Decred’s Politeia, a proposal system that is part of Decred’s governance system, has a vast amount of potential uses. As such, Decred can only reasonably explore a few of these use cases on their own.

The Politeia Platform Challenge is a competition designed to discover alternate uses for the Politeia codebase. Competitors will use Politeia source code to address alternate use cases besides a public proposal system and then demonstrate how they work. Decred will choose the best of these on February 10th, 2018 at the Hyatt Regency in Austin, TX. The event starts at 8 PM CST, ends at 12 AM CST, and is free to attend. Drinks and food will be available for purchase.

Competitors are encouraged to work in teams but may work independently. National competitors will be able to demonstrate their projects remotely through video conferencing. Prizes will be awarded for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place:

1st Place - USD 10,000

2nd Place - USD 5,000

3rd Place - USD 2,000

All prizes are equivalent to USD and payable in Decred.

Competition Submission Instructions

Interested parties should write a brief description of their intended project and email to pi2017 (at) decred.org. Projects that are sound and novel will be accepted for competition.

Competitors can post questions about the competition or Politeia codebase on:

Questions regarding presentation logistics at the Hyatt should be emailed to Courtney Brokc (cbrock at roguesignal.io). Working code must be submitted on or before January 26th, 2018 to pi2017 (at) decred.org. Please include all instructions.

Teams will demonstrate projects live at the event on February 10th, 2018. Teams not located in Austin, TX will present remotely.

Directions for Submissions

Submissions must focus on some combination of changes to the backend and/or the frontend. If your idea requires a different workflow than Politeia, i.e. proposals submitted by users that must be manually approved by administrators, you will need to make some modifications to the backend. If your idea requires a new user interface, you will need to modify the frontend.

Presentations for submissions should focus on what use cases are addressed and how the backend was changed to accommodate those use cases. Demonstrating frontend changes is optional and we suggest using user interface mockups in lieu of having a working frontend for the submission.

There are no requirements regarding whether or not submissions are open sourced, so it is acceptable to make a submission that corresponds to code that is not open sourced. However, we will need to confirm each submission has working proof-of-concept level code prior the event on February 10th, 2018. Please note that you must make the source code for the proof-of-concept available for evaluation, but not necessarily open source it publicly. Working code must be submitted via email on or before January 26th, 2018, to pi2017 (at) decred.org along with instructions on how to make it work.

In the case that a submission is open source, the Decred Project may choose to fund further work on the submission after the competition is complete. As a matter of policy, the Decred Project does not financially support closed-source software, so it is not eligible for similar ongoing funding.

Details on Prize Payments

Payment for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prizes shall occur after the winners are selected by a panel of judges. The payment amounts shall be equivalent to USD 10,000, USD 5,000 and USD 2,000, for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places, respectively. The payments shall be made in Decred after the second event, using an exchange rate averaged over the month of January 2018. This average is determined by averaging the DCR/USDT exchange rate, calculated by taking the DCR/BTC and BTC/USDT data from Poloniex, weighted averages over 15 minute intervals, multiplying them, and then averaging over the month of January 2018.

Conclusion

There are myriad potential uses for Politeia, and we are excited to see what competitors come up with for the event on February 10th, 2018. If you’re interested in getting in touch and discussing the Politeia Platform Challenge, please contact us on GitHub, Rocket.Chat, Reddit or our Forum.