# Polkadot OpenGov

The main issues lay not on the technical aspect of OpenGov (although every system can always be improved), but on the social organization layer. This writeup intends to discuss a potential avenue of organization and what the role of different actors in the ecosystem might be.

## Background
OpenGov is a new governance system integrated into Polkadot that allows every token holder to participate in different decisions on the Polkadot Network. This range from runtime upgrades to treasury spending and others. It is organized by tracks, each of them with different needs in terms of turnout and approval needed, depending on the impact it has on the network.

### Spending Breakedown
_Thanks to Parity's data team, Tommi (aka Alice_und_Bob) and the doTreasury team for the data showed below_

Ever since the start of OpenGov, there have been 160 Referenda, most of which are from the Medium Spender (up to 100,000 DOT) track. This is followede by Tips (summing al types), and then Small Spender and Large Spender. From the proposals, ~50% have been aproved, with ~40% cancelled (rejection + timeout), and ~10% are being voted at the time of writing.


**Treasury Spending details**

Treasury spending tracks are currently the most used tracks in OpenGov. The following is a breakdown of these tracks.

| Track | Weight | Approval | Cancelled | Ongoing |
|:--------------:|--------|----------|-----------|---------|
| Small Spender | 16.2% | 18.75% | 75% | 6.25% |
| Medium Spender | 67.7% | 43.3% | 38.8% | 17.9% |
| Big Spender | 16.2% | 50% | 31.3% | 18.8% |

Incredibly enough, the more treasury funding a team is willing to spend, the highest the probability it has of being approved. This seems counter-intutive and dangerous to the ecosystem. Instead of fostering an entrepreneurial attitude of trying small and failing small, the community is aiming for very big spends.

**Spending Categories**

Tracks themselves do not express what the funding is being used on. Since the very beginning of Polkadot, the most amount of spending has been used for funding different projects. However, in the recent years, main funding has been shifting towards outreach, to the point that in 2023 the community has decided to spend more on outreach than on development.


Looking into outreach particulary, the most amount of funding goes towards events and Media efforts. For development, funds are being mostly used for wallet development and maintainace, and for special projects (the likes of Snowbridge).

One small conclusion to be driven is that in 2023, the treasury has spent more funds in events than it had into attracting new client implementations to the network, a key feature that would positively impact Polkadot becoming unstoppable.



### Current Community Sentiment
Since OpenGov, the community sentiment has been going down significantly. Proposers believe that the are left to battle alone against big dot holders, making the process more of a lottery. At the same time, voters believe that sometimes they don't have enough information to make a decision or that the project is not impactful, however they fail to communicate this clearly. This leaves the project with a bad sentiment and no potential action to be taken.

Proposals themselves, although sometimes very detailed, are not cohesive. Every proposer tries to push for what they personally thing is the right way to do, yet this bigger consensus in the Polkadot Ecosystem on what direction to take lacks completely.

In the end, this is currently creating a cycle by which everyone has very good intention but lacks complete coordination. Therefore the Polkadot Ecosystem is trhowing treasury funds in a lot of different directions without a clear, coordinated impact.

## Bounties

As [stated on the Polkadot Wiki](https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/glossary#bounty) (with a slight edit from myself) a Bounty is:

> A mechanism which works in some sense as the reverse of a Treasury Proposal, allowing the Polkadot <del>Council</del> Community to indicate that there is a need to do some task for the Polkadot network and allowing users to receive DOT in return for working on that task.

In essence, a Bounty is a joint decision from the Polkadot Community to focus resources on a specific task. It has several mechanisms in itself:
- Curators. This is a set of actors that can only act in the Bounty itself. At the same time, these curators need to be voted by the Community. Curators can also be un-assigned by the community if they are not delivering.
- Sub-Bounties. This is a mechanism that Bounties have to further split spending into smaller categories.
- Bounty Cancellation. The community can actively vote to cancel a Bounty if it's not delivering as expected.

More information about these mechanisms can be found [directly on the code](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/tree/master/substrate/frame/bounties).

The imporant bit about bounties is that it allows the community to actively discuss and allocate resources to what will make the Polkadot Ecosystem sucessful. This, paired with people socially trusted by the community to allocate this resources, yet keeping control of changing them if needed, allows for a better directed use of public funds.

### Using Bounties
An interesting way of looking into this is actually having meta-discussions around spending categories (Outreach, BD, Development, Research, etc) with what the concrete objectives for these are. This should be paired with metrics and a proposed list of curators.

Different Bounties with different spending targets and different curators can be proposed simultaneously for the community to decide accordingly.

Each bounty as well can then be divided into sub-bounties to execute a more granular use of the funds.

**Example**
Let's use as simple, not fully extensivle, example Development Funding. A community member can propose to use Development funding with the following objectives:
1. Decrease the time to parachain. Objective is to decrease Polkadot Coretime consumption from several months to 2 weeks.
2. Add client diversity. Objective is to have 4 different client implementation being developed.
3. Support key infrastructure to make polkadot unstoppable. Objetive is to have a diverse landscape of Wallets and Bootnodes, each of them with a clear roadmap to becoming self-sustainable.

For this, the proposer believes that Polkadot should spend 1,000,000 DOT in total, and curators should be X, Y, Z, W and Q.

All three objectives will be a sub-bounty in itself, and allocation will be: 50% to Objetive 1, 40% to Objective 2 and 10% to Objective 3. Proposals are to be made in the form in a github issue and the curators will send a remark on chain the moment something has been merged and approved, besides sending the funds.

Finally, these proposers have the following set of RFP's (reason for proposals) for each category, with things they believe should be implemented, and it's description. Still, this list is non extensive and other applications that help achieve the three objectives mentioned are welcome.

## Parity's Role
Parity is one more community member of Polkadot. However, it has in itself a great weight and is listend to carefully by the overall community. This community role has to be treated with great concious.

If Parity starts emitting opinions about everything, thus dictating the course of the development of the network, then it will most probably negatively affect it, as it's impossible for it to know what is the absolute best.

At the same time, Parity thus have some power to initiate postive discussions in the community to try and help it organize itself.

My proposal is for Parity to kick-off this social organization of OpenGov, help with KOL in the ecosystem to discuss this openly and start executing this.

## A note on Collectives
To be added. Main thoughts:
- long term ideal
- short term difficult to implement for non-technical tasks
- quantitive data for non-technical stuff hard to execute. everything more cualitive and opinionated.
- reputation role?