Welcome to the fourteenth Intersect development report! This week’s report includes an update on our new members' area, FAQ’s on the Chang upgrade, community tooling, governance tooling, and more.

So, without further ado, let’s get into this week’s news.

Members area

We are very excited to announce that our Members and Community Committee have been given a sneak peek at our members' area, which will be rolled out to all members in beta on May 29th!

The reception from this pre-release presentation has been hugely positive and provided a great foundation for our membership rollout. The members' area is currently in beta, so the feedback we receive from our pre-release will provide valuable information to help us create the best experience for all our members once the portal is launched to the public.

Stay tuned!

Chang upgrade and future major releases

The hard fork working group has collated key questions around the Chang upgrade and hard forks in general in this frequently asked questions (FAQ) document. Worth a read! Facilitating and coordinating upgrades to core Cardano infrastructure is a big part of what we do at Intersect. Through our members, much of this development involves upgrades to the protocol in major releases - such as hard forks - and you can learn more about it here.

The DRep Pioneer Workshop Leaders Program, as developed in response to governance features outlined in CIP-1694, aims to empower a significant portion of the Cardano community with the requisite expertise to fulfill the role of DReps effectively. Facilitated by Intersect, the program invited applications from qualified member organizations to spearhead comprehensive DRep education courses as Pioneer Workshop Leaders.

The program boasts a diverse cohort of Pioneer Leaders, including Pedro Lucas, Martin Musagara, Ha Nguyen, Cameron Smith, Joao Bosco Ribeiro, Reshma Mohan, Daniela Alvez, Phil Lewis, Eystein Magnus Hansen, Ubio Obu, Jaromir Tesar, Adam Rusch, Jenny Brito, Hosky and Wada Global Ltd.

Selected through a meticulous process, these leaders hail from various regions globally, ensuring a rich tapestry of perspectives and expertise. Each Pioneer Leader is tasked with creating, refining, and delivering DRep training within their respective communities, serving as ambassadors of knowledge and fostering greater understanding and engagement.

Read more here

Marketing working group

Over 100 members (and non-members!) applied to join the new marketing working group, which kicked off last Friday! At the kick-off, the group reviewed its draft purpose and objectives and mentioned a new grant category opening shortly. Soon after, we discussed themes, considerations, objectives, and ideas to factor into the overall strategy work. The group also agreed that a weekly cadence would keep momentum high and improve collaboration.

In the second session, the group recapped the kick-off and shared insights by contributing to a SWOT analysis—capturing all the individual perspectives on Cardano's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Jump into the working group via Discord

Community tooling

Following Community evaluation and MCC ratification, we are pleased to announce the results (subject to contract) of the Inclusion & Accessibility Category (Phase 1):

• SWARM has been awarded the Town Hall & After Town Hall grant, building on its extensive experience running Catalyst After Town Halls and SingularityNET spaces and, crucially, supporting geographical communities in Cardano in developing their Town Halls.
• Jenny Brito has been awarded the position of running two Twitter spaces per month, utilizing the expertise she gained from Cardano Over Coffee X Spaces and her extensive contributions to Cardano’s governance discourse.
• The Open Space award has been split between two applicants:
• Rami Hanania, Cardano Ambassador for the MENA (Middle East and North Africa)/Arabic Speaking Online Community, will focus on inclusivity and adaptability to enhance engagement in the Cardano Community and optimize monthly town hall meetings.
• The Cardano Curation team will create 10 short, engaging videos on Cardano Governance to expand the ecosystem's reach.

Congratulations to all the successful applicants! You can keep up-to-date on their work and other grantee projects by clicking here. We would also like to thank those who expressed an interest in the category and those who supported the evaluation.

Phase 2 of the Inclusion & Accessibility Category, which will comprise the translation of GovTool and the Constitutional Committee Portal, will be launched on Friday, 24th May.

In other news, Daniela Alves and Maria Carmo, based in Brazil, are hosting a virtual workshop on 20th May focusing on decentralized governance. This is in partnership with the Youth of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries. Please click here to join and learn more about the event.

Community hubs

The Japan Hub held its first virtual Town Hall event on Tuesday, 14th May, involving community members. Participants engaged in an interesting discussion on the Cardano roadmap and budget resolution for over two hours. You can watch the recording of the Town Hall event here.

Click here to learn more about the current activities within the Japan and LATAM hubs.

If you're passionate about driving positive change and nurturing community initiatives, we invite you to explore opportunities to apply for a Community Hub grant. Your involvement can catalyze impactful projects and contribute to community growth and enrichment. To apply for a Community Hub grant, click here.

Wallets working group

This week, the Wallets Working Group met for their 8th workshop call (see recording / shared drive). In this meeting, the group discussed;

1. Close out on the work for CIP-0116? | Universal JSON Encoding for Domain Types and CPS-0012? | Query Layer Standardization.
2. Kick-off and discussion of the first draft of CIP-???? | Wallet best practices.
3. First draft + discussion on new wallet connector CIP(s).

Point 1: work falls into the group’s Query Layer Initiative, where efforts to standardize how wallets request data from sources. Part of this has been to create JSON representations for Cardano domain types (CIP-116). Although this could benefit wallet implementers, this standard could see wide application across Cardno’s web-based infrastructure. The next step in this initiative is to start drafting the final query layer standard CIP, with the knowledge gained through CPS-12 (the problem statement describing the motivation for a standardized query layer) and the data types described in CIP-116.

Point 2: this new standard aims to document the best practices for wallet developers to follow to improve security and user experience with their wallets. The group sees this first draft as a step towards a Cardano quality standard, raising and improving wallets for all. The group invites comments and suggestions from all stakeholders. Please feel free to add comments to the GitHub pull request; see the rendered doc (for reading).

Point 3: marks the approach of the final steps to the Wallet Connector initiative, and this initiative aims to produce new wallet connector standards to improve dApp-wallet communication. It kicked off at the start of the year, developing the CPS-10, which describes, in detail, issues the ecosystem has with the current landscape of wallet connectors. This new draft marks the first step to solving the issues described via CPS-10, offering a general extensible framework for Cardano wallet connectors.

Cardano governance in a nutshell - grant update

This week, Intersect members Mike Hornan of ABLE pool and Summon Associations, released their next Cardano governance infographic. This comes from their grant proposal of Cardano Governance in a Nutshell, which aims to demystify some of the trickier details of Cardano’s governance model.

This infographic, titled “The Governance Tree” and created by Mike, describes all the new Cardano-cli governance functionality. It offers readers a one-stop shop for learning all the new Cardano CLI commands to interact with the new governance model. Mike said of this infographic, "In chaos, there is order."

All infographics can be found via the ABLE pool site.

If you want to learn more about Cardano governance or Mike’s process, feel free to join the ABLE pool Discord server. Here, Mike runs weekly governance workshops and shares infographic previews.

Governance tooling

We encourage everyone to keep testing the current implementation of Govtool on sanchogov.tools and to send feedback through the ‘feedback’ function. This feedback helps refine and improve these features and builds up the backlog of new features for the community to work on.

Here are the updated stats for GovTool; please note these stats are cumulative and take into account the period from the last reset to the present:

Additionally, here are the stats for the SanchoNet testnet for this past week:

Events

DRep it like it’s hot - after hang: if you’re in London on Friday, May 24th, between 17:00 and 22:00, then come and join the Claybourhood London meet-up Hosted by Clay Nation, in collaboration with Upstream ADA Stake Pool, Konsensis, ADA North Pool, and Calmdano X Space. Let's celebrate our community and get to know each other with an evening of Pizza pints. It's all happening at The Ship, a spot that's as lively and inviting as our crowd. If you’d like to participate, you can register your interest here. Member meet-ups: through a grant category, we’ve now funded 11 local member meet-ups taking place across the globe over the summer.We’ll share the list in next week’s update!

This week's reminders

In this week's reminders section, we’d like to highlight: Consensus—Intersect will attend Consensus 2024, the world's largest, longest-running, and most influential gathering, bringing together all sides of the cryptocurrency, blockchain, and Web3 community. Supported by Intersect members Genius Yield, Genius X, EMURGO, and Hosky, if you wish to attend, you can get your tickets here and get 15% off your pass using our code - INTERSECTC24

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. Your ideas and suggestions are crucial to us. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please get in touch via email, X, or LinkedIn.