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Treasury Proposal: AwesomeDOT – A Public Infrastructure Platform for Discovering and Maintaining Polkadot Ecosystem Projects
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 Over time, links break, repositories become inactive, and information becomes outdated.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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Comments (7)
Comments are restricted to accounts with an on-chain verified identity.
Ey 👋
I noticed the proposal references polkadotecosystem.com, yet no contact or coordination was attempted, despite the portal being open, maintained, and already solving most of the challenges described.
Before rebuilding a full ecosystem directory, the first step should be assessing whether the existing public good can simply be extended instead of duplicated.
What already exists
The Polkadot Ecosystem Directory already provides:
Current reality
Most of what this proposal aims to build already exists.
The remaining parts (automation, bots, AI-assisted submissions) can be integrated directly into the current platform without fragmenting efforts. These features are secondary to the real challenge: distribution and discoverability.
The efficient path forward
If the goal is genuine ecosystem impact, the best approach is:
→ Reuse the existing directory and contents as the canonical reference
→ Add automation and tooling on top of the existing infrastructure
→ Build experimental / derivative portals using the same data
This avoids duplication, increases coherence, and delivers far better ROI for the Treasury on all this initiatives as coordinated ecosystem.
I’m fully open to collaboration and integration, and can advise on direction and project structure. Parallel directories built from scratch or poorly references only dilute effort and waste resources that could strengthen a single, unified ecosystem projects, resources and related content center.
The foundational work already exists
Categorization, content, project mapping, manual verification, and structural taxonomy have all been built and maintained for over a year. There is no need to start from zero.
To avoid duplication going forward, I strongly recommend:
→ Aligning directories, ecosystem maps, and discovery tools under a shared roadmap.
This enables data reuse, strengthens distribution, and keeps community efforts coherent.
I’m available to contribute, coordinate, and share resources wherever it creates measurable ecosystem value.
Additional context
I delivered the original initiative under Proposal 1240, have continued maintaining the portal since then, and I will be preparing a concise review + roadmap covering:
If teams are open to collaboration, consolidating distribution and unifying efforts will have far greater impact than building in isolation and even competing.
Forum:
Polkadot Atlas: All the Polkadot Ecosystem in One Place
Hi @LV and thank you for taking the time to share this detailed perspective - really appreciate it.
I want to respond clearly and constructively, because the last thing we want is duplication of effort, and the goal of AwesomeDOT has always been to complement existing work, not compete with it. I'll try to go through your points one by one.
1. Your current work
First, yes — polkadotecosystem.com is a valuable public good, and it’s evident that a lot of manual effort, taxonomy development, and verification has gone into it. We respect that work and the consistency with which it has been maintained.
Our proposal does not question its usefulness.
What we are trying to address is a different, and currently unsolved, problem that sits upstream of any curated directory:
This is the root problem we are focused on.
2. Discoverability Gap: The Core Issue We Are Targeting
Before writing the proposal, we conducted 40+ real-world search tests:
In every test:
No native Polkadot directory appeared in the first 2–3 pages of results.
polkadotecosystem.com did not surface.
Even parachains.info often did not surface.
The results were dominated by:
Whether the WordPress version ranked historically or not, the current reality is that the directory is not indexed or discoverable today, and this is exactly what we are trying to fix.
I am not saying this is a critique, it is simply the measurable outcome in search engines right now.
3. Static vs Dynamic: We Are Solving a Different Layer
Your directory provides:
AwesomeDOT is not trying to replace these things.
What we are building is a dynamic system designed specifically for search engine discoverability and automation, including:
Dynamic Page Generation
Every category, sub-category, chain, tool, and project gets:
Static/directories — even well curated ones — do not benefit from:
Search engines heavily prioritize these factors today.
Automation Layer
Our proposal includes:
These are not small features — they are the backbone of a self-updating ecosystem dataset.
This automation layer does not exist anywhere today.
Unified API Layer
A core deliverable of AwesomeDOT is a public API endpoint that anyone can query, including other app builders, dashboards, explorers, researchers, and — importantly — other directories.
Today, none of the existing directories offer a stable, structured, public API.
4. Why We Didn’t Propose “Just Extend polkadotecosystem.com”
Because based on your architecture and stack, the following would require a rebuild anyway:
Even if we wanted to “extend” the existing directory, we would need to re-architect the backend entirely — which is effectively the same work we are already proposing.
That said, integration remains absolutely possible, and I’ll touch on that below.
5. Consolidation Is the Goal — and AwesomeDOT Is Designed for It
We agree with you completely:
Where AwesomeDOT can add value is here:
We are building the data and automation layer that any number of frontends can use.
This means:
And similarly:
This means that it not duplication, rather a shared infrastructure backend that multiple frontends (including yours) can reuse.
6. The Proposal Explicitly Encourages Collaboration
Our proposal explicitly notes:
We would be very happy to:
This is not a zero-sum effort.
It is an attempt to create a single underlying source of truth, with multiple frontends allowed to innovate on top of it.
7. The Treasury’s ROI Improves with This Approach
Treasury funding should support:
AwesomeDOT provides that shared layer.
Your directory provides a specialized frontend based on your UX choices.
These two are not competing but complementary parts of the same ecosystem architecture.
8. Invitation to Collaborate
We would genuinely like to find a path where:
together form a unified and reusable ecosystem backbone.
If you're open to it, we would be happy to:
Let’s solve the discoverability problem together.
OG Tracker Rating 3/3
Clear display of deliverables✅
Clear display of a valid direct point of contact ✅
Clear display of proposal’s duration✅
OGT Rating aims to help voters make better informed decisions and direct proposers towards certain common-good practices. We are providing feedback based on 3 simple yet crucial criteria which we believe should be included in every OpenGov referenda.