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OpenGov.Watch - 2024 July Performance Summary

· 3 min read
Alice und Bob

This month started intense, with our Polkadot Treasury Report making waves in crypto mass media and the socials. While the reception was mixed, it put Polkadot back on the radar of several people and entities that had forgotten about Polkadot.

Our monthly OpenGov report for July highlights some of the consequences: A more critical evaluation of the Treasury's spending behavior. The Marketing Bounty 500k refill was rejected as more whales woke up and we hope that more accountability and a better alignment along a shred strategy will be the consequence.

Speaking of strategy, we were honored to share our mental model for how OpenGov can develop a bottom-up strategy at Polkadot Decoded in this “State of the Union” talk. Folks at Parity liked the presentation and mentioned it in their “Emerging Web3 Trends” blog post.

Our main objective for this month was to propose a budget for OpenGov. This put us in front of a fundamental problem that we have been confronted with for over a year now, typically summarized as “Budgets in OpenGov are not enforceable”. Sure, we could come up with some budget and hit send, but that is not what we are here for. We had to find a way. We had to break this belief of unenforceability first and to do it, we had to completely deconstruct current Theories of Treasury Management. We listened to a lot of community discussions and in the absence of coming up with a budget, we came up with the second-best thing: A credible path to a real budget. We call our approach “BASED Budgeting - A Bottom-up Approach to Strategic, Effective & Decentralized Budgeting”. You can find a 10-minute exposition + 15 minutes of discussion here on AAG. Or get the 67-minute BASED Budgeting - Introduction and Q&A in our YouTube Live.

Our Governance Initiative focus for this month we have picked the Ambassador Program. The original OpenGov referendum was very crude and as such, there was a lot of follow-up debate about all the missing pieces and details and unfinished discussions. We summarized the relevant talking points with specific suggestions for the current situation and lessons learned for future on-chain collectives. Read the article here and listen to the Twitter OpenGov Office Hours special episode here.

Public sentiment around OpenGov (and by extension Polkadot) is in a critical zone right now with the Treasury main account having broken below 100m USD in available cash and many questioning if OpenGov can turn around. As OpenGov.Watch, we intend to stay on top of the situation by creating a new shared sense of agency in the community through the application of our newly developed BASED Budgeting approach. It will require the participation of smart brains, dedicated hands, and responsible whales to get it done.

What we did this month:​