Hello community!

We are posting this discussion to gauge feedback on our proposal — to move Polkadot Live development into the community and aim to get funding for 1 full-time senior software engineer for a 12 month period. 

Upon positive feedback being received we will move forward and commence a proposal.

Overview

Ross Bulat (Parity Technologies) demoed a new blockchain user experience at Polkadot Decoded 2023, showing how Polkadot interaction can happen on the desktop.

The app, named Polkadot Live, is centred around 2 key fundamentals:

• Notifications that are delivered directly to the user, as they happen, in a decentralised manner (node RPC & light client driven), The ability to quickly respond to those notifications, by submitting extrinsics, directly on the desktop. These “quick actions” should be complementary to existing dapps, and not act as replacements.
• Readers of this document are encouraged to watch the entire presentation for the rationale of the product, the problems it solves, what has been achieved thus far with the prototype demoed, and the general roadmap of the app.

We are preparing a proposal in an effort to secure funding to onboard one full-time senior developer to contribute to the Polkadot Live product and bring it to an initial release. This full time developer will report directly to Ross, who leads and oversees the direction of the app.

This will primarily be an engineering effort, but promotion / marketing efforts will also be explored when the product is ready for a beta release, in order to receive feedback from the community and shape the product to community expectations.

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Proposal Details:

Planned Proposal Start Date: 27th September 2023

Proposal Submitted By: Joel Kenny, JKRB Investments / Website / LinkedIn

Advisor, Technical Direction: Ross Bulat, Parity Technologies

Requested Funds: 24,937 DOT ($100k @ $4.01 / 1 DOT)

Planned Fund Allocation:

• 15% / $15,000: to JKRB Investments (manager of contractual agreement(s), onboarding of software engineer, milestones and project management oversight). Paid in bulk upon successful proposal approval, with immediate commencement of works.
• 80% / $80,000: 12-month allocation of monthly salary for 1 full-time senior software engineer. $6,666 / monthly salary, $50 per hour / 6 hour days.
• 5%: Contingencies, unforeseen expenses. To be held in DOT until if / when contingency expenses come about.

Deliverables:

• Initial release of Polkadot Live app, for macOS and Windows.
• Open sourcing of Polkadot Live codebase on Github.

Full Proposal Document: Google Doc