An Open Communication Layer For Polkadot

Amount Requested: 27,259 DOT ($133,080 USD, converted with the EMA-7 DOT price of $4.882 on 17 August 2023)

TL;DR: OpenComm consolidates siloed discussions in the ecosystem, improving and decentralizing governance communications, as well as enabling on-chain discussions about any entity or resource, such as proposals, accounts, or transactions. This communication layer is open and accessible by anyone and any application, improving information flow and availability in the ecosystem. DOT holders will benefit by the increased flow, decentralization, and accessibility of communications in the ecosystem.

If you prefer to watch or listen, we have also prepared a brief video overviewing this proposal:

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Currently, communication in the Polkadot ecosystem is not only largely stuck in Web2, but it is siloed and segregated. Governance discussions take place off-chain and are thus fragmented, projects have to rely on Discord and Telegram to interact with their communities, and suboptimal solutions are implemented for connecting these Web2 accounts to users’ Web3 accounts. Furthermore, by forcing communities to live off-chain, user engagement with dapps is lowered. We realized that, although Web3 communities, and their communications, should be moved on-chain (in order to solve the aforementioned problems), there was too much friction with actually using a blockchain for this.

In May, we released the final piece of our UX (user experience) solution, enabling Web3 social to provide a familiar Web2 UX that is so smooth, even your grandma can do it. In fact, the onboarding process is even faster than many Web2 apps, as you don’t even need to manually create an account.

Open Communication For Open Governance

After removing the previously mentioned friction, we created OpenComm in order to further decentralize Polkadot’s governance, and the governance of any other Web3 project (as OpenComm supports EVM as well as Substrate) by enabling smooth and efficient on-chain communication.

“Integrating OpenComm was one of the most efficient and effective integrations for Polkassembly.

We managed to enable messaging on the platform in no time and are looking forward to the community engaging on proposals and topics which will steer our partner networks in a community driven direction.” - Parambir, Product Owner, Polkassembly

With OpenComm, all governance discussions will take place on-chain, and the content and messages will be freely accessible by anyone. This means we could have ten different governance platforms, all connected to the OpenComm social layer, allowing anyone to access the full breadth of Polkadot’s governance discussions, despite their UI/UX preference. This can already be seen, as there is a unified Zeitgeist discussion available from three different user interfaces.

We then realized that OpenComm could facilitate much more than just governance, and with our Resource Linking standard, OpenComm enables on-chain communication around any on-chain entity (such as accounts, proposals, NFTs, or anything else), and can even be used to discuss things off-chain, such as URLs around the internet.

“The integration with OpenComm has been a groundbreaking step for us at Zeitgeist. To see users able to chat with each other (in a decentralized manner!) whilst in the middle of using our prediction markets app has been a joy - but beyond that has made them just as happy!” - James Preston, Marketing Communications Manager, Zeitgeist

Adoption

As of August 17th, OpenComm has facilitated over 7,900 messages, and one OpenComm-powered app, Grill.chat, has received almost 10,000 unique visitors in the last month. Try it out! Additionally, OpenComm has already been integrated into various ecosystem apps, including Zeitgeist, Polkassembly, Polkadot Study, and Sub.ID, and our team is getting new integration requests every week from projects in the ecosystem.

Please read the full proposal for all of the relevant details including the full context, milestone breakdown, budget, etc.

FAQ

The topic was previously posted for preliminary discussion on Polkassembly, where we answered comments about:

• Moderation and content permanence
• Moderation vs censorship and token gating
• Subsocial vs DappForce
• Messaging architecture