Polkascan Foundation Social Contract | Maintenance & Support for Python Libraries

This Social Contract aims to serve as an agreement between Polkascan Foundation on one hand and the Polkadot Network Community on the other hand. The Social Contract should be viewed as an off-chain coordination mechanism to advance the relation between Polkadot Network Community and Polkascan Foundation in its role of external service provider.

Polkascan Foundation is a not-for-profit infrastructure service provider and maintainer of Polkadot Ecosystem Python Libraries. These libraries have been developed over the past 2 years and have so far had our Polkascan Block Explorer stack as primary use-case and form its foundational components. The Python libraries are partly funded by Web3 Foundation grants, they have a generalized nature, suitable for adoption by any Python-based project in the broader Polkadot ecosystem. So far resource constraints have forced Polkascan Foundation to limit providing community support, with a few exceptions. This in turn has served as friction to increase wide-spread adoption of the libraries in the ecosystem. We have had an increasing amount of community requests to provide structural support for new Python-based projects in the ecosystem. Our most recent development update provides an overview of our current libraries' features in section 4: https://medium.com/polkadot-network/polkascan-development-update-7-36b5f814dc8b

Polkascan Foundation has been around from day one in the broader Polkadot ecosystem and has been consistently advocating the use of on-chain treasuries as sustainable source of funding for ecosystem infrastructure components. So far, we have prioritized our treasury requests to fund operational expenses for running the Polkascan.io platform. Now that has been approved, a next logical step for Polkascan Foundation is a funding request for maintenance and support of our Python libraries. Fundamentally we believe that the Polkadot Treasury should be willing to fund maintenance and support of its infrastructure.

Links and further details:

• The Social Contract Mechanism: https://github.com/polkascan/social-contract/blob/master/README.md
• The Social Contract for Maintenance & Support of Python Libraries: https://github.com/polkascan/social-contract/blob/master/polkadot/social-contract-002.md
• Treasury Proposal 8: https://github.com/polkascan/social-contract/blob/master/polkadot/treasury-proposal-008.md

We will be available to answer the Polkadot Council's questions.