Kusama Governance Dashboard

Dear Community,

We finally have a governance dashboard (currently only includes gov1 data)!

While the Proof of Chaos project aims to incentivise governance participation, until now there was no way to actually measure the impact of these efforts. We decided to build this dashboard since no alternatives were available and received treasury funding for the undertaking.

To align interests with a successful outcome and ensure delivery we only asked for approximately half (10500 Euros) of the funding up-front (the original proposal). These funds have already been received by us through Proposal 145. After receiving positive feedback on the related discussion post, we are now creating this proposal for the remaining funding (9200 Euros).

9200 Euros = 9824 USD

Using the EMA7: 24.65 USD/KSM

9824 / 24.65 = 398.5 KSM

The dashboard is split into 3 parts

Main dashboard

Presents the most important statistics to show insightful trends.

Single referendum view

Displays all relevant information for a specific referendum.

Single account view

Provides insights into the voting behaviour of a specific wallet.

We initially projected delivery to be in July 2022 and sincerely apologise for the delay. While work commenced immediately, we were not fully satisfied with previous iterations. Note that this project was largely executed by data analyst Claudia Yuan as to allow the existing devs for the Proof of Chaos project to keep focused on our other efforts.

Explanation of the design choices:

For the dashboard we built a custom SubSquid indexer that indexes all relevant governance data in real-time. You can query the data here.

Drawbacks:

Subsquid indexers are currently still running on centralized servers.
The indexer needs to be updated each time there is a runtime upgrade with breaking changes to the existing logic.

Centralisation

Currently all Subsquid indexers are running on the company's servers. While Subquery may have a more decentralized product, we still went with Subsquid due to the ease and speed of development with their solution. The support received from the Subsquid team as well as their commitment to the Polkadot Ecosystem also played a significant role in our decision. Note that Subsquid is working towards decentralisation.

Breaking changes through Runtime upgrades

This should be less of an issue as the Kusama network becomes more stable and runtime upgrades become "less invasive".

For the frontend we went with a Python Framework called Dash. While this helped us to build quicker, it limited us in flexibility. This route was chosen due to Claudia's familiarity with Python.

Continuation of the project...

We are of course interested in extending the dashboard to also include OpenGov (Gov2) data. This would be required to measure the effect of our incentivisation efforts going forward. It would involve updating the indexer to incorporate all OpenGov events + extrinsics as well as adapting the front-end to the new type of data (charts/filtering by tracks etc.).

Feel free to also throw any feature requests you may have in the comments of the discussion post. Thank you very much.