Hello Polkadot community! I am Fardeen (haquefardeen on GitHub/Polkadot), the creator of AwesomeDOT, a community-driven repository that has curated hundreds of projects, tools, and resources across the Polkadot ecosystem over the last three years. We are submitting a revised Treasury proposal for AwesomeDOT Hub, in collaboration with JUST Ventures.

Some of you may remember our earlier attempt (Referendum #1469). After that vote and the feedback shared in forum threads, DMs, and calls, we completely reworked the proposal. The current version clarifies scope, responsibilities, and deliverables, and positions the AwesomeDOT Platform as long-term ecosystem infrastructure.

🔎 TL;DR

We want to build awesome-dot.com, a live, community-maintained directory of Polkadot projects that:

* makes it easier for people to find active, trustworthy Polkadot apps & tools,

* keeps data fresh automatically instead of relying only on manual updates, and

* exposes everything through an open API so other teams can build on top of it. 

This is meant to be long-term ecosystem infrastructure, not a one-off campaign.

🧩 Background & Problem Statement

The Polkadot ecosystem is rich and rapidly expanding. While this is a strong positive signal, it also creates fragmentation. Information about ecosystem projects is spread across GitHub repositories, blogs, dashboards, informal lists, and third-party aggregators. New users are often faced with a large number of links (wallets, infrastructure tools, dApps, SDKs) without clear signals on which projects are active, maintained, or relevant today.

Maintaining comprehensive ecosystem lists manually is increasingly difficult. Over time, links break, repositories become inactive, and information becomes outdated. This leads to confusion for users and reduces trust in existing directories. The lack of a single, well-maintained, native discovery surface makes onboarding harder and pushes users towards third-party platforms that are not community-owned.

AwesomeDOT has been one attempt to centralize this knowledge. It has grown to include a broad set of Polkadot ecosystem projects and resources, largely through community contributions. However, in its current form (a GitHub repository with a basic website), it remains largely manual to maintain, offers limited freshness guarantees, and does not scale well as the ecosystem grows.

✅ What We’re Building

We propose to build the AwesomeDOT Platform, a public infrastructure layer that transforms the curated list into a dynamic, searchable, and sustainably maintained discovery hub for the Polkadot ecosystem.

The goal is curation without losing completeness: keeping broad coverage while adding structure, freshness, and trust signals. Key elements include:

* Automated Project Health Signals

  Introduce a Project Liveness Bot that checks for broken links and inactive repositories on a regular basis. This helps identify stale or unmaintained projects and keeps the directory reliable over time.

* Ecosystem Association Checks

  Deploy a Project Association Bot that verifies whether projects clearly identify their relationship to Polkadot (e.g. via website content). This provides an additional signal during human review and helps maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio.

* Metrics Enrichment

  Integrate a Metrics Bot to enrich project entries with publicly available signals such as repository activity or community indicators. These metrics provide context for users but are not intended to “pick winners.”

* Low-Friction Contributions with Human Review

  Contributors submit a project URL with minimal friction. An AI-assisted contribution workflow helps pre-fill structured fields (description, tags, links), after which human maintainers review and approve changes via pull requests before anything goes live.

* Searchable, Structured Web Interface

  Build a clean frontend (awesome-dot.com) with clear categorization, filtering, and short explanatory intros per category (e.g. wallets, DeFi, infrastructure), making the ecosystem easier to explore for newcomers.

Any AI usage in this proposal acts strictly as a support layer to reduce repetitive manual work — final authority always remains with human maintainers.

📦 What this proposal delivers

Over roughly 4 months, we commit to:

* Live awesome-dot.com website with:

  * project + category pages

  * search and filtering

  * Comprehensive copy and intros for key categories

* Open API serving the unified dataset

* Working Liveness Bot, Metrics Bot, and Association Bot

* AI-assisted submission pipeline (URL → enriched PR, reviewed by humans)

* Public documentation + final Treasury report with metrics and links to all repos 

All code and data will be open-source and community-maintained.

💰 Budget & Track

* Requested amount: equivalent of $76,000 USD in USDC

* Track: Small Spender

The payout is structured in multiple parts so that a portion is paid at approval and the rest only after delivery as per the on-chain preimage.

🧱 Why This Is Infrastructure (Not Marketing)

This question came up a lot, so we’re addressing it explicitly.

While the platform will naturally improve visibility of Polkadot projects, what we’re actually building is:

* a unified, open data schema for projects,

* a machine-readable ecosystem dataset,

* automation bots for liveness / metrics / association,

* a public API layer other builders can reuse, and

* an open-source discovery frontend maintained by the community. 

This proposal is about long-term shared infrastructure that future dashboards, analytics tools, governance apps, and even agents can plug into. Any “marketing” benefit is a side-effect, not the main deliverable.

Full proposal (with detailed deliverables, milestones, and tables):

> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fsu-Br2t0WHMwEkZsOY2OkFk9fWhVOiCGyL4QL6CYOE/

Thanks for reading and for all the feedback so far — it has genuinely made this proposal stronger. 🙏

— Fardeen Haque / AwesomeDOT, with JUST Ventures

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