Welcome all! It’s a pleasure to be able to return with another Intersect development update! As always, it’s been a busy week. With so much happening across the membership base, whether in committees or working groups, to events and governance developments, bringing it up to the surface is a constant challenge. This week’s update spotlights a new Cardano backlog working group, the new Technical Steering Committee space, and an exciting new marketing working group! Plus, we’ve got more on member orientation, grants, Intersect in Tokyo, and more.

Backlog Ecosystem Process Design working group

In February of this year, the Civics Committee chaired a workshop in London, focusing on ideating and mapping high-level design and processes. Initially referred to as the ecosystem process design working group, the group considered how the Cardano backlog and development roadmap could leverage greater distributed development through Intersect’s member-based structure.

The working group will support two of Intersect’s core pillars: orchestrating the delivery of the community-approved Cardano Roadmap and facilitating Cardano's continuity for system stability. It will start with what Cardano continuity and backlog could include in 2025. This working group, and potentially a committee change, will contribute and input to the proposed budget for Cardano at the Annual Members Meeting. We’ll continue to update you on this story as it develops.

Technical Steering Committee (TSC) knowledge base update

As we move closer to on-chain decision-making (as described in CIP-1694), the TSC will play an integral role, ensuring that the governance of Cardano is based upon sound technical awareness and best practices. The concept of this committee, its members, and how it makes its recommendations via sub-committees such as the Parameter committee are still in progress, however, a new dedicated section on our ever-expanding knowledge base goes into more detail. It details how the committee will evolve over the coming weeks and months.

New Cardano marketing working group

A recent recurring theme across the ecosystem has been a desire to amplify, coordinate, and expedite our collective marketing power by collaborating on a comprehensive marketing strategy for Cardano. Aiming to capture all verticals and domains across the ecosystem, Intersect member Anastasia Labs, spearheaded by MLaden LM, applied to start the group and will be supported heavily by Intersect’s marketing team.

The new Marketing working group will call for members and outside contributors in the coming days to ideate and deliver an actionable and funded marketing strategy via new grants with the potential to utilize treasury funding later this year. Watch this space!

Community Tooling

Funding opportunities continue to expand, launching numerous initiatives to empower our members and propel Cardano's governance rollout. Before we jump to it, a quick note on milestone-based reporting and current projects in-flight:

Milestone based reporting

Milestone-based reporting is a crucial step towards enhancing transparency and accountability. Inspired by Project Catalyst, it provides a clear path for funded projects to deliver on their promises, fostering trust and engagement within the community.

This new Intersect Community Grants page on our knowledge base lets you view any current grant projects, including their milestones. Here we will continue to showcase our grantees' achievements and their coming updates.

For now, we’d like to highlight:

Daniela Alves and Maria Carmo from GovChainLab have achieved the first milestone in their education and multimedia grant to Make Cardano governance clear and accessible to everyone within the Portuguese-speaking community.

You can review their proposal and milestones here. And if you’re a Portuguese-speaking member, you can now read our Dev Updates and other Intersect news and blogs in Portuguese! Check it out here.

Evaluation of Grant Open Category

Since the official close of the Open category, we have been working closely with the community pilot evaluation group (via the Membership and Community committee) to select the proposals that will progress accordingly.

Working to streamline the selection process, we look forward to announcing the results of the chosen projects at the end of April after the MCC has ratified them.

DReps

We have been overwhelmed by the number of responses we have received for the DRep Pioneer Program. With close to 100 applications coming through, the interest has been outstanding, and it is a testament to the level of engagement with Cardano’s on-chain governance.

The application process for this program closed on Friday, April 5th, and we are officially at the evaluation stage. Successful applicants will be announced at the end of April.

Inclusion and Accessibility

We are excited to mention that, following up on the grant evaluation working group we put together in March, we will now open the group again for all who are interested in helping to support the evaluation of the Inclusion and Accessibility Grant category. The group closes on Friday, April 19th.

Please note that you cannot participate in this evaluation if you have applied to the inclusion and accessibility category.

If you’re interested in participating in the group, please complete theapplication form as soon as possible. If you have any questions, please drop an email to grants@intersectmbo.org.

DevOps for Governance Tools

The Governance tools that will allow everyone to participate in governing Cardano are currently in development and open for beta testing in sanchogov.tools. As we progress in decentralizing the development and maintenance of these tools to be owned by the community, we are opening a grant to award a contract to a company in the community to own and manage the software development operations.
Please review the requirements and directions for applying here.

Governance tooling

The Byron Network team is completing this week the development of the DRep Directory feature, which will allow users to search for DReps and delegate easily, and the Governance Actions submission feature, which will provide a structured, simple process to submit ‘info’ and ‘treasury’ actions on-chain. Once thoroughly tested, these features will be released for beta testing on Sanchogov.tools.

We want to thank the users who have participated in the small usability testing the Intersect Product team ran last week to validate the new Govtool Proposal discussion area. This week, the usability testing results have been analyzed, and the WeDeliver team is now incorporating the user interface adjustments to start implementation.

Furthermore, in our continuous effort to distribute the development and maintenance of the governance tools, the Byron Network team, the WeDeliver team, and the Bloxico team, with the support of the Intersect Product team, have started to create an open library of components that will allow these different builders to work together on Govtool and, in the future, allow anyone to contribute to its development.

If you would like to participate in refining how to distribute and decentralize the ownership and development of these Governance tools, please join the Governance Tools working group (Join our Discord channel - register for our next call).

Here are this week's GovTool stats:

Regarding the GovTool stats, our development team has been working on a live dashboard that users can access directly from the GovTool website in the coming days - Here is a preview of what to expect. (note the values used in the preview are dummy values for demonstration purposes).

SanchoNet

This week, the SanchoNet community consented to install node 8.10, which adds significant features to the governance testnet. SanchoNet will need to reset to install the node, which, at the time of writing, has been scheduled for the end of this week.

Node 8.10 supports a new cost model for Plutus v3 and new Plutus byte string primitives. The Constitution Committee quorum has been renamed to the threshold in the CLI, and a new economic parameter, minFeeRefScriptCostPerByte, has been added for reference scripts. This version of the node also adds support for reference scripts in the Conway era.

Here are this week's SanchoNet Stats:

Update from Teamz - Japan

This weekend, Intersect returns to Tokyo for the Teamz blockchain event.

Among many workshops, local member meet-ups, and networking opportunities at the event, Director of Marketing and Communications Jack Briggs will give a keynote speech on the main stage at 14:00 JST on April 13.

The New Japan Community Hub is coming

Fostering and enabling a global community has been a cornerstone of Intersect's strategy since its inception. The convergence of individuals from diverse corners of the world is a testament to Cardano's global power. Building on the Teamz event, we’re excited to announce the Intersect Japanese Community Hub, which will be spearheaded by Intersect members Yuta and Yuri.

The Intersect Japanese Community Hub presents an exciting opportunity for local members to meet, collaborate, and enrich Cardano’s spiritual home. We look forward to supporting Yuta, Yuri and all Japanese members as we build the hub and bring together some of the longest-standing contributors to the Cardano ecosystem.

This week's reminders

In this week's reminders section, we’d like to highlight:

• We’re recruiting - We’re seeking a Community Engagement Manager to support the rollout and consultation process. Intersect members are encouraged to apply, and there’s one week left before applications close. Learn more about the role here.
• Our knowledge base continues to expand. Here, we publish updates and progress as fast as we can.
• Our April town hall meeting will be held on 30th April at 16:00 UTC. Here we will discuss community events, funding opportunities, and other important topics you want to be involved with. Please register here if you’d like to participate.
  

Well, that’s it for this week's update. Thanks for reading! We look forward to the next update, including a recap from our team in Tokyo and information on our other member schemes. You definitely will not want to miss it!

We’re always interested in hearing more from you about subjects important to you, such as Cardano’s governance. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please get in touch via email, X, or LinkedIn.