Polkassembly is an integral part of Polkadot and Kusama governance.
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This submission proposes an annual payment as part of our social contract with the Polkadot & Kusama treasury to cover maintenance, operations and human resource costs for Polkassembly, including general maintenance, runtime upgrades changes, new feature development and could/infrastructure cost.
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Polkassembly is transitioning from a quarterly proposal model to an annual one to streamline our operations and enhance the value we deliver to the Polkadot community. This strategic shift is driven by several key factors:
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1. Sustained Support and Development:
Moving to an annual proposal model allows us to secure more stable and long-term support for our team. This stability is crucial for maintaining a dedicated group of developers and contributors who can focus on continuous development without the interruptions that come with frequent funding cycles.
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2. Enhanced Focus on Quality and Innovation:
With a yearly cycle, our team can dedicate more time to developing high-quality features and undertaking innovative experiments that require longer gestation periods. Planned pipelines and milestones with research will help deliver high quality features beyond the quarterly milestones
3. Comprehensive Reporting and Transparency:
Annual proposals enable us to provide more detailed and impactful reports on our progress and achievements. These comprehensive reports will offer clear insights into our contributions, backed by proof of work statistics, showcasing our commitment and the tangible benefits we bring to the ecosystem.
All these metrics are attached below in the Product Statistics and social statistics where our contribution and its significance can be seen
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4. Strategic Marketing and Community Engagement:
A yearly cycle affords us the opportunity to plan and execute more strategic marketing initiatives. By aligning our marketing efforts with our development milestones, we can ensure that our achievements are effectively communicated and a long term strategy to promote OpenGov and its novel developments can be highlighted within and outside the community.
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5. Maximizing Common Good and Addressing Opportunity Costs:
This model allows us to align our resources more closely with the common good of the Polkadot ecosystem. By considering the opportunity costs, we can prioritize projects and features that offer the highest value and impact, ensuring that our contributions are both meaningful and timely.
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So essentially, transitioning to an annual proposal model reflects our commitment to continuous contribution, high-quality development, and strategic growth. With 95%+ of our milestones already achieved in the past year and over 50 new features rolled out, we are confident that this new approach will enable us to serve the Polkadot community even more effectively.
Our story is one of unwavering commitment and proven results, and we are excited to embark on this next phase of our journey with the support of the community.
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So what are we upto in 2024?
Theme |
Feature |
Goal |
Tasks |
Analytics |
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Analytics |
Referendum Level Analytics |
To provide detailed understanding of statistics on a referendum level |
1. Break down metrics into three types - DOT used for voting, number of voters participating and the DOT used with conviction during the vote for each referendum |
Track Level Analytics |
To provide detailed understanding of statistics on a track level |
1. Break down metrics into three types - DOT used for voting, number of voters participating and the DOT used with conviction during the vote for each of the tracks |
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Governance Level Analytics |
To provide detailed understanding of statistics across governance |
1. A separate tab will house overall governance level analytics - This will also provide the option to navigate to track and referendum level details 2. Critical stats like Amount of DOT locked in governance, # of active referenda etc will be available here 3. Navigate across referenda in a track and category agnostic manner |
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New Features |
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Reports and Accountability |
Deadline |
To provide an understanding of when a proposal will be delivered by |
1. Community will have clear understanding of the final deadline of the proposal |
Progress Reports (Potentially in collaboration with Subsquare) |
To provide the community with an update on what was delivered and when / with what impact? |
1. Proposers will be nudged to add progress reports when the deadlines nears |
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Evaluation tab |
To ensure each proposal is thoroughly vetted on the idea and theย proposerโs merits |
1. The evaluation tab will have multiple sections including - Proposer deepdive, beneficiary deepdive, Audits and the Progress Reports |
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Expert Body |
Proposal Expert Review |
To enable expert reviews on proposal page and highlight these in the interface |
1. Allow experts to submit reports on a proposal on Polkassembly along with an AI generated or manually added summary of the report |
Proxy Addresses |
Create Proxy Addresses |
To enable users to create proxies directly in Polkassembly |
1. Allow users to create - governance, non-transfer, staking, identity, cancel, auction and nomination proxies directly from Polkassembly |
Delegation |
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Overview Page |
Trendingย delegates |
To ensure users can participate in quick delegation via Polkassembly |
1. We highlight the top and most frequently delegated users with their voting details on the central ui of the profile |
How to delegate |
A quick two step guide to enable smooth delegations |
Give users the options to either:ย ย - Select a track to delegate and then delegate their votes orย - Select one of the top delegates and then choose relevant tracks to assign delegation |
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Become a delegate on Polkassembly |
To allow users to highlight themselves as potential delegation candidates on Polkassembly |
1. Users can add their bio, socials and make a profile if they have not done so or link their original profile if it is already created to become a delegate |
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Data points for delegators |
Statistics |
To ensure users can track how the ecosystemโs current delegation status looks like |
1. We highlight the top metrics including - total supply, delegated tokens, total delegated votes, total delegators and total number of delegators being tracked on the platform |
Badgesย |
To highlight participants with exceptional contributions |
1. Delegates who have differentiable activities will be given badges on the platform |
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Unlock Delegations |
To allow users to understand in how much time they would be able to unlock their delegate votes |
To show delegators time to unlock their votes - with details around history of conviction, voting power on track level |
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Delegate engagement |
Delegation Mandate |
To allow users to independently edit delegation mandateย |
1. User will have a separate bio describing how they make their voting judgements, their general delegation mandate and why they should receive additional delegations |
Chat with delegates |
A quick way to interact with delegates |
1. Discuss the reason for voting, mandate for voting, and many more details with a user by chatting with them via the delegation dashboard |
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Fellowship (Milestone 2) |
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New Features |
Calendar |
To show important events in the fellowship as well as expected timelines |
1. Important on chain events, execution dates and offchain events like Polkadot Blockchain Academy will be tracked here 2. Fellowship Member inductions and anniversaries will be trackable from these events |
Micro-features |
A set of mini improvements to the currently live collectives platform |
1. Addition of multiple RPC endpoints to ensure a smoother experience in different geographies 2. Dark mode customization and improvements to ensure standardization in the product 3. Tooltips and tipping for fellowship platform to allow users to quick view fellows instead of directly going to their profile 4. Trending Proposals on fellowship and their status to allow quick access to these proposals and voting on them 5. Empty States across platform and loaders to ensure a smooth experience especially in case of heavier on chain calls or images 6. Nudges for new fellows and existing ones regarding on chain activity to ensure that there is a smoother onboarding to best practices of the platform 7. All Fellowship Meeting recordings redirection and calendar events for new fellows to ensure they can access past information. |
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Westendย |
Quick deployment and testing of features on Fellowship |
1. Westend platform deployed with equivalent functionality to the Polkadot Fellowship for fellows and non fellows to explore the product |
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Fellow Experience |
Personalization |
To make the fellowship product more customized as per needs of fellows |
1. Notifications for Fellows 2. Following Fellows and receiving updates regarding them in the activity feed |
Fellowship Statistics |
To show important statistics for fellows |
1. Detailed statistics for salary pallets - Total salary drawn, salary available in a cycle 2. Number of members inducted, requests created, referendum created, voting analysis on each of the referendum and more |
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Mobile view |
Mobile experience |
To allow members to access the fellowship platform on their mobiles for engaging and quick actionsย |
1. Each of the features available on the web view would be made available in the fellowshipโs mobile version |
Integration with Github |
RFC proposals |
Enable ease of engagement with RFC proposalsย |
1. AI Summary for PRs, RFC and issues in activity to allow members to read through the details 2. Convert RFC PR to Proposal on activity tabย |
Github Integration |
To allow a deepdive into contributions made by fellows as well as highlighting top fellows |
1. To import the activity doneย on fellowship repository and show it along with summary statistics in the fellowship platform 2. To show the top fellows in a given time period and contributions made by them 3. To have stats regarding contributions by fellows |
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Product Partnerships |
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Prediction marketsย |
Zeitgeist Integration(Live) |
To boost community engagement participation in Governance |
1. Twitter announcementยจ |
To choose and create new markets via Zeitgeist & deep integration of prediction markets |
1. Polkassembly takes the responsibility of identifying new markets and ensuring that the most exciting markets are used for predictions |
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Subsocial |
Deeper integration with subsocial |
To enable more cross platform features/data feed from subsocialย |
1. Fetch relevant posts from subsocial and show with relevant proposals 2. Deeper integrate subsocial-chat with Polkassembly |
Points & Leaderboard |
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Points System |
Leaderboard Formulation |
To enable a gamified understanding of a users contribution to governance via a single metric |
1. The first version of proposed scoring system indicates the distribution of points for various off chain and on chain activities done via Polkassembly |
Score breakdown for each user |
To enable each user to understand how their score is calculatedย |
1. This will be available at multiple touchpoints including the profile, quick view tooltip and in the leaderboard |
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Social |
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On Product Notificationsย |
Single notification hub inside Polkassembly |
To enable users to access notifications in a central system |
1. Polkassembly presently allows users to configure what kind of notifications they would like to receive off chain on mail, telegram and discord |
Mentions |
In proposals, comments and replies |
To enable users to mention users across the site |
1. Users will be able to tag any user by simply typing @ & their username |
Follow |
Profile based following |
To enable users to follow each otherโs governance activity on Polkassembly |
1. Presently we allow following posts and receiving notifications for updates on them |
Timeline (Activity feed) |
Social Timeline as platform default view |
To build an engaging social experience within Polkassembly |
1. Independently show users the activity which they have participated in and whatever is pending on them to participate in - especially in case of referenda |
Share vote on Social Media & Social NFTS |
Enable NFTs for voting which are shareable |
To build an experience around sharing of vote based NFTs on social media |
1. Design multiple kinds of aye, nay, split, abstain NFTs |
Profile NFT Integration |
Enable integration of NFTs in governance profilesย |
To build a holistic reputation for individuals on Polkassemblyย ย |
1. POAPs, Social NFTs, Soul bound NFTs, gaming and other such NFTs will be imported into each userโs profile |
Badges |
Gamification of user profile |
To build tags which can help identify a user and understand their voting patterns |
1. Delegate, fellows, delegators will have custom badges which help identify their profiles in forum based discussions easily |
Bounty Product (V1) |
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Use Cases |
Social Bounties |
To allow members to post collaborative bounties for community to solve in Polkadot community |
Polkadot ecosystem presently only allows funding of bounties via the treasury. |
Product Features |
All Bounty Timeline |
To allow users to see all published bounties and their status |
1. The list of bounties shows details including the funder, the time of creation, user profile, comments, reactions |
Profile Page |
To allow users to maintain their profile and reputations |
1. Profile level details include -ย Username, profile picture, total amount of bounties created, total amount of bounties funded, bounties earned, number of bounties created |
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Bounty Dashboard |
Custom Bounty Interface |
To boost the adoption and visibility for bounties in the ecosystem |
1. Highlight all open, closed and in voting bounties in a separate interface 4. Dashboard ii. Bounty Cards highlighting different bounties, their status, Category, tags, amounts, no. of sub-bounties, etc. iv. Create bounty button 5. Bounty Detail page i. How to make a submission for that bounty ii. Portal to make submission for the bounty iii Tracking status of the bounty submission iv Read, review comments and update bounty submission if required Parent Bounty proposal details and discussions(comments + voting details) For curators i. Being able to view and track all active submissions ii. Manage active submissions and leave comments or communicate with bounty submitters iii. Initiate payout for sub-bounty iv. Update status for bounty v. Cancel bounty Profiles i. Number of sub-bounties created ii. Tracks/categories in which bounties were claimed iii. Total amount earned from sub-bounties, etc. |
Maintenance - Features |
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Creating proposals on Polkassembly |
Proposal creation for all tracks |
To all the creation of different tracks of proposals on Polkassembly |
1. Currently users can use Polkassemblyโs powerful interface only to create proposals in the treasury tracks |
Multiple beneficiaries on treasury proposals (Live) |
To allow users to show multiple on chain beneficiaries and request for funding in a transparent manner |
1. Based on community requests we developed and delivered a feature to easily add multiple beneficiaries while creating a proposal - a process which is very difficult on PolkadotJS |
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Profile |
Interface upgrades(Live) |
To bring all governance statistics in a single comprehensive profile |
1. UI revamp - For votes casted, proposals created, discussions created, linking addresses, multisigs and proxies |
Delegation integration(Live) |
To integrate delegation dashboard with profile of user |
1. Show a detailed view of number of delegation received and delegations given - Allow users to view/add delegation mandate on profile - Show number of delegation given with the same details mentioned above - Allow selection of address from multiple addresses linked to profile |
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Detailed balance information |
To show breakdown of users token balance |
1. Show userโs total token balance split across locked balance and transferable balance 2. To show userโs total voting power split across self voting and delegations |
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Comments, reactions and mentions |
To show usersโ off chain engagement historyย ย |
1. To show comments and replies by a user. |
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Maintenance - Technical |
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Technical Integrations |
Subsquid migration(Live) |
To enable seamless transition to latest technical infrastructure offered by Subsquid |
1. Migration to the arrow squid offered by Subsquid for Polkadot & Kusama along with sdk integration changes |
Site wide analytics |
Implementing instrumentation to ensure site wide tracking and reporting of statistics in proposals |
1. All twitter posts made for engagement including # of views, # of proposals created, etc. have been done by leveraging the instrumentation implemented across the site 2. The instrumentation has been split into three phases, with only phase 1 live currently |
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Development & Open Source Standardizationย |
Design system integration |
To ensure a seamless user experience (consistency in components) and fast developmentย |
1. After completing the migration to NextJS the product speed, responsiveness and overall performance have been significantly improved - Secondary button - Default button - Disabled button - Icon button - Textareas - Select dropdowns - Checkboxes and radio buttons - Switches and toggles iii. Typography: ย ย ย ย - Heading styles (h1 to h6) ย ย ย ย - Paragraph text ย ย ย ย - Bold and italic styles ย ย ย ย - Lists (unordered and ordered) ย ย ย - Blockquotes ย ย ย ย - Navbar ย ย ย ย - Sidebar ย ย ย ย - Breadcrumbs ย ย ย - Pagination ย ย ย ย - Basic card ย ย ย ย - Image card ย ย ย - Actionable card vi. Modals and Popovers: ย ย ย ย - Modal dialog ย ย ย - Popover and tooltips ย ย ย - Use a library of scalable vector icons. ย ย ย ย - Success alert ย ย ย ย - Error alert ย ย ย ย - Warning alert ย ย ย - Info alert ix. Loading Indicators: ย ย ย ย - Spinner/loader x. . Tabs and Accordion: ย ย ย ย - Tabbed navigation ย ย ย ย - Accordion for collapsible content xi. Progress Bars: ย ย ย ย - Linear progress bar ย ย ย ย - Circular progress bar xii. Tables: ย ย ย ย - Basic table ย ย ย - Data tables with sorting and filtering xiii. Badges and Tags: ย ย ย ย - Status badges ย ย ย - Tag labels xiv. Utilities: ย ย ย ย - Spacing and layout utilities (e.g., margin, padding, flexbox) ย ย ย ย - Color palette and theming |
Automated Testing |
To ensure continuous testing for smoother product evolution |
1. Leverage selenium to build an automation testing pipeline for all off chain features including - login, discussion, comments, replies, reactions, page views |
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Site Experience Improvemenet |
JWT Issue fixes(Live) |
To ensure smooth auto logout experience for users |
1. Maintain JWT sessions between old architecture and new next JS architecture 2. Auto logout for users, helping prevent errors due to JWT timeout. |
Cache controlย |
To ensure smooth cache control in nextJS and cloudflare |
1. Enable caching in Cloudflare for all resources possible to reduce hosting costs and reduce load on the server, increasing server reliability.ย |
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Package size(Live) |
To improve load time on the platform |
1. Replace SVG files with links to reduce the package size from 3.41 mb to 2 mb and ensure image component creation to continue sustainable development by replacing 20+ files |
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Refactoring (Live) |
To improve delegation dashboard speed and experience |
1. Improve api response time and removed redundancies |
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Improve Vote detail info |
To allow users to see all vote details in a consumable view |
1. Allow users to see vote time, % of voting power even for non delegated votes |
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Maintenance - Microfeatures |
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Description API |
OpenAI API(Live) |
To allow users to access Polkassemblyโs AI Summary |
The AI Summary API has two options |
Referendum Page Mircofeatures |
Quote / Share Comments |
To allow users to quote a portion of a proposal, comment or reply |
1. Users will be able to see quoted replies, comments or proposals |
Status level filters(Live) |
To allow users to filter proposal based on status |
1. Filtering on tags is already live |
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Bounties |
To show detailed breakdown of a newly proposed bounty or child bounty |
1. Currently visibility into the details of a bounty are very less. The feature will show % of bounty that has already been claimed, % requested and how much will remain after bounty approval - The detail will be available on the proposal detail page as well as the listing view |
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RHS Cards with scroll on proposal page(Live) |
To allow users to take contextual actions directly from the page |
1. Pay the decision deposit to ensure the proposal enters in to the voting period |
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Feature Scope Improvement |
Verify identities on Kusama |
Deploying the feature to set and verify identities on Kusama with ease |
1. Similar to Polkadot, users will be able to follow a simple two step process to set and verify their identity directly on Polkassembly |
Reply to Subsquare Comments on Polkassembly |
To enable proposers and users to complete entire conversations on Polkassembly |
1. Most users struggle with replying to comments from subsquare even though they occupy <2% of comments in the governance of Polkadot & Kusama historically. |
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New alerts for users |
To allow an even larger and comprehensive set of alerts for users to configure |
1. Alerts for receiving a delegation or undelegation on chain |
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Mobile view improvements |
To build a better mobile experience for Polkassemblyย |
1. Improve vote details screen on mobile - for seeing details of a vote and distribution between delegated & solo votes on mobile |
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New Mircrofeatures |
Show votes on listing view |
To allow users to identify which proposal they have voted for directly from the listing view |
1. Users can directly see their vote type - aye, nay, abstain or split and the amount as well as conviction directly from the listing view of all / track specific pagesย |
Compulsory username setup (Live) |
To ensure users find a consistent experience in the platform |
1. Polkassembly earlier saw a lot of usernames not being set and hence wallet address being used as usernames |
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Cancel Preimage |
To allow users to cancel erroneous preimages and receive their deposit back |
1. The option to cancel a preimage is provided on two touchpoints |
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Proposal tagging |
To enable retroactive tracking of proposal types, spends and more directly on Polkassembly |
1. Using publicly created tags and breakdown of proposals into different categories to retroactively tag proposals |
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Data Decentralization |
Decentralizing proposal data(Potentially in collaboration with Subsquare) |
Data Decentralization is an important step in progressing Polkassembly and OpenGov to decentralization |
1. Decentralizing the following data sources |
Landing pageย |
Polkassembly landing page revamp |
To ensure a better onboarding for users and provide them withย more information about OpenGov and its capabilities when they land on polkassembly.io |
1. Polkassembly attracts the largest number of users to governance in the DOT ecosystem. |
Mobile App (V1) |
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Governance experience on Mobile |
Primary Features |
To enable smooth usage of governance in a PWA app |
1. Migration & Testing of all off chain features including post creation, comments, replies, likes from the PWA 4. Implementย In app notification as per mobile experience |
Tinder style voting |
To enable quicker voting for users with summarized details only |
3. Building mobile specific features like - tinder style voting and notifications to ensure a great user experience for governance i. Building in comment AI summaries to enable quicker decision making for tinder style voting with all relevant information data points ii. Leveraging existing vote & AI summary to ensure users have a good overview of the proposal iii. Highlighting expert reviews and necessary details to enable users to make a quicker decision |
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Here are some new product clips from our latest work โย
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We are excited for the future of Polkadot and to explore the depths of OpenGov's power to support the growth of our ecosystem, powered by Polkassembly!ย
The complete proposal details along with the budget are all included in the document here.ย
Hi @Polkassembly,
Although it's clear that Polkassembly plays a crucial role in OpenGov alongside Subsquare, I believe the budget requested is excessive. I don't understand why you should be charging extra for the new features when you already have a crowded personnel listed solely for maintenance. Furthermore, I'm noticing a trend of escalating costs with each proposal from Polkassembly, a point highlighted by ChaosDAO. Moreover, I don't understand why the treasury should be funding your travel and accommodation costs for the events.
My vote is nay, with the primary concern that Polkassembly's expenses are becoming increasingly heavy on the treasury. I would vote in favor of a proposal with a more modest and reasonable budget and a shorter duration.
Best regards,
kukabi | Helikon
Though polkassembly and related governance tools are important to the ecosystem, this team is becoming more and more greedy. Their expenses are keep growing dramatically, but products UX/UI is just so so, not competitive.