Close Out Report

Project Details

Project Name

Cardano Ambassador Workshop - Europe

Project Number

1300033

Date started

February 2025

Date completed

December 2025

Links

IdeaScale/Fund pageMilestones

Project Manager: Felix Weber

Challenge KPIs & How Addressed

The Challenge KPIs of the “Cardano-Open: Ecosystem” had been stated as: Cardano Governance working groups

• Cardano marketing initiatives and public outreach
• Community hackathons and builder outreach (in person and virtual)
• Content and education creation/curation
• Mentorship and collaboration
• Education advancement
• Local policy, standards, and regulation formulations

This project addressed these mainly by focusing on

• Community hackathons and builder outreach (in person and virtual)
  - in-person community/builder space, similar to the well known Cardano Buidler Fest but in smaller scope and focused on the Cardano Ambassador Community
• Mentorship and collaboration
  - direct collaboration with Ambassadors as well as with the Cardano Foundation Community Team
• Education advancement
  - directly aiming to further educate highly active and present Ambassadors with workshop sessions, ideas & content

To address these objectives, following KPIs/OKRs can match well to define the success:

• Ideate, develop and execute a new concept for Cardano Ambassador in-person Workshops
• Collaborate with the Ambassadors Community and the Cardano Foundation to ideate, design and host the Workshop

Project KPIs & Delivery

The Project KPIs have been formalised in the proposal Milestones, such as:

• Milestone 1: Complete onboarding process for funded proposal and setup administration to coordinate and execute the proposal
• Milestone 2: Event preparation and setup a communication hub to communicate with event collaborators and participants
• Milestone 3: Hosting the Ambassadors Event

We addressed all project KPIs, the execution of all Milestones via completing & reporting the respectful Milestones accordingly

Key achievements

1. With the Proposal

Main achievement is surely the fact that we actually completed the proposal, all its objectives and KPIs. The proposal helped a load to experiment and establish a new Ambassador Workshop format, a simple, effective and great initiative wich helps to improve and support the Cardano Ambassadors program as a fully community driven initiative, By Ambassadors - For Ambassadors.

2. With Ambassadors

Key achievements have been specially fruitful around the collaboration and coordination of the participating Cardano Ambassador in different roles from ideation to execution, whereby Ambassadors engaged at the earliest stage to help in making the event a success.

3. With the Cardano Foundation

The CF Community Team, especially Sebastian Aravena, Manager of the Ambassadors Program, was sticking closely to communicate and coordinate the event together with the Ambassadors and Sebastian provided a wealth of helpful support.

Key learnings

1. Major lessons & learnings from the Project

• Ambassador Proposals via Catalyst

  Ambassadors can ask funding for, the hosting of an in-person workshop over multiple days is definitely a currently out-of-the-scope project which the Ambassadors budget wouldn't be able to cover. Having Project Catalyst as a place to go where Ambassadors can bootstrap new initiatives is, indeed, quite effective. The proposal has been a success and completed, the event was an awesome time for present folks and we now have what needed to address the Cardano Foundation and to make the point of a validated concept of Ambassador Workshops which now needs their attention and eventual resources for further roll outs.

2. Major lessons & learnings from the Event

• Less is more

  Having a relatively small group over a long time (13 ppl for 4 days) while off the grid is a perfect setup with little noise and distraction around, allowing it to easily create a very familiar and intimate setup, the venue which was the perfect place with the cosy setup, rooms, catering, fireplaces etc further helped to have a space which feels more like a home than a hotel. Non-overscheduled days with enough chill time for ppl to really connect is another time proving that, at times, less-is-(indeed)-more.

• Ambassadors are awesome ppl

  We have loads of communities and groups within the Cardano Ecosystem, and the Cardano Ambassadors program is surely on the communities with an insanely high quality of members, deeply rooted and committed folks, on the ground day in and out, having a group of such ppl coming a first time together in real time was a blast, you can image the quality and depth of conversations which took place, the connections which have been built.

• Keep it simple

  For organising the workshop and everything, not more than 1 - 2 ppl were necessary. Its not needed to have a whole “Team” organising and hosting workshops. Organisation and administration can be kept as simple as possible, reducing overhead and needed internal coordination.

Next steps

Since this project was to bootstrap the event and to validate the concept, we now indeed continue conversations with the Cardano Foundation with the objective to align together with the CF to support further Ambassador Workshops in the future and to ensure that Ambassadors Workshops stay a close collaborational effort between the CF and the Cardano Ambassadors community.

Furthermore, we will continue to explore how this low-budget workshops can be funded most effectively, either through sources such as Project Catalyst, Intersect or directly via the Cardano Foundation

Final thoughts/comments

As already mentioned, this proposal was a great thing indeed to enable some resources to kick off new initiatives to support the Cardano Ambassadors as a community driven initiative.