Welcome all to the 11th installment of our development report! Some of the key highlights this week: key milestones on Cardano’s governance rollout, Cardano’s “core” open source strategy, marketing working group applications, DRep Pioneer Program leaders confirmed, significant additions to our shared knowledge base, and more!

Without further ado, let’s dive in

Update on Cardano’s governance rollout

Earlier this week, we published a key terms and milestones overview - highlighting the governance features coming to Cardano and how on-chain decision-making will be rolled out throughout 2024. Some key takeaways include defining the difference between the “interim period” and “technical bootstrapping phase” and when the community will begin drafting the final constitution. Read more

Core Cardano and its open-source strategy

The Open Source Program Office, steered by Intersect’s Open Source Committee (OSC), has been maturing processes and enhancing stability to effectively steward & maintain over 35 repositories (and growing) under Intersect - including Cardano’s core codebase. The OSC was the first committee established at Intersect and is currently chaired by Tweag, with DQuadrant, IOG, and Adam Dean, among others contributing as sitting members. Earlier this year, the OSC agreed on a strategy to advance Cardano’s open-source project into the future. The documentation is rich and worth a deeper dive for all those interested. Read more

Community Funding

Funding opportunities at Intersect continue to evolve, with new opportunities emerging. While some have focussed on specific tooling, others have centered on improving awareness and accessibility to Cardano’s upcoming governance features. Before we update the current projects, you can learn more and view all our funding opportunities on our knowledge base.

• With the Open grant category, we are excited to mention that the community evaluator working group has reached a consensus regarding the results of this award. The results have been shared with the Membership & Community Committee (MCC) for ratification. We are currently seeking clarification from applicants before sharing the results publicly. We look forward to sharing the latest successful applicants soon.
• The Inclusion & Accessibility category (phase 1) has kicked off the evaluation with a new round of community evaluators who have kindly stepped forward to support evaluating this category. As a reminder, we are looking to award four grants for the following subcategories:
• Intersect Town Halls
• After Town Halls
• Twitter Space
• Open Space

The evaluation will take approximately two weeks to complete and will follow with ratification from the MCC with expected results on Friday, 17th May.

Phase 2 of this category will be out soon. It will focus on translating governance tools into multiple languages, for example: GovTool, Constitution Committee Portal, and the Constitution.

DRep Pioneer Programme

We have an exciting update on candidate selection for the DRep Pioneer program. As you know, we have been hard at work processing the applications, which has taken some time. We received a fantastic response from over 80 applicants, and after careful consideration, we can now reveal that 14 applicants have been selected to join the program. We’ll announce more soon, so watch out for an update in the coming weeks. Of course, we want to encourage as many people as possible to become DReps; this is the entire program's purpose. For those who were not selected, we want to enable them to continue to educate the community on the importance and value of DReps to governance on Cardano. Additionally, we will invite them to participate in the training sessions created by the DRep Pioneers as priority participants in the very first cohort. Exciting times are ahead, and we’re encouraged by the interest in this program and what that means for the strength DReps will have when representing ada holders in the future.

Cardano Continuity Q1 Update

You can now read more about the work being completed by continuity partners in Q1. Tweag, Galois, WellTyped, IOG, VacLabs, and BryonNetwork all delivered against the continuity-defined scope, and continue to contribute throughout 2024.

Behind the scenes, the technical operations & delivery assurance teams have been working hard to help us meet the continuity delivery targets. As part of their commitment to transparency, the team has published a retrospective on Q1, including updates to internal processes and changes for Q2 2024. We will bring this retrospective report to you each quarter, reaffirming our commitment to transparency and trust, peeling back the curtain and outlining some of the functional team's incredible work 'behind the scenes.'

Read more on what work was delivered in Q1, and dive deeper into internal processes and the retrospective here.

Governance tooling

In the past week, the Intersect product team has made the Govtool repository public and the GitHub project public, where everyone can actively track development progress, some feedback collected, and the starting point of the open backlog. This active community involvement is a testament to our shared commitment to the success of the DRep Pioneer Program.

After the latest SanchoNet node update, SanchoNet Govtool, together with the supported wallets, has been updated, and it’s now back online for everyone to test Sanchogov.tools.

The moment SanchoNet was back online we saw people testing, here are the latest stats:

In other exciting news, the ByronNetwork team has completed developing five the new features and improvements coming to Sanchogov.tools:

• New DRep registration, which provides a structured and guided process to register as a DRep and add extra context in the form of metadata
• DRep Directory, which will allow everyone to easily find registered DReps, check their details submitted on-chain as metadata, and delegate to them
• Direct Voter, which allows everyone to register to be able to vote with their voting power directly
• Governance Action Submission provides a simple process for submitting Governance Actions on-chain, starting from info and treasury actions.
• New vote context, which gives DReps a simple way to add context to their vote when submitting it on-chain

These are now being tested before being soon available on Sanchogov.tools. The community can keep track of new features in the latest roadmap section on docs.sanchogov.tools.

Cardano Buidler Fest #1

This week our open-source program office, technical and community reps were in Toulouse for Buidl 2024 - a two-day developer-focused event organized by Arnaud Bailley of IOG and Matthias Benkort of the Cardano Foundation. Capping off an incredible two days, the excitement and demand for dev-centric events testify to the global impact of Cardano and the dev community. It was a fantastic opportunity to connect with over 100 Cardano developers, long-term builders, and beyond. Recapping at the end of day two, it was apparent demand was high to follow up with Buidl 2. We’ll be polling members to see if this is something Intersect should support! PRAGMA announced At the start of Buidl, after two intense days of knowledge sharing, problem-solving, and ideation, PRAGMA, a new open-source association, was announced! On day two, the five founding members hosted a whiteboarding session to explore their ideas and plans for 2025. PRAGMA will initially host two projects; the well-loved Aiken and Amaru - a rust node client for Cardano. Later in 2025, we can expect more projects to be welcomed and membership expanded. Through its members, Intersect plays a leading role in orchestrating and enhancing Cardano’s core open-source technology, including funding opportunities, and driving the rollout of Cardano’s on- and off-chain governance.

In the era of Voltaire, a healthy Cardano has resilience and scalability through distributed open development and decentralized governance. With on-chain decision-making coming later this year, the emergence of hyper-focussed associations like PRAGMA is critical to fostering global & open collaboration and, ultimately, ecosystem growth.

Essential Cardano360

Catch up with our update in April’s Essential Cardano360! In this episode, we have updates from Gemma Dakin, our head of community Grants, and our committees and working groups, including Intersect members: Kevin Hammond - Technical Services Committee Chair, Adam Rusch - Ecosystem Process Design Working Group Lead, Christian Taylor - Head of the open source program office, and Mark Byers - Members and Community Committee. We’d like to thank everyone who recorded the sessions; your insights are highly valued and appreciated.

You can view our Essential Cardano 360 feature here

This week's reminders

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

• Applications for the Community Engagement Manager role have now closed. Thanks to all those who applied, and we’ll be in contact with all applicants soon.
• Our knowledge base continues to expand. Here, we publish updates and progress as fast as we can.

Well, that’s it for this week's update. Thanks for reading!

And finally, we’re 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.