POLITEIA DIGEST June 12 - 25 2023

Treasury balance: 860,220 DCR (approx +7,657 DCR/month) - $12.8 million (+$114K/month) based on $14.85 DCR price

New Proposals

Cypherpunk Times 2023-2024

Published Jun 13 by phoenixgreen | 43 comments

This proposal follows on from the Decred Magazine proposal approved in 2022, rebranding Decred Magazine to Cypherpunk Times and making it a multi-chain publication. The budget requested is $44,000, which equates to $3,600/month - an increase on the $2,800/month from the last Decred Magazine proposal, to allow room for expansion to cover additional chains.

The proposal includes criteria for the kind of chain which is within scope, the main one being that it must have at least 5 years of development of permissionless open source software. There are also rules about how much content can relate to a specific project, with an initial cap of 5 items per week. The proposed funding is for “maintenance of the publication, Decred related content, and other relevant content that enhances the Decred message”, with an eventual aim to have other projects fund and coordinate content about them, but with some “crossovers” whilst that is brought up to speed.

The proposal pays contributors at $30/hour and has caps for the editor role (10 hours per week) and content submissions (4 for medium, 8 for long, 15 for technical articles). When most content is published it is given a marketing campaign, shared with the Magazine’s 100 newsletter subscribers and promoted to the 1,350 social media followers across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Most of the higher scoring comments are supportive of the proposal, but there are quite a few which take issue with the rebranding or ask probing questions about how it will work - although note that nearly half of all the comments on the proposal are from @shane, and they’re quite repetitive on the subject of being against rebranding. @phoenixgreen has stated his intention is to pursue the rebranding as that is his preferred approach, but if the current rebranding version of the proposal is rejected he would plan to submit a new proposal without the rebranding aspect.

utxostudios

Published Jun 19 by utxostudio | 20 comments

This proposal seeks funding of $23,650 to produce twelve 90-second videos in twelve different languages. The proposal includes two links to example videos on Vimeo (password: dcr), these feature actors in ski-masks talking about Decred. The proposal does not include dissemination of this material, it would be produced and then made available to the Decred community to share or re-use. The budget would cover 4 shoot days, 5 editing days, 12 actors (for the different languages) and 11 translations - with the final 12 languages dependant on actor availability but definitely covering Mandarin, Hindi, Egyptian Arabic, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. The script for the videos would be shared with the Decred community before recording, and where possible translators would be recruited from within the Decred community.

The comments on the proposal are generally supportive. The top comment from @exitus asks whether the ski-masks are negotiable and suggests some alternatives which would preserve actor anonymity without the same links to criminality - but @utxostudios was not persuaded to change it. The proposal owner is also pseudonymous (JC on Bison Relay) but claims to have “shot stuff for FX, NBC, Discovery, NYTimes, commercials, music videos, etc.” and works on this project with a principle collaborator who has been staking DCR for 3 years.

Promote DCRDEX through a new website

Published Jun 21 by tallamericano | last edited Jun 22 | 22 comments

This proposal seeks funding of $2,000 to build a new website with educational information about DCRDEX, about 10-20 pages documenting the features and benefits of DCRDEX, with tutorials.

The proposal originally planned to host this website at Coinbase.ie but that was identified as a problem by several community members, and @tallamericano edited the proposal to make the domain undetermined. The main part of the budget is dedicated to web development ($1,600) for a “responsive and visually appealing website, implementation of necessary features, and integration of DCRDEX branding elements”. $300 is reserved for content creation to fill the site, including text graphics and illustrations, with the remaining $100 for domain and hosting costs. The proposal anticipates completing the website within 4 weeks, with a subsequent proposal to implement features such as dynamic information feeds from DCRDEX.

Most of the comments are about the domain name, with almost all of these suggesting it is a bad choice because it seems like a scam to trick people looking for Coinbase or would likely draw negative attention from their lawyers. @shane’s stands out as the only comment supporting the domain name choice, going as far as to suggest registering binance.ie and kraken.ie as well.

Proposals Under Review

Proposal for Building Decred.club Website and Promoting the Chinese Community

Published Jun 5 by cagedbird | last edited Jun 9 | 14 comments (+2)

Recap: This proposal requests a budget of $2,400 (edited down from an initial $30,000) to establish and further develop the Decred.club website, a Chinese language resource for learning about Decred. The proposal was initially pitched as a full time endeavour, but in response to community feedback it has been scaled back to part-time and the scope reduced, it no longer aims to translate the Decred docs and will instead focus on more contemporary content like wallet tutorials and article translations. The proposal indicates one item of content would be produced or translated per week, with additional time spent maintaining the website and growing the Decred.club community.

Initial comments expressed scepticism about the $30,000 budget, and some took issue with the translation component specifically as this kind of work has its own proposal already. The comments include a discussion of the importance of social media channels alongside websites and @cagedbird explains that this will be limited to Twitter and Telegram because sharing such information on Chinese social media would likely result in a swift ban and possible prosecution.

About this issue

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

Image credit: @sænder