Societal - A Homebase for Decentralized Communities
The link to our discussion post can be found here. The discussion post was made by my personal account. We have submitted this proposal after a week of public discussion and attending the AAG call.
Dear Polkadot Community,
My name is Graeme Fox - Co-Founder & CEO of Societal. For those of you that dont know, Societal is a parachain that makes it easy to organize, govern, and grow on-chain communities. Its streamlined SaaS application is the ideal platform to run any Polkadot community’s operations, including the creator economy, protocols, social clubs, gaming, DAOs, and more.
Societal is asking for $187,342.47 USD / 38,249 DOT (as of June 21st, 2023) in treasury funding to provide the ecosystem with a platform for community operations and governance. Our application will work with any tokenized project in the ecosystem that is looking for governance, treasury, and community management services.
As it stands today, the Polkadot ecosystem does not have the creation, governance, and treasury management tooling products that the other major blockchain ecosystems do. By building these products, we will strengthen the Polkadot community by empowering NFT projects, DAOs, and protocols with a powerful platform to manage their operations.
Societal has not applied for treasury funding before and has a small amount of VC backing. We are asking the treasury to support our project so that we can finish off our product and start onboarding Polkadot users. We believe that after we do this we will be in a strong position to seek more VC funding, as the fundraising environment is currently at a stand still for early-stage crypto projects. Additionally, we strongly believe that the Polkadot ecosystem needs more usable applications, as most projects in-production today are DeFi or smart contract infrastructure platforms.
Societal has already completed most of the work required to be the homebase for decentralized communities in the Polkadot ecosystem. We are seeking funding to complete an array of final features of the product, including token import, governance, and proposal features along with the management UI to support them. We will also use the funding to conduct final testing and to start onboarding users. These features will allow new and existing communities to have access to a full suite of governance, treasury, and member management systems, which are currently not available in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Please find the full proposal here. It would be great to hear your collective input about our proposal, and I am more than happy to answer any questions or concerns that you may have.
More information about Societal can be found here:
Societal’s Track record/Accomplishments below:
- Attended Inaugural Polkadot Blockchain Academy
- Polkadot Relayers
- Secured Three Web 3 Foundation Grants - Grant 1, Grant 2, Grant 3
- Accepted to Substrate Builders Program and Completed Milestone 1
- Multiple Polkadot Panel Discussions - Academy Alumni, ETHDenver
- Rococo Testnet Deployment
- Product Walkthrough Videos
- Scytale Academy Graduate
- Accepted to Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator 2023
- Cross Ecosystem Engagement Initiatives
Comments (8)
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Hey team, Requesting you to link the discussion post to the proposal. If you face any challenge, feel free to reach out to us.
@premiurly
Hi there, I am having some trouble linking the discussion as I made it with my personal account and made the referendum with our business account / address. I have posted the discussion in the description but will send you a message to see if we can resolve this. Thanks!
Hello Graeme, your proposal is well structured and detailed, it seems interesting to me, but let me ask something. How does Societal's proposal for community operations and governance compare to Subsocial for example? What unique benefits does your solution offer, considering the significant funding request and the need for more usable applications within the Polkadot ecosystem? Thanks, Polkadotters
@pmensik
Hi Polkadotters! Thanks for the question/discussion.
We're big fans of Subsocial, and are in early-stage talks with them to see where we can work together. Some of the areas we see as very complimentary would be features like Spaces (social profiles), news feed, and grill chat. One of our favourite parts about building in the Polkadot ecosystem is the culture of collaborating, and now working with Subsocial to integrate some of their features is the perfect example.
To answer your other question - Societal's USP is customizable on-chain governance, operational and member management systems for decentrlaized communities / organizations. We are focusing on the governace and treasury management opposed to social or commination networks like Subsocial. Along with this, we will be launching an app store for third-party community management tools to deploy on our smart contract layer, becoming a one-stop shop for dotsama communities to run all of their operations.
Hope this answers your question and thanks again for taking the time to ask!