourage shared ownership and responsibility for planning efforts

Risk - of documentation being late

Mitigation: focus early effort on setting up documentation infrastructure and process; dedicate planning space to clear delegations of responsibility for documentation requirements such as recording/upload, timestamping, gitbook updates, etc.

Risk - that we do not succeed in attracting more, and new, attendees to TH and ATH

Mitigation: leverage WG and committee documentation to give a clear sense of energy and effort taking place in Intersect; keep the edges of the marketing, planning and facilitation efforts open and transparent to potential attendees, members, or participants beyond core Intersect

Risk - FUD around Intersect member, committee/WG, or wider scale Cardano efforts distracts from productive TH/ATH marketing and execution

Mitigation: transparency and communication around documentation and process; clarity of responsibility and accountability for efforts conducted under this grant; professionalism and win/win, infinite games mindset around engaging with others in communication channels; listening as a core skill that is modeled.

Dependencies

If you answered yes to the above, will you plan to integrate or work together with these projects directly? If so, how do you intend to work together?*

No dependencies

Please describe your plan for testing, future updates, user support and maintenance, or indicate if none can be provided

This question is more relevant to software development, and might not be entirely appropriate for a proposal such as this.

Nevertheless, our process of community outreach, research and reporting comprises a type of “testing” process; and so does our GitHub Project Board based documentation oand tracking of decisions, action items, ideas and community IP. The way we plan to integrate this tracking with the open Planning workshops and with the documentation of what happens in each TH and ATH will ensure that

“Future updates” are addressed by our Playbook, and by the process of supporting the Intersect community to write a proposal to run Th and ATh in future, drawing on all the learning from this year.

And “user support” is addressed by our plan to train and support community members to gradually take on facilitation of TH, and our plan to offer support in the form of co-facilitation and help with planning, to people who want to run an ATH but lack the confidence to do so.

Last Thoughts

Lastly, is there anything else you would like to add that will help us understand and evaluate your proposal fairly?

Please note that we are proposing to facilitate *both* TH and ATH in an integrated proposal.

This is because we have found, in our previous work in supporting communities across Catalyst to run THs, that it works best to integrate TH and ATH, at least initially, so that there is a cohesive identity, and so that some of the overheads such as publicity, outreach and reporting can be combined. It also allows us to directly compare participation in TH with participation in ATH, and see if there are learnings to be derived from that; and documentation and tracking can work across the whole endeavour.

Swarm is widely known for its process of kickstarting Town Halls in different communities, offering knowledge, mentorship and practical support which a community can adapt to build a TH identity that suits them - and then withdrawing to let the community run with it independently. Swarm has already successfully done this in Project Catalyst in Africa, Latam, Eastern Hemisphere, Europe, and Pacific regions, and in SingularityNET’s Ambassador Program and DeepFunding Program, so we feel we have the right skills to do it in Intersect too. Typically the process takes 7 to 10 months, which fits with the time frame of this grant.

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References

Last updated 1 month ago