@wei:pacna.org
Polkadot is not a castle in the sky. It builds upon, and uses other countless open source projects developed and maintained by other open source developers. This proposal aims at providing funding through the decentralized Polkadot treasury for Matrix.org Foundation, a non-profit UK Community Interest Company, behind the Matrix protocol.
The proposal is submitted by the author for community interest. Matrix.org Foundation acknowledges the proposal and confirms that they are able to receive funding in this way. However, the proposal or author are not affiliated with Matrix.org Foundation. Opinions expressed in this proposal are of the author's own, but not his employer (Parity Technologies).
Matrix protocol plays an essential role in Polkadot communications. The Matrix protocol is an open network for secure and decentralized communication. The majority of the Polkadot community interacts through Matrix protocol almost daily in rooms like "Polkadot Watercooler" and "Polkadot Direction". Matrix.org Foundation helps in, among other things, maintaining the Matrix procotol specifications, developing homeserver implementations such as Synapse and Dendrite, as well as writing Matrix SDKs for various languages including Rust. For more backgrounds of Matrix.org Foundation, you can read MSC1779.
Matrix.org Foundation is in need of help. In recent years, as data privacy increasingly becoming a concern, Matrix protocol becomes more widely deployed in many places, from open source communities to government organizations. However, according to Matrix's 2022 holiday update, not many of them reached core Matrix protocol development and it's putting core development at risk. They even had to lay off some of the folks working on the core team as a result.
Funding Upstream is an initiative for a set of bounties and treasury proposals to fund upstream projects and organizations that Polkadot depends on. Those includes Polkadot's direct dependencies, tool-chains, as well as software heavily utilized in the Polkadot ecosystem. The author hopes that this proposal can be one of the many.
As a common-good initiative, this proposal is being openly coordinated by the whole Polkadot community. You can find more information about it on:
@olanod:virto.community
This is a great initiative, totally on board with it. As said here the whole ecosystem relies heavily on the protocol and I see a lot of potential for Matrix and Polkadot to further overlap in the future.
Is the amount arbitrary? is it something the Matrix foundation would be fine receiving? would a higher amount perhaps be desirable?
Our team, Virto, is currently applying for funds in the Kusama ecosystem to develop a technology stack that is heavily reliant on Matrix and its integration with Substrate. Among other things we would work on the homeserver Conduit to allow it to compile to WASM, a Matrix client that works on embedded devices and a custom protocol to have embedded WASM state machines in Matrix rooms. Very exited to see efforts that can bring both decentralized protocols closer together :)
@wei:pacna.org
Is the amount arbitrary? is it something the Matrix foundation would be fine receiving? would a higher amount perhaps be desirable?
Indeed there's nothing scientific about the amount. It's kind of taken from the sponsorship information page, of the highest "Platinum membership" level. It's also just what I (might wrongly have) perceived as the amount that we sort of had some agreements on during the initial discussions.
I've talked with them last week and they're definitely fine receiving this amount. However, this is indeed not a lot compared with the total expenses -- according to the public information I can find (page, section "so, why is this all happening?"), currently, donation amounts to $6000 per month and Element provides $400,000 per month funding. The amount that this proposal is covering converted to per months, however, only amounts to less than 1/12 of that.
I'm honestly being cautious here. Last year we tried to kick-start the funding upstream initiative via the direct dependencies bounty. One of the very issues that stalled it was disagreements on the amounts (and whether locking is needed). It's not an easy task to perceive the value that the whole community thinks is reasonable. My opinion here is that we can always raise the amount later by adding subsequent treasury proposals. Doing the reverse -- starting with high amount and lowering it -- would not be a good idea, because the proposal may get rejected altogether, even though a lower amount would have been accepted by everyone.
By the way, writing here, I noticed that I used the currency "EUR" in the proposal. Given that it's a C.I.C incorporated in UK, using British pounds as the currency may be more desirable. I'm going to change that in the proposal.
@afr:tchncs.de
Commenting to signal that I fully suppport funding the Matrix Foundation. It's an important cornerstone of our community, not only limited to Polkadot/Kusama. Also, I think 500_000 (EUR or GBP) is a reasonable amount for the start.
@raul:web3.foundation
joining here with my other handle, not sure why i cannot join with my original one. I think this is a great idea - maybe structuring this as a maintenance proposal (covering part of the costs) for a tool we use on a daily basis makes more sense for the community. I assume Matrix aims to structure this as a donation (and not a grant or proposal) due to the implications of the latter and the fact being a foundation, they can receive donations - in any case, our community should see this as something that might happen frequently. Wei do you have a draft to use as contextual info? if not, should we start something?
@wei:pacna.org
I'd recommend that we keep those Funding Upstream proposals to be of "no strings attached". In a sense, the initiative has a major difference compared with existing treasury proposals. Most current proposals, including maintenance proposals, can be considered as providing loans for work that will be done in the future. Funding Upstream is different, in that we're essentially paying back debt for work that those open source tools already have done for Polkadot community in the past. As we'll continue to heavily rely on those things, this will continue to be the case.
Instead of "maintenance proposals", one thing we can explore, and I think will benefit the Polkadot community more, is to participate in Matrix's governance process. For example, once we reach agreements to fund Matrix.org Foundation continuously, members of the Matrix.org Foundation can vote on various "representatives" for its governing board. We can envision having the decentralized Polkadot community participating as a whole through an on-chain process, and having various on-chain collectives to, for example, vote for Polkadot representatives to participate closer in Matrix's core specifications. Of course, all those are for the mid-to-long-term future and we'll have to discuss the details with Matrix.org Foundation first (as well as figuring out the legal issues, and probably also submit MSCs to reach an acceptable deal with the wider Matrix community). In any case, I think this would be a much better direction to explore than requiring Matrix.org Foundation to structure it as maintenance proposals.
do you have a draft to use as contextual info?
I don't follow you here. What kind of "draft" do you mean?
@raul:web3.foundation
I think this would be a much better direction to explore than requiring Matrix.org Foundation to structure it as maintenance proposals.
yes, this can also work
@raul:web3.foundation
I don't follow you here. What kind of "draft" do you mean?
when you submit a proposal onchain you will need to explain to the community the arguments of the submission: it would be helpful to structure a document with what the matrix.org fundation is, how it works, what we use from them and how, and how much is the proposal requesting and on which terms (in this case, to be of "no strings attached"), rewarding for work done for the Polkadot community in the past - and explaining long terms goals to participate or be part of their governance process.
@wei:pacna.org
when you submit a proposal onchain you will need to explain to the community the arguments of the submission
Then this is actually the very document that you want. Or if you come from Element app, you can view a static version of the doc at https://forum.corepaper.org/post/!AZvsRzlxPPMqKlMwMB:pacna.org
@wei:pacna.org
I would like to address some of the comments raised for Funding Upstream initiative's proposal of the Matrix.org Foundation, regarding its donation nature.
One of the most important marketing strategies of the Funding Upstream initiative is to improve the image and perception of Polkadot inside the open source community. This has massive benefits for Polkadot overall, as it allows us to better attract developers as well as receiving support for software we use. One issue usually mentioned with Polkadot's treasury spending is that too many of them are "business-oriented", that most of them are just "proposals to grab funds and run". Open source developers are famously good at doing the opposite -- real common-good initiatives and projects.
The strategy still has a long way to go, as historically we're not viewed as a friend of open source. For example, up till today, Rust's lib.rs still openly lists crypto with the joke name "magic beans" (https://lib.rs/cryptography/cryptocurrencies). The strategy to improve the image and perception of Polkadot cannot be done by going to war with them -- after all, we use their software and we depend on them. It can only be done by supporting them, and changing things over time.
We chose Matrix.org Foundation for the initial proposal for the Funding Upstream initiative because it's one of the few that is currently friendly towards crypto. The goal here is to start it as a role model, as to showcase to other open source communities that it's possible to receive support from Polkadot treasury, interact with us, and possibly have more collaborations in the future. The donation nature of the proposal is decided following the strategy -- we would not win anything else, but only a single proposal, had we asked Matrix.org Foundation to do a specific consultation project with us.
The strategy also relied on the assumption that we do not have a hugely divided community on this issue -- that supporting software we already used and benefited extremely is common sense. Indeed, we were actually not aware of the divided nature until just a few hours ago -- discussions from all places we can gather were single-handedly positive. This new divided nature, however, changed a lot of things, and it means that the strategy of the Funding Upstream initiative may have already failed -- the proposal, even if it's passed, will be viewed as "the initiative persuaded the community", rather than what we intended "the community overwhelmingly supports open source".
I think this proposal will also make many of us reconsider our free-time involvement in Polkadot. The community is kept together by countless individuals generously doing countless voluntary work. Many of us would have to reconsider whether it's still worth it, given that things do cost money and time, inside a community that is hostile towards open source.