Week ending Sept. 16th

Open for Business:The PA/vPA Operations Treasury Community is up and running and has successfully approved its first applicant (for funding a new tool for PAs), as well as chartered its first governing body (a vPA Working Group) which is already off to a fast start facilitating the community owned vPA Petitions Process! Check out the highlights below and follow this link for more details.

• AIM successfully approved for its PA ID-Finder tool

• vPA Process Working Group Charter accepted by the Treasury

• 2/3 vPA petitions completed with the last one nearing finalization

• vPA working group has begun to build out the architecture around bounties for its members

Elsewhere in the QA Community this TODO List for getting a jumpstart on the process of iterating Community Guidelines for Fund 10 has been making the rounds. Add your thoughts and insights, and lets keep pushing to get the process organized, coordinated and functioning (and funded through the PA/vPA treasury!) Any doubts? Suggestions? Let the community know via PA/vPA telegram chat or discord channel here.

Claims updates

To avoid confusion, submissions for funding to the PA/vPA Treasury are called "claims" rather than "proposals", but you will find that they will often have a lot in common with proposals in Catalyst.

• Community toolmakers AIM submitted and were approved for their tool PA ID-Finder.

• Read about the proposal here, and note the community created Administrative Review that was submitted, as well as the discussion around the claim in that thread.
• Follow the progress of the project on Dework, where the task describes contacts for the project, the results of the vote and how and when it was held. It also includes the data on how long the "rapid-funding" process took... 8 days and 22 hours for the first try, and our goal is to cut down on that significantly for most claims.

How to get involved

• Do you want to build something for the QA community or are you contributing in other ways? Check out Section 6 of the Treasury Governance Framework to see if your efforts might overlap with the funding objectives of the PA/vPA Treasury.
• All claims against the Treasury begin as discussions, and you are encouraged to run ideas by community members, and get tips and pointers on how to structure or submit claims, or just design your own claim and submit it in the main discussion thread. Community members will help you from there.

vPA Working Group updates

The vPA WG (formally called the vPA Process Working Group for the PA/vPA Operations Treasury) is a chartered governing body for the Treasury. As such it has access to streamlined funding for specific tasks, and adds one member to the Treasury Board of Trustees (the Trustees are responsible for locking down the Treasury in the event of an attack, acting as a final assurance that all required processes have been followed, and of working to distribute the governance of the Treasury to its edges).

• You can check out the Charter and community recommendation for approval of the Charter here.
• The scope and purpose of this WG is described in the above charter:

The purpose of the vPA Process Working Group is to facilitate and coordinate individual contribution to collaborative tasks related to maintaining the integrity of the veteran Proposal Assessor process in Project Catalyst when those contributing individuals are to be compensated from the PA/vPA Operations Treasury.

This working group is needed because the vPA process is rapid, complex and iterative, and therefore would benefit from an open, organized pool of contributors who are prepared to carry out tasks within shortened timeframes, but who need appropriate incentives, coordinated approaches and facilitative access to the tasks at hand.

• The vPA WG is currently working on setting up bounties for distributed work, creating documentation repos on Gitbook, and facilitating the vPA Petitions Process (see below).
• Significant tasks on the near horizon for the vPA WG are convening its first meeting, onboarding community members actively working on the iteration of vPA and related guidelines, and electing or otherwise selecting a Trustee to add to the Treasury board of trustees (see here for some perspective on how the Treasury Community reciprocates with its Trustees).

How to get involved

The vPA WG is required to allow unlimited membership without restrictions, so don't think that you have to be a vPA to contribute! If you care about the integrity and outcomes of the vPA process, then your contributions to the WG are welcome. The best place to check in with them is via their main discussion channel for now (ask for @DanMercurius). And if you needed reminded, the purpose of the WG is not just to coordinate and facilitate, but to do these things in order to create accountable funding mechanisms for the QA community. In other words, the WG is able to pay to sustain critical effort in the ecosystem.

• If you are interested in working on iterating guidelines in the community, definitely get in touch with the WG, as this is a major task that needs attention soon.

• Do you have other ideas that align with the purpose listed above? Bring your ideas to the group and develop a path forward!

vPA Petitions Process updates

The vPA Petitions Process (documented here) is a limited time and scope process introduced by the community to collect information about issues found during the vPA process, in particular issues around rewards distribution. This information is collated via discussion around "petitions" submitted by community members, and then presented to IOG with a requested outcome. Sometimes the outcomes are realized, sometimes not, but we always learn something that can help us improve the vPA process.

The first 2 petitions have been completed and are ready to be sent on to IOG

• Petition by Michael Macko
• Petition by Tomi Astikainen

A final petition is currently ongoing, brought against Dimitri Fernando (see his initial responses here, and know that this is an ongoing discussion). It is currently halfway through an async process designed by the Petitions process facilitator. The petitioners presented their petition and the data around it first, and you can see that presentation here. Currently Dimitri will be presenting his side in a presentation on Friday, which should give a full picture of the case as well as the issues observed and possible outcomes for the community to consider. Soon after this second presentation, a vote will be scheduled to collect a final layer of community input. Follow along here for the latest updates, including when voting on the petition is open. Hoping for plenty of participation and insight from the community on the issues sensed here.

UPDATE: The last petition has completed presentations of evidence and community voting is live with both anonymous and non-anonymous poll options. The vote is open until 0300UTC tomorrow (Saturday). As with all things Catalyst, voting is an important stage in informing processes, and often marks new stages of auditing and studying results and outcomes.

General QA and Treasury Community updates

There is an active document in the community that can be the launch point for our efforts to coordinate the changes to the Proposer, PA and vPA guidelines for Fund 10. This is becoming a critical piece of the community governance puzzle, and is an area where we can actively carve out the community's role from IOG oversight over time.

• Obviously the Treasury Community is rolling out this Bi-weekly update to be released on the 1st and 3rd Friday of each month via the Project Catalyst newsletter, but it is also the beginning of a process to migrate the existing Treasury Documentation over to Gitbook as required by our Governance Framework. This should help us on our journey to make the Treasury as accessible as possible.
• Check out this suggestion for 2 stage PA process that has been circulating and catching feedback. This is an idea that has been around the community for a while, and this latest description has added numerous improvements.
• A friendly reminder that the Treasury Community has a Code of Conduct and we appreciate anyone engaging in the claims process, working groups or general communication channels for these things to be aware of it and to follow it. It has been designed with a "light touch" and while there is a mediation path provided, it does not currently include an enforcement mechanism, relying instead on the power of an informed community taking responsibility for its own environment. Like all experiments, we will see how it goes. As with all Treasury documentation, there is a process for revising the CoC, which is there to make sure that the conditions required for our participation are always being cultivated.

Action items

• Conclude the vPA Petitions Process for Fund 9

• Onboard more Working Group members to iterate documentation

• Convene 1st vPA WG meeting and select a Trustee

• Fund first bounties for WG tasks

• Settle funding claim for PA ID-Finder upon project completion

• Moar claims!

Next Steps: Having clear action items in the community can make the difference between practical and pointless. The items above are only some possibilities for impact and positive, iterative growth and outcomes. Let's get some of them checked off before the next update!