A big chunk of work from @_alyp_ was merged into the the politeia repo last week that adds the final bits for the Decred Contractor Clearance process. What's that? A thread https://github.com/decred/politeia/pull/1104

First, let's clear up some confusion about the politeia repo. At its core, politeia is a transparent, timestamped data store. Its a platform that we've built multiple use cases on top of.

Right now, these uses cases are:

1. Politeia - our proposal system ( http://proposals.decred.org )
2. Contractor Management System (CMS) - the system we use for managing monthly contractor billing

They're separate apps that run on the same politeia platform and share the same politeia repo. You configure your politeia instance and tell it which one to run.

This allows us share code between the different apps. You develop a feature for one, its available on all of them.

Anyway, back to the Decred Contractor Clearance process. As an open source project our recruiting pool is the entire world. This is great, but it also poses some challenges.

Imagine you open your workplace up to the entire internet. Without some sort of filtering process, chaos will ensue.

In Decred, this filtering process is contributing. Before becoming a Decred contractor, you must first contribute and prove you can add value to the project.

The Decred Contractor Clearance process is the formalization of this process. It was voted on and approved by the Decred stakeholders back in Dec 2018.

https://proposals.decred.org/proposals/fa38a3593d9a3f6cb2478a24c25114f5097c572f6dadf24c78bb521ed10992a4

To become a Decred contractor you need three existing contractors, who have worked with you, to vouch for your ability. If an applicant is contentious, it can be put to a vote where every existing contractor gets a vote that is weighted by their contribution history.

The pull request that I started this thread with was the final bits for the initial implementation. This process is now formalized and built into our Contractor Management System.