Hello Mork,
Your proposal is exactly the kind of submissions I was looking for when I submitted the RFP: Action Research for OpenGov to the W3F back in February 2024.
I particularly resonate with your statements on Information asymmetry, which some will see as an opportunity to be leveraged for personal gains, while others will perceive as an obstacle to a more holistic ecosystem.
I think that a tool that can be customised to provide tailored but credibly neutral insights for all OpenGov participants is very much needed. But in my eyes, the most valuable part of your proposal is that your team also offers to do ongoing R&D for OpenGov based on these timely insights.
There are a lot of aspects of OpenGov that can and should be reinvented to better fit the current landscape. For example, delegation is always being pushed as the solution to a so-called “low turnout” in OpenGov. But I have written in the past about how there might be some issues in the way voting mechanisms are currently set up that put individual voters and delegators off participating in the first place.
One recommendation I would have about this Squidsway proposal is that its off-chain data should incorporate some form of SEO score of each project, as a measure of the team’s understanding of basic web development and marketing strategies.
Over the past 4 years, I have observed a pattern whereby project teams create noise on socials (Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Polkadot forum) just before they submit a proposal on OpenGov. But what happens to them once they are approved or rejected? Do they ditch their initiatives altogether or keep working to refine them? Do they confine themselves to a niche of known supporters or do they try to engage other market participants? Are they content with getting funding from the Polkadot network alone or do they investigate ways to sustain themselves beyond the ecosystem?
It seems to me that SEO tells the real story and the history of all projects in a credibly neutral manner that is highly desirable. SEO can’t be gamed by buying views, likes, and shares/retweets; so it is worth taking into consideration to avoid bringing in junk data into the analysis.
All the best!