Dear Polkadot community,

With the launch of OpenGov on Polkadot around the corner, we plan to use the knowledge and skills we have gained from Kusama OpenGov to help kick-start Polkadot's OpenGov. Our main goal hasn't changed: we want to make the governance proposals process within the Polkadot community better, more open, and more successful.

This proposal outlines our plan to bring our successful proposal auditing process, first started on the Kusama Network, to the Polkadot Network. It builds on the work of the OpenCommunity Governance project, which has been running on the Kusama network for the past five months. In this period we delivered 80+ Audit reports on Kusama OpenGov treasury proposals.

Problem

With the launch of OpenGon on Kusama, it became apparent that proposals are not very well structured, lack information, and include budgets that seem very hard to defend. Proposals can also be very diverse with a focus on different areas that not everyone can be familiar with. For all these reasons it is significantly time-consuming for voters to truly understand the proposal and cast an educated vote on it.

A significant challenge in the current proposal evaluation process is the lack of constructive feedback during the discussion phase. To address this, appointed auditors will focus on being more involved in the earlier phases of proposal development. This proactive approach will help proposers receive feedback and address potential weaknesses in their proposals before they are submitted onchain, giving them time to evaluate the feedback and make improvements.

Milestone 0: Prepare OpenCommunity Governance documentation

Milestone 0 focuses on adjusting the governance documents currently used in the Kusama network to align with the needs of the Polkadot ecosystem. This involves adjusting the Proposal and Audit templates, updating necessary documents on treasury sites, wiki, and GitHub, and initiating the audit process to improve the quality and transparency of incoming proposals with the set standards and guidelines.

Milestone 1: Implement OpenCommunity Governance

In Milestone 1, the primary objective is to start proposal audits while they are still in the discussion phase and follow up the proposals onchain.

A major challenge in the current proposal evaluation process is the lack of constructive feedback during the discussion phase. To address this, appointed auditors will shift their focus by becoming more involved in the earlier phases of proposal development. This proactive approach will help proposers receive feedback and address potential weaknesses in their proposals before they are submitted onchain, ultimately improving the overall quality of submissions.

All details can be found in the Proposal document

All the documents, previous treasury proposals, deliverables and reports, audits are stored on our GitHub

We are community oriented initiative and we are open to onboard additional auditors from the community, more details can be found in the following Kusama proposal.

Kusama ongoing project

Some examples of audit reports: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3

I am looking for feedback on this proposal so please feel free to ask questions and leave suggestions to help me further improve the presented project. Your suggestions will play a key role in enhancing the transparency and efficiency of our governance process.

Thank you!