cadCAD Community funding proposal & AMA session

🗃️ Archive 🌱 Conviction Voting
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Hey TEC!

The cadCAD Community has prepared a proposal for funding of key education/communications/operations roles in the community that will allow the number of cadCAD users and the community of TE modelers to grow! But, before going live with conviction voting, wanted to offer up an opportunity to get feedback on this thread, and also connect with anyone who has questions about this proposal, cadCAD the tool, or cadCAD the community in an AMA session.

The session will be held on Monday, March 21st @ 7pm UTC in the cadCAD discord #cadcad-community-call voice channel: https://discord.gg/UAeyc5AA. Add the session to your calendar here.

We hope to see you there!

Thanks!
-cadCAD community

Proposal title

cadCAD Community Funding from the TEC

TL;DR

We are requesting funds to cover a portion of the cadCAD community’s management costs for 6 months to allow for consistent contributions in the areas of education, operations, and communications. These consistent contributions are needed to advance token engineering modeling & simulation tools, and grow the community of Token Engineers with modeling experience.

Proposal description

cadCAD is an open-source Python package that assists in the processes of designing, testing and validating complex systems through simulation. The tool was originally developed by BlockScience for use cases in the Token Engineering space to help users design and build token-based economic systems. If these economic systems are going to be adopted as essential public infrastructure, they will need to be designed and built responsibly with powerful tools like cadCAD. If this sounds familiar, that’s because cadCAD is already being used by many members of the TEC and closely aligned communities like Commons Stack and 1Hive!

Since being open sourced in 2020, all improvements to the codebase and the organization of various community events like community calls and study groups have come from a collective effort of dedicated contributors in the TE space, primarily supported by BlockScience & BSci Labs along with donors from around the world via Gitcoin Grants. This core group of contributors and community members successfully bootstrapped initial adoption, but as efforts from organizations like the TE Academy and TE Commons drive exciting growth of the TE community, the adoption of cadCAD has increased and so have the demands on it’s volunteers.

In order to provide the necessary support to this growing community and drive even more adoption, cadCAD is hiring key contributors to fill official roles and responsibilities within the community. As a result, this proposal is requesting funds to be used as compensation for those community members who fill roles driving the education, communications, and operations initiatives within the cadCAD community.

How does this proposal benefit the community and/or the field of Token Engineering?

With access to funding for community management, the cadCAD community will have consistency in essential offerings in three main areas:

  • Education - An immediate initiative of the cadCAD community (and in partnership with the TE Academy) is to kick off a cadCAD study group. This education offering will allow TE community members a chance to improve their cadCAD skills with the support of peers & exerts, while also contributing content to the cadCAD commons in the form of models, documentation, and research
  • Operations - Maintain & improve community communication and coordination infrastructure. Specifically, the cadCAD website, discord, and telegram
  • Communications - In order to drive further adoption of cadCAD and community growth, there will be regular communications via community updates highlighting new cadCAD use cases and research.

With consistent contributions in these three areas, we imagine building a powerful community of modelers with jobs as Token Engineers who apply their knowledge & skills to further advance the field of Token Engineering & optimize the token economics of communities across web3 - including, obviously, the TEC!

Close alignment between the TEC and cadCAD communities during this next phase of the cadCAD community growth will reinforce the TEC as a schelling point for Token Engineering.

Amount requested (Only for Conviction Voting)

54,000 wxDai to fund 6 months of work for several part-time cadCAD resources.

How will these funds be used? (Only for conviction voting)

In total we are requesting 54,000 wxDai to fund the following responsibilities for 6 mo.

image

The funds will be transferred to the cadCAD Gnosis multisig run by Chris Catoya Executive Director of the cadCAD Foundation and Head of Product at BlockScience Labs, Dr. Michael Zargham and Jeff Emmett of BlockScience, and Tyler Mace, cadCAD Core Tech Contributor and team member at BlockScience Labs.

How will you share progress?

The coordination of all work related to this proposal will happen transparently in our discord. To stay plugged in to progress at the ground-level, we encourage you to drop by our discord and add the public community calendar to drop in on calls!

At a higher-level, however, the community will also be authoring monthly community updates highlighting the work being done in various work streams - website maintenance, bounty program, study groups, community call, documentation, and codebase updates. This monthly community update post will be published to the cadCAD blog, and we can also link it to the TEC forum to make the updates readily accessible to this community!

Project information (if applies)

Team Information

Note: many of the below roles are volunteer or supported by other organizations (BlockScience, BlockScience Labs). Funds from this grant will be disbursed among new & existing part-time contributors requiring compensation.

Chris Catoya (cadCAD director) - funded by BSci Labs
Michael Zargham (cadCAD technical product owner) - funded by BSci
Jeff Emmett (cadCAD volunteer) - funded by BSci
Jessica Zartler (cadCAD volunteer) - funded by BSci
Peter Hacker (cadCAD community call & study group facilitator) - funded by this proposal
cadCAD Community Manager - to be hired - funded by this proposal
cadCAD Infra DevOps - to be hired - funded by this proposal

Funds for this proposal will be sent to the cadCAD Foundation Gnosis Safe address: 0x5041A1C1DCC760337e99B03DB60FeAF5f6f6c802
Keyholders: Chris Catoya, Michael Zargham, Tyler Mace, and Jeff Emmett

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All,
Please support cadCAD-org so we can continue to support the Token Engineering Commons! We hope to make methods and tools for model-based-systems engineering, open source and legible (whether or not cadCAD itself is the tool you end up needing to use to accomplish design, development, operations and governance of complex systems).

As the above minus Matlab – the expensive closed source software systems engineers use

@Heater,
Thanks so much for doing all the legwork to prepare for this proposal. BlockScience has been funding cadCAD software development for years but its also very important that we do community development around the cadCAD org.

Also huge shout out to you @Heater for your work on the cadCAD study group. I’d like to throw out some praise to a few more contributors who are more on the technical side since we’re talking about building out the social side of socio-technical system. Joshua Jodesty (BlockScience) did the heavy lifting on the original cadCAD implementation. Emanuel Lima (BlockScience) and Tyler Mace (BlockScience Labs) are leading on the 1.0 release. We’ve also had tons of support from other engineers from a variety of other orgs. Lastly, I want to thank everyone who has supported our gitcoin grant over the years.

Love.
-Z

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