Polkadot ecosystem announces the formation of the Polkadot Alliance to establish and uphold a set of ethics for the community

The success of any ecosystem depends largely on its environment and a thriving community that is built on consensus and a set of ethics rooted in fairness and trust so that the voice of every member is heard, valued, and respected.

Two years ago, several Polkadot community teams got together and came up with the idea for the Alliance, primarily to fight misuse of the Polkadot brand and unattributed code. The Polkadot Alliance was first referenced in public in the August 2022 blog post “Proposal for Common Good Parachains” by Joe Petrowski of the Web3 Foundation.

Fast forward three months later. Seven teams from the Polkadot ecosystem announced today the official formation of the Polkadot Alliance, an on-chain collective that maintains and enforces a set of ethics and recommended standards for the community to follow.

The founding fellows include Acala, Astar, Interlay, KILT Protocol, Moonbeam, Subscan, and Phala. The mission of the Alliance is to ensure standards of excellence across the rapidly growing ecosystem.

What is Polkadot Alliance?

The Polkadot Alliance is an on-chain collective that establishes and upholds a community code of ethics. The Alliance provides an on-chain mechanism to recognize teams who align with the open-source culture, to ensure the continued success of the Polkadot ecosystem. The Alliance is already deployed on the Westend test parachain and will likely be the first one on Polkadot.

Membership

Membership in the alliance is open to members of the Polkadot community if they meet certain requirements.  You can read the Alliance Charter to learn more about how to become a member. Members of the alliance also have some responsibilities. Alliance members are expected to be companies, projects, other collectives, or even other networks in the Polkadot ecosystem (e.g. a company working on a parachain, or the Kusama network itself). Membership consists of two tiers: Fellow and Ally.

Fellows have voting rights on Alliance motions and carry out on-chain operations. Being a Fellow requires a strong commitment not only to abide by the standards but also to enforce these standards in a consistent and timely manner. For instance, Fellows are responsible for membership management including promotion to Ally (or removal), and curation of an “Unscrupulous List” of problematic team URLs and accounts.

A subset of the Fellows is the seven Founding Fellows, which are the teams who built the Polkadot Alliance and started to contribute before it was live on-chain.

Allies are members of the Polkadot Alliance and do not have voting rights. There are two ways to join as an Ally:

• By submitting a transaction to join and placing a deposit of 1,000 DOT, which is locked until retirement from the collective.
• By nomination by a Fellow, which does not require a deposit.

Anyone can join as an Ally (with a deposit), but only Fellows can promote Allies to Fellow. Allies that wish to take a more active role in operating the Alliance, and who demonstrate active and sustained contributions to the ecosystem, can request promotion to Fellow. The motion to do so requires 60% approval from voting members to pass.

The Alliance will exist on-chain and will publish its findings of unscrupulous websites and accounts on-chain. But it will not have any governance powers; its domain does not reach into other parts of the Polkadot protocol.