Catdet WG - LFGrow! 
Mission: To grow the Catdets corps and shower all cats with love.
How we operate
Fundamentally we don’t believe in creating solutions to problems that don’t exist, and we believe in leveraging strengths and synergies across different groups to maximally achieve any aim. The Catdet WG will work closely with CWG, the team and other WGs to achieve our mission and help them achieve theirs so that together J.U.P can move towards the meta.
The Genesis of Catdets
To give an example of this in action, the first seeds of the Catdet WG were actually planted by meow and the Jupiter team, when they started off with both the Catdet and Cats of Culture roles in Jupiter’s Discord. The idea was to highlight helpful members of the community so as to encourage everyone to learn more about Jupiter while helping new cats at the same time. This allowed Jupiter to develop many active contributors in the Discord who were deeply connected with the Jupiter ethos, who cared for other members of the community and helped to lighten the Moderator and Team’s loads when it came to fielding answers to the wide range of questions that often came in from the newcomers.
Hold on… what even is a Catdet?
It is honestly quite hard to objectively define what a Catdet is. If you ask different people in Jupiter, they will probably give you different answers, although there will be things in common that come up. Catdets are certainly helpful, caring, honest, fair and somewhat idealistic because you need at least a bit of that to truly believe in the meta. Some may think that you need to be highly agreeable to become a Catdet. That’s actually far from the truth and there have been many Catdets who have been really argumentative and disagreeable on many matters. I think the core idea here, to echo meow and Kemosabe and Slorg on this, would be that Catdets are learners at heart, and a good learner is always open-minded and listens to others sincerely.
Anyway the other day I sat down as well and tried hard to describe a Catdet and the best I could come up with is this poem:
Jupiter’s Catdets
In Jupiter’s orbit, we are learning, rousingly.
Imperfection’s our guide, in growth, we take pride.
Kind hearts, clear skies, cats and mice,
Shadows of spite, surrender,
with insight we shine.
In dialogue, we dance,
not a glance at disgrace.
With words, we embrace,
no fury in our Space.
Intellectual diversity thrives,
money ain’t the only drive.
Our creative sparks ignite,
when motives align just right.
Unique are our pounces, onto the galaxies’ gentleness.
Eager to learn, to be better, in the infinite horizon.
What do you guys think? Does this encapsulate what being a Catdet means to you? Let us know in the replies below. For a musical rendition of this, check out what Scarlet made.
Growing the Catdet Culture
So one of the things that I have been helping the team with since then was to grow the Catdet corps in Discord by providing some guidelines to Cats of Culture for how to select Catdets and then doing regular checks on the activities of members and course-correcting where necessary so as to continue to preserve and strengthen the Catdet ethos and culture.
The core Catdet WG members will continue to take on this responsibility in the Discord. One of the idea we are keen to explore more of is how to extend the Catdet corps beyond the Discord itself, into the forums and also other channels such as X and Reddit.
There are also other important process-questions we want to answer together with the community through this trial Catdet Workgroup process. Some examples are below:
- How can we improve the current process of Catdet “selection”?
- The existing process is that Cats of Culture or any team member can select someone as a Catdet.
- What makes someone suitable to be a “Cats of Culture”?
- The existing process is via nomination from any Cats of Culture and with a final decision from myself, any team members or any of the other Jupiter Work Group members.
- How do we select for a Catdet Workgroup Core Contributor?
- The current Catdet Workgroup core contributors are selected via a pre-trial period of 8 weeks, where ideas were gathered in a community/public Trello board (Trello) and then those who were keen came forth to volunteer their time and efforts to test things out. The eventual shortlist of members was selected by me taking into factors like quality/quantity of output, their related web3 & web2 backgrounds, how well we were able to work together as well as their availabilities and asks.
Another problem the Catdet WG tackled
Another example of the Catdet WG in action was how we arrived at the current Weekly Updates that you see in the Discord. So after many weeks of observing the Discord and hearing feedback from everyone, one of the problems we noticed on the ground was that people often lost track of discussions and they found it hard to keep up with what’s happening in the space if they were not glued to the Discord all the time. This was an important problem to tackle because if the community was not moving together and kept up-to-date on the latest happenings in the Jupiverse then the discussions in Discord could quickly become fragmented and repetitive.
Posting Weekly Updates
So one of the things Cas came up with was to use ChatGPT to crawl and summarise some of the content/discussion in the Discord. That eventually grew into the Weekly Updates in its current form we have been posting for the past 7 weeks. We also worked with Slorg (CWG member) to come up with the current Get Started guide that’s posted in https://station.jup.ag/JUP/Get-Started. In the future we look forward to working closely with the other WGs as well to help synthesise key information in the Discord and help get these posted in different places.
Ideas we are still cooking in the lab
Beyond these, we also tested several other concepts/ideas such as a Catdet X Army, where Rolex played a huge part in its formation initially alongside several other CoCs including catoshi and Easy E, and also the idea of hosting classes/events in the Discord (by Catdets, for all cats).
J4J - Cats of Culture are catdets who contribute above and beyond to J.U.P
Catdet X Army
For the X army, we saw it as a great opportunity to utilise the strength-in-numbers that Catdets have to help amplify Jupiter’s messaging across X on all fronts. Rolex with his experience as engagement lead for Mad Lads council taught the group how to take advantage of the X algorithm to craft posts that help do that. We have had a few successful tweets that generated close to a 100k impressions, not bad considering that it was just a trial group of around 17 Catdets that we started with. We can’t wait to explore the potential of this idea further, perhaps even spinning up a Catdet Twitter, as we expand into hundreds and thousands of Catdets. We want to work closely with the community to re-evaluate the feasibility and potential of these ideas before diving into them further.
Events and Classes
As for the trial classes, SirNayNay (who is now one of the core contributors for the jup.eco WG) kindly volunteered to run some ChatGPT classes for fellow Catdets. This received a pretty good reception and he hosted 2 classes for everyone. The feedback was great and I think the community enjoyed learning together and exploring ways to improve productivity. We see a wide range of talents in the Jupiter ecosystem and lots of passionate people willing to share their knowledge with one another. In the #mockJUP channel there was also a similar trial experience going on where Tommy led the zer0s to take part in fitness regimes and workouts. He has run 5 sessions so far with the zer0s and it is just one of those things that is really helpful for web3 folks who sit in front of the computer a lot and may lack the motivation to workout/exercise. I think there are a lot of opportunities for the Catdet WG to discover the talents within the Jupiter Ecosystem, get people sharing their knowledge and create a community of learners. To paraphrase Armani from Backpack, community is not about coming into say GM in the chat, it’s about building and caring for each other. What better way is there to achieve that than to get everyone understanding each others’ strengths and helping each other to grow as a community?
There are probably a ton of other ideas we can explore as the Catdet corps grow. meow was suggesting that the Catdets could play a huge role in filtering a Catdet Token list for Jupiter as well. That’s really exciting, if you ask me, because it starts to unlock the power in a community of people with clear values and alignment to Jupiter’s ethos and the meta.
That said, all these are just ideas, with some of them currently incubating. We want to hear more, from YOU. That is the whole purpose of this trial workgroup process. We want to get as many people in the wider J.U.P community involved as possible, definitely not just those of us in the Discord right now.
We want to hear from you and hear your ideas and inputs.
Catdets are all about the love
With everything that we are doing, we want to make sure that every cat in the community is cared for and loved. This will be a huge focus of the Catdet WG’s efforts. We will find ways to continuously spotlight Catdets and their contributions to the community, and explore ideas such as Discord amenities, merch and other welfare items together with the community, team and other WGs.
How many of you would wear this!?
The Love For Cats Budget
So the key aspect for our budget that we are requesting will be a 24k USDC budget to take care of the cats in the community, and also to sweeten the pie for Catdets for their efforts to grow the Catdet corps and also in contributing to the community.
And that’s not all.
We have some really really cool skill sets in our team and we think that it would be awesome if Catdets can make something happen at Solana Breakpoint in 2024. This is still an IDEA for now. We are really excited about this one though, if we could plan an experiential event together with the Jupiter team and other WGs, for Catdets and all Breakpoint participants.
We think this could be the perfect way to carve a key milestone into the journey and efforts of the trial Catdet WG in achieving our mission and spreading the love to the entire Solana ecosystem.
If both the community AND Jupiter team are keen on this idea, the specific budget for this event will have to be considered and proposed separately. The Catdet WG is offering to coordinate, plan and execute this on behalf of the J.U.P community.
Our ask
The team for its efforts will request a budget of 45k USDC for a 5 months trial period, culminating in the Solana Breakpoint event. This will be at a rate of 1.8k per core contributor, per month.
The total budget therefore adds up to 69k with 24k for the community incentives and 45k for the compensation to the core contributors over a period of 5 months.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading our proposal and we look forward to reading your replies below.
tl;dr
Catdet WG will continue to identify and solve problems within the J.U.P community as we have done so far and work towards leveraging the strengths of the community to grow the Catdet Corps and culture, so as to propel the J.U.P closer and closer to the meta.
This trial process is aimed at hearing and involving everyone in the J.U.P community to co-create the Catdet culture together and grow the Catdet corps. The process of 5 months will give us sufficient time to listen, plan, act, and iterate on any feedback. We hope you will give us the chance to work together with you and grow the meta together.
LFGrow!
Introducing the Catdet WG core contributors
Lead: Julian
- 6 years of experience in education and product management.
- Full-time technical co-founder in an edtech start-up from 2018 to 2021. The flagship mobile app we developed was in the Top Apps on the Google Play Store for several weeks and Ranked 16th on the Apple App Store Education category.
- Tech consulting since 2022 - providing technical advice and development services to projects and companies.
- Participated in two recent Solana hackathons.
- Co-founder of SCALES - a project with the vision of helping the next billion users on Solana have fun with a peace of mind. We protect Solana users from drains, scams and hacks via providing better education on wallet and personal on-chain security.
Easy E
- Easy E: is his childhood nickname after NWA rapper Eazy E.
- A self proclaimed Solana maxi and OG circa 2021.
- Jupiter user since day one. Let’s goooo!
- Advisor to Web 3 startups
- Entrepreneur & business owner who has built/created several successful brands. IRL: real estate development & restaurant owner.
- Strengths: Branding/marketing, team building, attention to detail, dreaming big, and execution.
- Fun fact: Favorite karaoke song, “Juicy” by Notorious B.I.G.
Cas AKA TheGreatOBO
- 7 years of Service + Customer Service experience
- A core team member of a James Beard Award winning restaurant for 3 years.
- A highly involved Cat of Culture within the Jupiter Ecosystem
- Kept catdets informed via weekly community updates
- Uplifted community members through community event organization.
- Experience with organising fundraisers for charity: e.g. raised $6000 for a local deaf ASL teacher to help him remain housed.
- Leading the Winning Hearts Taskforce for SCALES DAO, coordinated connections with over 20 Solana Communities
- Hobbyist content creation, video editing, and 3D animation background
Catoshi - A professional spot trader and Jack of all trades with the ability to wear many hats from PR to filmmaking. Passionate about defi and growing the Jupiter and Solana ecosystems.
- 10 years of experience in web 2 marketing from big tech to small business.
- 5 years of experience as the founder of a small manufacturing and e-commerce company.
- 5 years of experience as an independent filmmaker and professional content creator, with an ability to deliver large projects on time and under budget.
- Customer obsessed with a passion for team building, product design, community building, mentorship and event planning.
Rolex Gold: Passionate SOL NFT community member since 2021, striving towards a better web3 experience for all. WAO
- Previous Loan Officer with 7 years experience in Finance
- Won multiple awards for being a top performer of a billion dollar credit union
- Mad Lads elected council member for Thought Leadership and Lads engagement
- Leading engagement through creative posts on Mad Lads, and working closely with other council members to help grow/shape the community’s future
- 0 iq zer0b0i helping lead zer0 culture: Running the mockJUP twitter page since launch, spreading awareness of zer0, and coordinating with other community members in pushing zer0 culture
- Co-founder of SCALES: A project aimed at education of wallet security and onboarding web2 users to web3
- Passion for helping others: I have a big heart and love helping others where I see fit. WAO
Some Questions we have heard so far and our answers
Catdet working group is a closed group, right? Is entry by merit only?
As mentioned in the proposal, the initial core contributors of the Catdet WG are selected via several weeks of trial and experimentation even prior to this proposal, mostly based on merit and interest as well as availability. The selection process can definitely be improved and this is something we will be working with the community extensively on. No one on the team, including myself, should be irreplaceable by any means and I think having good processes here to ensure that is key.
Re: The 3 trial working groups. You just don’t need 3 groups for this. If I’m writing a detailed description of something, you better believe I can summarize it with ease and post that on a different website. 
The Catdet WG’s mission is in growing the Catdet corps and showering all cats with love. It certainly goes beyond summarising content. As mentioned in the proposal, we will observe and solve critical problems that we see in the community, and one of these problems we tackled was the dissemination of information and updates to those who were less active, hence we took on the task of creating a weekly Discord discussions summary and also providing weekly Jupiter-related updates.
We will continue to be extremely mission-focused, observant and innovative.
If I don’t participate much in typing in the Discord, does it mean I cannot become a Catdet?
Certainly not. Part of the reason we have ideas such as organising more community-led events and also creating opportunities for community members to engage across different platforms is so that more and more people can be recognised and be part of the Catdet corps.
The best chance to get involved with all these is NOW. Come speak to us in the Discord or on one of the Twitter spaces during the voting process and get your voices heard.
We look forward to you participating in the J.U.P and receiving the love from catdets! 
Change Logs:
- 30th April: Updated draft proposal based on feedback. The proposal now has a tighter scope of listening to and working closely with the community to co-create the Catdet culture and grow the Catdet corps instead of a fixed set of executables. The plans and what the Catdet WG is currently working on are now re-worded more loosely as ideas. Added ideas of a Catdet-managed Twitter account, several process-oriented questions that we are seeking to answer, and a stronger focus on listening to the wider community beyond just all of us who are in the Jupiter Discord currently.
What is this group? I often visit X (twice a day), and I’ve only come across some of you individually. I like to hijack illustrative content either from the mem or/and using some AI tools.
I recognized your image inspired by the mem with batman ;).
I’d like to be part of your team so I don’t have to work alone.