POLITEIA DIGEST January 31 - March 16 2023

New Proposals

Decred Journal and Politeia Digest 2023

Published Mar 4 by bee, last edited Mar 6 | 11 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $40,000 for 12 months of producing Decred Journal and Politeia Digest, with a ⁹⁰⁄₁₀ split in budget between these. Spending figures for the previous period were reported; the total spent was $25,570, which was 77% of the proposal’s limit, and it was spent mostly on the Journal ($24,050) with only $1,520 spent on Politeia Digest (6%). It was a relatively quiet year for Politeia, with only 6 issues of PD being published in the 9 month period covered by the previous proposal. Some figures were reported for an average 2022 issue, ~4,400 words and 220 links to sources.

Cointelegraph Content Proposal

Published Mar 4 by mattyleight, last edited Mar 13 | 55 comments

This proposal requests $50,000 for a package of content to be published on Cointelegraph’s website and other channels, with $25,000 to be paid up front before work begins and another $25,000 after the first month of collaboration - @exitus and @tivra are named as the Decred representatives who would facilitate the relationship. The content would be delivered over 4-6 weeks and include: one spotlight article and one interview article, each to be pinned on the main page for 24 hours, featured in the related news section and shared on Cointelegraph’s Twitter and Telegram - and also a Twitter Spaces with live tweeting, and after talking to some community members on a livestream they decided to add a free press release, usually valued at $8,000. The budget is broken down into a main part of $47K, with an additional $3K classified as “volatility protection”, effectively a surcharge for accepting DCR as payment.

This proposal has some interesting comments and discussions. @jy-p explained the history between Decred and Cointelegraph, starting with a hit piece when Decred launched published by a pseudonymous author and followed by a ghosting when efforts were made to connect and find out what was behind the coverage. There is a comment from someone claiming to be a former Cointelegraph employee who claims the most crypto savvy staff have been laid off in recent months and Cointelegraph has embraced increasingly dubious crypto projects as advertising partners. Many of the other comments probe aspects of the proposal offering, and through this interaction and similar on a livestream many details have been added to the proposal.

Decred DEX - Desktop App and Packaging

Published Mar 7 by buck54321 | 5 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $29,000 to develop a more user-friendly Decred DEX installation package for desktop users (Windows, Mac and Linux). The work would be completed by the Decred DEX team with @buck54321 taking the lead, a proof of concept has been completed for Debian-based Linux which demonstrates using desktop notifications and the system tray to enhance user experience. The work is expected to take around 12 weeks of full-time equivalent work performed part-time in conjunction with the other Decred DEX efforts.

Decred DEX - Client Development

Published Mar 7 by buck54321 | 25 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $182,000 to fund around 9 months of work on the Decred DEX client, with a focus on improving wallet functionality for all of the assets supported. Additional assets are being targeted for support, like Polygon and DigiByte, and the integrated wallet functionality will be improved for Zcash (to support shielded pools) and Decred (staking and mixing). The rationale for this refocus of development is that Decred DEX is the first point of contact many users have with Decred, they may not want or need a heavy duty wallet like Decrediton but could still benefit from some of Decred’s advanced features through the built-in DEX wallet.

Decred DEX - Market Maker and Arbitrage Bot Development

Published Mar 7 by martonp, last edited Mar 16 | 8 comments

This proposal requests a budget of $73,000 for development of market making and arbitrage trading bots to work with Decred DEX, work is expected to take 9 months (with a limit of 14) and would be led by @martonp. The rationale for providing software to run these bots is that it would open up the prospect of acting as a market maker to many more users because they would not need to create their own bot first. Decred DEX markets would benefit from added liquidity provided by users running the market maker bots, and the arbitrage trading bot could be used to generate profits by exploiting and closing gaps between the DEX price and that on a CEX (initially Binance and Bittrex).

Approved Proposals

Timestamply

Published Jan 23 by tiagoad | 20 comments (+6)

Final voting figures: 88% Yes votes, 48% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requested $17,300 for a front end redesign of Timestamply, a web application which provides a timestamping service using dcrtime on the backend. The work was completed by @sænder (design, $2,800) and @tiagoalvesdulce (development, $14,500). The scope of work included a new logo and design, light and dark modes, multiple languages and many other improvements, and references a number of GitHub pull requests. The development work is broken down by number of hours per pull request, totalling 290 hours or approx 5.5 FTE, billed at $50/hr.

Decred Content and Asset Translations 2023

Published Jan 27 by kozel, last edited Jan 29 | 7 comments (+3)

Final voting figures: 88% Yes votes, 44% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requested a budget of $33,000 for a year’s funding of translation work, and opens with a summary of the recently concluded third phase of the translation program where a budget of $20,000 was requested and $11,355.33 was spent. @bee keeps track of translations in an index covering text and video work, as well as tracking software translation status. Most of the effort goes into translating Decred Journal and updates to the decred.org website, during the previous phase new languages were added, such as Greek and German. For this proposal, the list of previously approved contractors has been left out, due to issues with perceived “ownership” of certain languages’ translation work or complacency. Also greater use will be made of the CMS temporary contractor functionality, so there is less of a need for prospective contributors to have an established record of translating to join the proposal.

Rejected Proposals

Sponsorship in Motorsports

Published Jan 18 by laurent, last edited Feb 4 | 58 comments (+0)

Final voting figures: 9% Yes votes, 22% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requests a budget of $26,033 for sponsorship of a professional race car driver as they compete in the 2023 BGDC races driving a Honda Civic Type R. The proposal would have Decred as the sole sponsor, with the car being painted in Decred colours and with the Decred logo. The Decred-liveried Honda Civic would feature in 5 races around Europe, and the sponsorship money would cover all associated costs aside from car depreciation and repairs following the event. 40% of the budget is being requested as an up-front payment, with the remainder to be paid out in four 15% instalments over the course of the year.

Alphaday Grant Application

Published Jan 23 by alphaday, last edited Jan 30 | 10 comments (+5)

Final voting figures: 17% Yes votes, 25% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requests $2,200 to produce a Decred version of the Alphaday “dashboard”, where information from various widgets can be arranged on one screen as a “tab killer” dealing death to the cluttered browser bars of crypto fans everywhere. The budget is broken down into “upfront costs” of $1,000 for development such as including Decred resources as optional widgets for dashboards, and $100 per month for an analyst to check the dashboard daily and ensure it is working correctly.

Rick Red Revival: Research and assorted other tasks

Published Jan 18 by richard-red, last edited Feb 1 | 35 comments (+7)

Final voting figures: 56% Yes votes, 30% turnout of eligible tickets.

Recap: This proposal requests a budget of $32,500 for one year of work covering a variety of domains and tasks. It includes a research component which follows on from the “Open Source Research” proposal series, and a number of other components, along with approximate and maximum spending limits per component. The research component has an estimated spend of $10,000 and would include Politeia data collection and analysis as well as research on other communities’ governance. Politeia moderation and running the @pi_crumbs Twitter account has an estimate of $1,800. $5,000 is earmarked for quality assurance type testing of Decred software and writing issues, tutorials and reviews. There are also some more novel categories with budgets, with an estimated $2,000 to be spent on producing more Clay Stakey stop-motion animations, $1,000 for novelty graphics in the @BisonContent style, as well as a $2,000 miscellaneous heading to cover general helping out not covered elsewhere. Of the total budget, $2,500 is requested as payment in arrears for Politeia moderation ($1,000) and the already produced Clay Stakey ($1,000) and Bison Content ($500).

About this issue

Content for this edition was authored by @richardred with fixes from @bee.

Image credit: @sænder