Welcome to edition 33 - Intersect is growing fast, welcoming more individual and enterprise memberships weekly (including a shout-out this week). This week’s update is another big one: elections, annual members’ meetings, workshops, community grants, and more!

Intersect elections 2024 - Are you eligible to vote?

The application process for candidate submissions is now officially closed. We’d like to thank all those who submitted their applications.

Total applications - in numbers

Note: Applications yet to be validated are from associates who still need to upgrade their membership. Once the validation process has been completed, final figures may vary.

Meet the candidates

We are lucky to have an incredible pool of members to vote for from October 4th, and you can review all candidates and their profiles ahead of time. 

• Committee election candidates
• Board Seat election candidates

To participate in voting, you must be a full (paid) member. Ensure your membership is active or upgraded by today to qualify for standing and voting in the upcoming elections. You can check your membership status in the member area by following these steps.

Upcoming events and spaces

The membership and community committee (MCC) has launched its own X Account (Membership and Community Committee). On September 29, there will be an X Space to meet some MCC election candidates.

We will also be scheduling several X-Spaces in October for you to meet the election candidates. Follow the Intersect to keep up to date with these (they will also be visible in our events list on our member discord channel).

For any membership-related questions, or if you're a candidate wanting to promote your platform, check out Intersect's knowledge base or join the conversation on our Discord channel. Candidates can engage with the community, and the community can ask questions via the dedicated candidate Discord channel.

Membership and community
Intersect is proud to extend a warm welcome to our newest Enterprise members: Anastasia Labs, Bloxico, Byron Network OÜ, Catalyst Africa Townhall, Iagon, Inversion, MIGSO-PCUBED, Women In Move Solutions, and zkFold SA. We are excited to collaborate with each of you and explore new avenues of innovation and growth within the Cardano ecosystem.

As our community expands, we are reminded of the power of collaboration, diversity, and shared goals. Each organization brings unique expertise and insights, enriching our ecosystem and driving us forward on the path toward decentralized governance.

This time last year, our first Founding Members joined us, and Intersect has gone from strength to strength ever since. We are now 3,000+ strong, including over 1,200 paid members (individual or enterprise). Today, we end Founding Membership status, which will be recognized through an NFT to all Founding Members in the coming weeks. 

Thank you to all our members and associates for bringing Intersect this far in such a short time. 

Note: for those who’d like to upgrade their membership from associate to individual or enterprise, log in to your members' area and follow the steps or contact the membership team members@intersectmbo.org!

This week's membership stats are as follows:



Leadership update: transition of interim Executive Director
We want to inform our members and the broader Cardano community that Alex Pestchanker will be stepping down from his appointed interim role as Executive Director at Intersect due to personal reasons. While his time with us in this capacity has been brief, Alex has made meaningful contributions to our operation and wider membership, and we are grateful for his efforts.

Although Alex will no longer be a contributor on our leadership team, he will, of course, continue to be an active part of Cardano, as he has been since 2021. In addition, Alex will support the constitutional program leading up to the highly anticipated convention in Buenos Aires later this year. Thanks again, Alex, and for your continuing contributions to the Cardano community.

Constitutional workshops 

Community engagement remains crucial as we approach the Cardano constitutional convention in December in Buenos Aires. There’s still time to participate and contribute to shaping a constitutional framework that reflects the interests of the Cardano community in three ways:

1. Workshops are still taking place worldwide, so if you’d like to participate, please check the calendar for the full schedule and sign up for one in your area.
2. Meet your convention delegates! Each workshop elects a delegate and alternate who will travel to Buenos Aires in December and represent you at the convention. They listen to and collate community feedback on the draft constitution. See all the delegates and alternates elected so far.
3. If you cannot attend a workshop, we welcome you to submit individual feedback. Feedback will be submitted this way, and the workshop outputs will be reviewed on a best-effort basis.

Check out our knowledge base for more resources and information on the constitutional workshops, including the draft constitution, all workshop dates and locations, essential details for hosts and participants, and the list of elected delegates for the upcoming December convention.

Annual members’ meetings
We are delighted to announce that Intersect will host its inaugural annual members' meetings (AMMs) globally in October 2024. As a not-for-profit organization incorporated in Wyoming, USA, we must hold at least one annual meeting for our members. However, beyond this obligation, we are excited to bring members together, hold retrospectives on Intersect’s first year, and take a peek into 2025 and what next year holds. 

Setting the stage for the future in our first year is an exciting step as our members embrace and navigate Cardano’s new future: a future community-driven through on-chain governance. To have the best opportunity to meet as many members as possible, we’re hosting seven AMMs: six in-person gatherings worldwide and one Special Town Hall virtual meeting.

Location	Community Hub	Date
Tokyo, Japan	Japan	Thursday, October 3
Lisbon, Portugal	Europe	Saturday, October 5
Special Town Hall	Online	Tuesday, October 8
Accra, Ghana	Sub-Saharan Africa	Friday, October 11
Colombo, Sri Lanka	Sri Lanka	Saturday, October 12
Mexico City, Mexico	LATAM	Thursday, October 17
Austin, Texas	North America	Saturday, October 19

Find out more about what to expect at the annual members meetings in this dedicated blog post. You can also read more and RSVP to an event near you, and check out the AMM Q&A Session on Intersect’s YouTube channel - don’t forget to like and subscribe!

Intersect YouTube content
Over the past week, more content has been rolled out on our Intersect YouTube channel! Lily Brodi, Founder of Cattle Daddy Media and currently spearheading Cardano Girls, talked to us at Rare Evo about the important work women have been doing within the ecosystem. In addition, we captured some of the few faces involved within the community, such as hub managers, committee members, and those building on the Cardano blockchain. Check it out here. 

Feel free to subscribe to our channel here and watch for more exciting content in the coming weeks!

Open source 
The Cardano ecosystem continues to grow, with Intersect playing a pivotal role in its open source governance. Intersect is positioning itself as a hub for managing important projects like the Ouroboros protocol and Plutus, which are essential to Cardano's scalability and smart contract capabilities as collaboration and decentralization expand. Efforts to bridge Web2 and Web3 are in motion, with partnerships attracting interest in decentralized systems.

Launching the world's first paid open-source model through the OSC budget proposal is a significant achievement. This initiative, which compensates developers for their contributions, has been instrumental in attracting top talent. Please watch the explainer video on the Intersect Open Source Office YouTube channel. Intersect's membership and increased presence at key industry events, such as the Linux Foundation Annual Members Meeting and LF Decentralized Trust (formerly known as Hyperledger), promotes Cardano’s decentralized approach and fosters cross-chain partnerships.

The Open Source Summit in Vienna was a resounding success, with significant engagement and strong interest from Web2 developers and the introduction of the paid open-source model. Key meetings, including one with Executive Director Daniela Barbosa of Hyperledger, demonstrated the company's growing Influence. Looking ahead, the team is gearing up for upcoming industry events to maintain this momentum.

Follow us on our GitBook, X @IntersectOSO, and YouTube for more updates!

Community hubs
Our community hubs are organizing their annual members' meetings (AMMs), starting next week with the inaugural event in Tokyo on Thursday, October 3, followed shortly by Lisbon, Portugal, on Saturday, October 5. If you want to attend an AMM event, please sign up using our Luma page here. We also have a virtual AMM on October 8, which you can register for using the same Luma link.

Mexico

The Mexico arm of Intersect’s LATAM hub, led by Mauro Andreoli, has been busy with events this week. Two events occurred at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

On September 25, as part of the technology event the Faculty of Engineering organized, several companies, including Amazon and others, presented updates and innovations, with Cardano and Intersect present alongside its community.

Meanwhile, on September 26, the university opened its doors for the Intersect constitutional workshop and the launch of the Intersect Mexico hub, which spoke of the LATAM hub.

Sri Lanka

During the first week of October, our Sri Lankan hub will run a four-hour blockchain workshop for students at the University of Kelaniya’s new Technology Faculty building. The workshop will cover the transformative power of blockchain and provide an overview and introduction to Cardano and Intersect.

Governance tooling
Constitutional Committee Portal (CC-Portal)
The CC-Portal is part of the core governance tools, supporting the critical steps of the Cardano governance process.

The CC-Portal provides access to a user-friendly version of the Cardano constitution (as of now, the interim one), an easy interface for constitutional committee members to create metadata to attach as a rationale to the votes they submit on chain and context about constitutional committee members' votes to the Cardano community.

The CC-Portal is a community tool developed via an Intersect grant, which the Bloxico team was awarded. The CC-Portal, along with other core tools such as the Voltaire GovTool, is currently overseen by the Intersect Governance Tools working group. 

Governance in numbers

As we progress following Chang#1 hard fork, it’s essential to follow the progress of governance actions on-chain here every week. Since last Friday, the 20th of September 2024:

• We've advanced from Epoch 510 to Epoch 512
• Unique delegators increased by 1,318 (6,182 -> 7,500)
• Total number of vote delegations increased by 1,484 (6,792 -> 8,276)
• Total delegate representative (DRep) votes increased by 44 (150 -> 194)
• Total number of DRep registrations increased by 33 (483 -> 516)
• DReps who have attached metadata increased by 14 (241 -> 255)

To learn more about how you can start using GovTool, explore the GovTool documentation. Here, you'll find everything from step-by-step guides to detailed explanations of its features.

On the Intersect discord server, you can connect to the core maintainers of governance tools via the new request channel and the new help & support channel. 

DRep pioneer program
For those curious about the role of DReps or looking to register as one, we encourage you to explore our knowledge base. It provides comprehensive details on the responsibilities of DReps, the registration process, and valuable resources to support you on your journey. Becoming a part of the DRep community has always been challenging with these step-by-step guides and helpful insights.

This week's DReps Pioneer Program stats are as follows:



Community grants

• The GovTool governance action grant is now closed and under evaluation for the next 2 weeks. A subset of the technical steering committee (TSC) will evaluate these applications.
• WADA has completed its grant to translate the interim constitution into French and Swahili. The translations are available here.
• Vespr has completed milestone 3, upgrading the Vespr wallet to support standard functionalities within the Conway ledger era. Details of their milestones can be found here.

We are also excited to share that over the summer, Intersect has awarded grants to support local, in-person meet-ups focused on Intersect and Cardano governance. Here, you will find a blog with photos from the 14 events held worldwide, including in Australia, Portugal, the USA, Estonia, Venezuela, the DRC, Nigeria, Paraguay, Vietnam, and Brazil. These meet-ups created valuable opportunities for individuals to connect, network, and gain insights into Cardano governance, contributing to the growth of both Intersect and the broader Global Cardano Ecosystem.

For a detailed breakdown, visit the grants page.

Delivery assurance
The delivery assurance function within Intersect enhances reliability, fosters trust, and promotes transparency through regular communication. Aligned with the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), delivery assurance upholds technical excellence and supports Cardano's continuity and growth by improving efficiency and ensuring strategic goals are met, ultimately benefiting the Cardano community.

Here are the latest stats from the Delivery assurance team:

If you’d like to explore these milestones more deeply, visit our knowledge base.

 

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.