Treasury Proposal: Ordum | Public Good Grants Aggregator for Polkadot and Kusama
Dear Community,
Ordum is a public good grants aggregator for the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. This proposal addresses the funding of R&D.
Introduction
There is no existing software besides Gitcoin to publish, apply for and manage grants. Gitcoin focuses on a quadratic funding model, while there is a need for an overall indexer and management software for grants in web3.
After reading the Builders Program post(https://forum.polkadot.network/t/builders-programs/226) on the Polkadot Forum and speaking with other members of the community (including councillors, Web3 Foundation, and members of Shokunin Network), it was evident that a grants aggregator is imperative for bringing projects into the ecosystem as well as scaling it.
In order to construct a rich and independent environment of public goods and DAOs, it is fundamental for teams to easily find and acquaint themselves with treasuries and foundations.
Problem
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Treasuries / foundations(eg. Polkadot Treasury) are burning funds as there are not enough projects to support.
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Grants information and guidelines within the ecosystems are scattered and therefore difficult to find (there are only 2 places where we have a somewhat overview of these; Polkadot/Kusama documentation and Web3 Foundation Github).
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It is difficult to publicly track (grant) funding for different stages of project development. This has previously resulted in conflicts within the community.
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There isn’t a unified public record to privately / publicly manage and display a grant recipient’s quality and outcome of delivery (scattered documentation).
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With GOV2 incoming, further research is required on tracking proposals and deliverables in order to determine the appropriate UX.
Solution
Success for Ordum is the deliverance of all milestones and a V1 POC of a public goods grant aggregator.
1. A dapp which contains all grants from the ecosystems.
- Index data from treasuries in the ecosystem by building custom APIs(Subsquids) for tracking proposals
- Integrate Github in the front end for tracking and submitting non-treasury grants
- Building and maintaining light clients for quick data retrivals, security and low loading times
- Enable log in with multiple DID services, Github and Wallets
2. Minting of non-transferable NFTs as “certificates” for completed milestones. Each token would contain information on what was executed and how it was evaluated.
- Ordum will be built on Phala to leverege the chains privacy capabilities and Phat smart contracts
- Create a connection between DID (foundation)–> Phala Smart Contract–> Non-transferable NFT–>DID (recipient)
- Design a custom type of RMRK non-transferable NFT, stored on Crust, containing reports from the foundations on milestone delivery
3. Delivery of milestones, grant applications and funding are displayed on a team’s profile for transparency.
- Front end displaying funding amounts and certificates within a roadmap
4. Issuing surveys and analyzing / feedback data for the purpose of aggregating and managing treasury grants in the most optimal way.
- Design the optimal UX through collaboration with other teams in the ecosystem(interviews, surveys)
Requested funding
78,804 USD
The full proposal can be viewed here:
https://hackmd.io/@XyloDrone/Ordum
We look forward to hearing your feedback.
Comments (4)
This is an awesome proposal that could help bring the ecosystem together in terms of accountability and consistency re: Treasury Spends.
Please note that the end goal isn't just to spend the tokens that are getting burnt, but to strategically allocate these for the medium to long term growth and health of the network. Otherwise, we are just propping up the amount of coins in circulation and dumping the value-adding capabilities within the network. And I'm not even mentioning how terrible it reflects on the overall ecosystem when poorly thought-out proposals with faulty deliverables continuously get away with huge sums of funding.
A few things to add:
IMHO, the biggest issue we have in this ecosystem isn't so much the quality of solutions created/built, but the poor relaying of information. There are plenty of user-friendly tools being built all the time, but people in general and "officials" (i.e @Polkadot and its ambassadors) in particular aren't readily TALKING about them or giving them any visibility. As a result, a lot of people are STILL overwhelmingly hung up on Parity's Polkadot-JS Apps, because they assume that is what you need to be talking about/using to stay relevant re: Relay chain operations. I take for example tools like DotTreasury and BrightTreasury that have done a great job during Gov1.0 and will continue to do so, yet ecosystem participants haven't got much awareness of these.
So, in your proposal, I think you should mention strategies that you are going to tap into (to try) to raise awareness about your platform once it is finished.
Another issue that we currently have is that funding has sometimes been going into projects that are essentially copy-pasting other proposals, with very little to no originality and no real specifics/actual context given. This is particularly true when it comes to proposals in the events, translations, media, and marketing categories. Even with information available on Polkassembly, a lot of proponents don't bother doing any research, they just "assume" that their ideas have never been done before and dish out these duplicate proposals because, well, they want to try out their luck.
Therefore, it would be good if your dapp could allow the general audience to flag these proposals that are potential duplicate (i.e we avoid wasting the time/energy of the community of voters) and redirect the proponents towards existing project teams with which they can effectively collaborate and grow (i.e too many projects are already looking for talents, but can't seem to find any).
Thanks for your time! :)
Thank you for your feedback Anaelle LTD@KSM , appreciate it!
We are aware that the end goal is to make sure that the treasury money is well spent and that the teams are held accountable for the quality of their delivery :D. As you mentioned, it reflects poorly on both the ecosystems and token price.
On that note, the applicant’s user journeys would remain the same, it’s just that the UX would significantly improve and all grants would be in once place. It is not the intention of the software to make the funds easier to spend, just easier to locate and apply for, if that makes sense.
Please find further responses below:
Thanks for pointing these projects out, we weren’t really familiar with the second one. The proposal is for the funding of R&D, development comes in after this phase, hence why marketing hasn’t been mentioned. However, I can take this chance to share a bit more information on the subject. The first phase of research is UX, meaning that we will be reaching out to every team issuing grants in the ecosystem. Additionally, we will speak to grant recipients to construct note their paint points in the current user journeys, this should make them aware of our existence. That is the plan for raising awareness amongst ecosystem projects, both grant issuers and applicants(we want to cooperate and demonstrate how we care for their needs and solve their problems). As for the outside world, we haven’t thought about this and possibly will not until there is an MVP, as we are focused on functionality rather than hype in the R&D stage. Happy to reconsider this method and start thinking of it more in depth if you suggest so :D. There are a lot of projects in the eco the community is not aware off, I completely agree here.
That is a very interesting issue. One way we are tackling it is by issuing certificates for milestones, but we haven’t considered any measures for the actual applications(yet :D). One thing that worries me about flagging/voting is that someone could do so to a “good” proposal just out of spite or lack of information. Off the top of my head, the first solution to copy/paste, plagiarism and “basic” ideas would be an algorithm that could flag these, but the parameters would need to be carefully defined, tested and trained. Once these have been flagged they could be, as mentioned, redirected to existing teams and they can pick these up.
Also, if you feel like having an interview with us and providing more detailed feedback, feel free to ping me @xylodrone on telegram :D.
Thank you again for the information and your time, this has been very valuable to us.
Yes, exactly! We really do place an emphasis on functionality and necessity. Thank you very much for the kind words. Absolutely. As we are not a grant issuer ourselves, Ordum probably won't need to issue the "sticker", however, I think it would be a great idea encourage each foundation/grant issuer to have their own which could hold a tier of quality evaluation. And completely agreed. We started Ordum on the backbone of the ethos: "less trust, more truth" to help the community make data driven decisions. Oh, I see! This is quite an interesting idea and it will add it to our list. Although I'd also like to point out that a machine learning integration to scan proposals and label them as plagiarism etc would be something interesting to work on(we'd probably have to increase the cost of our proposal and get another developer with vyper or python backgrounds), especially when so many algorithms are biased, so it would be an intersting challange to tackle and to proposse an ethical and efficient solution(but also considering the possiblity that this just might not be the route we take once we go through the testing process). Thank you again and we look forward to it :D.