Vote on Intersect Budget Process Framework

I am voting YES on the governance action with hash e9693ed6b6465b2b46daaf641486a12b4b2946081634b5967b9d98897b0598fa#0.

The metadata for my vote is located here, and this blog serves as a more human-readable form of that justification.

Justification

I believe the proposed budget process is well thought out and will result in net positive benefit to the Cardano ecosystem.

However, I maintain several reservations. I would hope that Intersect incorporates the following pieces of feedback, provided they judge these suggestions as not sufficiently deviant from the spirit of their proposal to require a separate vote.

First, I agree with KtorZ’s analysis that the framing of this proposal subconciously views this as “the” budget process for Cardano, even while leaving room for “other” budget proposals. The language repeatedly frames it this way (the title of the proposal, references to “the” budgeting cycle, etc., and even structurally assuming that Intersect is entitled to “the rest” of the NCL). After several conversations with members of Intersect, I do believe this is unintentional, but it’s an unconcious bias that I believe Intersect should control for in their implementation of the proposed budget process.

Second, I believe Intersects budget process should not seek to define a net change limit for the Cardano Treasury, I believe that is the remit of the DReps entirely. Instead, they should define their budgetary limit, justify it based on the impact they want to effectuate, and then relate that to the global network NCL.

Third, I believe the intention of the “work package” based budgeting is to push back against omnibus proposals, but the proposal does not use clear enough language to this effect. I believe Intersect administrators should reserve the right to make judgement on the “cohesive value” of a work package, and work with vendors to break unrelated and independent projects into separate proposals that can be voted on independently by DReps during the Ekklesia voting stage.

Fourth, I believe the waterfall funding mechanism, borrowed from Catalyst, will prove just as damaging as it has been in Catalyst. It is damaging in both directions: projects that can expect a high degree of popularity are incentivized to inflate their ask, because there is plenty of room for them to crowd out other projects; and smaller, lessk known projects are forced to race to the bottom on price in the hopes that they’ll be able to “fill in the gaps”. It may be too large a deviation to change this, but I would encourage you to rethink this structure for future years.

Overall, I believe the proposal is a good one, and I’m excited to see it’s impact, specifically with a new focus on KPIs and Impact, and I hope the above reservations will be carefully considered.

As a reminder, you can find my values here.

Here is how I evaluate this proposal against each of my values:

1. Integrity -

2. Freedom -

3. Social Good -

4. Technical Soundness -

5. Economic Soundness -

6. Effective Discourse -

7. Transparency -

8. Flexibility -