Decentralized Voices Program - Luke Schoen

Governance
1

I wish to be considered a candidate for the Decentralized Voices Program.

I am interested in being delegated to by the W3F on the Spender (32, 33, 34) and Tipper (30, 31) tracks until I receive enough delegations independently, and from any other community delegates into the following Polkadot and Kusama account addresses:

  • Polkadot: 1dsrQjL34njJ4Y8FXGyxeLnmunPZ6XAvid9jSQe9S4pTUh2
  • Kusama: DDCNPp8oeYBcBM44b32iSse4t4yfTnDJbjQxohF59Fo23EF

I wish to be empowered to show what I am capable of and to prove my effectiveness by applying my public agenda that is outlined below to grow a following of delegated votes.

I believe I have been, and will continue to be, an avid and thoughtful contributor to governance in future, through both on-chain voting and off-chain interactions.

I have outlined below my qualifications, my “political philosophy” and/or agenda, and shown examples of my significant participation in Polkadot and Kusama governance, as was requested in the Decentralized Voices blog post:

Qualifications and experience

I have been an active member of the Polkadot since 2018 and Kusama since 2020.

I have the following relevant experience:

I have the following relevant qualifications, as it relates to governance:

  • Bachelor of Engineering, where I studied subjects such as: Innovation & International Competitiveness, Management for Engineers, Project Management, Commercial Engineering, Environmental Decision Making
  • Postgraduate Certificate in Business and Technology, where I got a credit in People Management
  • Diploma in Project Management

Public declaration of my political “philosophy” and/or agenda

Below I have tried to explain to people how I would vote in the future.

Philosophical statement

I believe OpenGov should:

  • Preserve liberal political democracy.
  • Focus on the decentralized Web3 vision of “less trust, more truth” - Dr Gavid Wood.
  • Embrace support from open-source conversational AI to evaluate proposals.
  • Augment manual decision-making with decentralized automated support, since “The world, in some sense, belongs to coders.” - Dr Gavin Wood
  • Boster itself with independent political neutrality

Analogies to other political philosophies

  • A real-world analogy of an entity that is decentralized, independent, and politically neutral would include:

    • Switzerland’s position towards conflicts.
    • Non-Aligned nations during the Cold War.
    • Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), where neutral locations such as a Swiss embassy was necessary for larger negotiations.

  • References:

Description of why you would be a good choice for this program

  • Scaling Polkadot’s Political Security

    • I would provide decentralized independent evaluation of proposals, similar to how I try to provide a decentralized independent software development contributions to the ecosystem. I would use this opportunity to build my reputation through a “less trust, more truth” approach to attract a diversity of independent voting power that should also increase the “political security” of both the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems.

      • Currently independent voters require a substantial amount of DOT or KSM tokens (combination of their own holdings and delegated voting power) to have a chance of their votes being impactful on some proposals even when using their maximum conviction. This has created a challenge for independent decentralized voters make an impact on proposals, this may still even be the case on some proposals even after getting support from the Decentralized Voices Program.

      • The Decentralized Voices Program has the opportunity to increase the maximum number of active impactful independent decentralized voters. If independent decentralized voters are chosen, it should help make impactful voting on Polkadot proposals more accessible to individuals, whilst lowering the barrier to obtaining an adequate amount of delegated votes.

      • It may be possible to create a detailed analysis of the amount of DOT or KSM needed to be an impactful voter, based on the maximum possible impactful voter turnout per proposal, using an impactful-voter-proposal tool.

    • I would be remain “politically neutral” (maintain an attitude of impartiality, non-aligned, maintain a balance) towards belligerents during political conflicts between decentralized DAOs in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems.

      • I would leverage my experience in integration management to play a key role as a conduit for communication, and as a trusted facilitator of peace effort negotiations to proactively try to prevent inter-DAO conflicts, or bring any that exist to an end.

      • I would strive to have my abstention and impartiality recognised by potential and actual belligerents.

      • I would strive to uphold certain rights and duties with belligerents.

      • I would strive to investigate cryptoeconomics to account for potential hybrid conflicts through cyber-weaponization of decentralized finance, trade, and the economy (through cross-chain sanctions, cross-chain espionage), where political conficts blend conventional and cyber conflicts (using fake news, diplomacy, lawfare, regime change, and foreign interference).

      • Polkadot and Kusama’s equivalent of a foreign and security policy should be used to guarantee the long-term prosperity and freedom of their communities by supporting foreign and native chains, and multi-chain DAOs, without taking sides in times of conflict, and possibly being sympathetic towards specific sides, and abstaining from all participation in conflict.

    • I would be able to use the delegated voting power to effectively participate in governance whilst developing and evaluating a new procurement pallet for the Kusama network, which would later become a standard resource for evaluating OpenGov proposals. It would later be applied on the Polkadot network, and used by parachain teams and parathread teams that are leveraging agile coretime.

      • The new procurement pallet would be configured through OpenGov referendum votes.

      • The new procurement pallet would be trained to handle different types of proposals and serve as a scaling solution, by reducing necessary voting times in readiness for coretime.

      • It would be augmented by a Polkadot domain-specific procurement bot that could be integrated into OpenGov user interfaces and automatically provide an evaluation of various proposals against the on-chain evaluation criteria. The benefit would be to reduce lost time evaluating poor proposals manually against evaluation criteria checklists, and to help the community focus their energy on investigating aspects of proposals where manual evaluation cannot yet be adequately augmented with automation.

      • The Polkadot community would be incentivised to crowd-source training data (including labelling, pre-processing, tokenising, stemming) that they would store in decentralized knowledge graphs (DKGs) for use in the development and testing of machine learning models for that procurement bot.

      • To provide some background, in late 2022 I collaborated on investigating an idea for a few months with an executive who is passionate about Web3, where we evaluated different open-source conversational AI software tools, where the goal was to filter and store relevant data in a decentralized knowledge graph and then use that as training data for a chatbot that would respond to questions from the Polkadot ecosystem. I published an example of a chatbot interface at the time here. However, we did not anticipate ChatGPT to emerge in early 2023, and parachain teams rapidly trended toward adopting that centralized support solution.

      • Zombienet SDK could be leveraged to simulate and monitor the potential impact of the new procurement pallet, which would include unit and integration tests that would consider edge cases, as we should “expect chaos” on Kusama.

      • It may be necessary to create an on-chain OpenGov political neutrality collective for future-proofing.

  • Mandatory requirements

    • I would vote regularly and explain the rationale behind my voting on Polkassembly, Subsquare, and/or other communications media (e.g. Polkaverse, X/Twitter, Polkadot Forum).

    • I would not to vote Aye or Nay for Treasury Proposals for themselves or for which I have a conflict of interest (e.g. voting against a competitor). In such cases, I may vote Abstain or not vote at all.

How would you approach governance referenda

The following is a high level overview of the evaluation criteria that I apply when reviewing governance referenda:

  • Values alignment with the Web3 vision and the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems.
  • Consistency between staging plans, schedule, and scope.
  • Scope defined exhaustively (e.g. includes assumptions/exclusions to minimise variations and scope creep, integration management plans).
  • Quality and quantity of goods or services (including innovation).
  • Fitness for purpose goods or services.
  • Whole-of-life costs of the goods or services (product servicing).
  • Value-adding components.
  • Financial value for money (e.g. cost benefit analysis, correct spending category chosen, budget breakdown that includes contingency).
  • Non-financial value for money (e.g. cost benefit analysis) such as Polkadot ecosystem priorities satisfied (e.g. economic, ethical such as maliciously timed community consultation, environmental sustainability, social).
  • Inclusive (e.g. support the disadvantaged and small businesses).
  • Commitment to team (e.g. education, apprenticeships, and trainees).
  • Communication with community (e.g. adequate stakeholder consultation, recording issues, timely review and feedback in discussions before posting referendum, ongoing community consultation, reflection on lessons learnt).
  • Legal due diligence (e.g. regulatory, insurances, disclosures like conflicts of interest of team and suppliers, human rights, sustainability, compliance with Polkadot policies, guidelines, code of conduct).
  • Competency of team members for their role (e.g. satisfy appropriate level in a skills matrix for review and approval by a Polkadot authority collective).
  • Past performance history (e.g. reliability, timeliness, quality, cost, delivery, innovation, product servicing, failure to perform in prior contracts).
  • Past conduct (e.g. litigation, bankrupcy, solvency, false declarations, corrupt conduct, media scrutiny, Polkadot ecosystem relations, relationship with sub-consultants and sub-contractors, convicted of an offence, convicted of professional misconduct or unprofessional conduct).
  • Risks identified along with mitigation measures (avoid exposing Polkadot ecosystem or its community to an unacceptable or adverse actual or reputational risk).

Opinions on previous Referenda or governance decisions

Please refer to my answer to this in further responses below.

  • Commentary, blog posts, etc. on Polkadot OpenGov or specific referenda

    • Blog post with commentary and questions about Polkadot OpenGov relating to Agile Coretime.

    • Off-chain interactions:

      • Centrifuge
        • Challenged Centrifuge Proposal “CP84: Unclaimed Polkadot Rewards” CP84: Unclaimed Polkadot Rewards - #7 by ltfschoen - Proposals - Centrifuge Governance Forum
          • Agenda was to extend the claim period indefinately, but I may have only helped to extend the claim period from from 30 (thirty) days to 60 (sixty) days. Unfortunately I was not available to vote NAY against the proposal during the Opensquare Snapshot voting period of 7 days, but although I am a holder of CFG tokens, even if I did vote I would not have been able to sway the vote even using the max conviction possible.
          • Posted on X to try to warn the community that may not have realised.
      • Equilibrium
        • Posted on X how the Equilibrium parachain team wasn’t providing their community with an adequate amount of time, to swap their EQ tokens for Q tokens, especially since it was during the Christmas holiday period.
      • Picasso
        • Posted on X about how Picasso Polkassembly Referenda “#63 Transfer Unclaimed PICA from the crowdloan to the Treasury” since it reminded me of another real world analogy that I had experienced where “dodgy property developers that had prepared an objectionable development application and sent letters during the holiday period (when most people go away) to neighboring residential homes requesting any objections to be notified within a week.”.

    • Private notes about “#2061 Marketing Bounty Proposal”. I have summarised my comments below. Note that the proposal may have been updated after I made the initial comments:

      • Why didn’t they have to show a cost breakdown of how they calculated their requested allocation of 90,000 DOT (which was ~US$600k at time of their proposal on 19th Dec). Was that allocation just to cover 1 year of work?

      • Assuming it was for only 1 year of work…

        • They said they were “proposing a set of 8 main curators” and mentioned a compensation rate for weekly management where “Curators will dedicate a minimum of 7 hours per week”, but that it was “capped at 7 hours per week”, and they “propose a compensation rate of $50 per hour for working hours”. So with their “cap”, even if collectively they work 50 weeks each year (2 weeks vacation), their collective max annual management fee would be 8 curators * 7 hrs max per week * US$50/hr * 52 weeks = US$140k. That’s ~75% less than the 90k DOT (~US$600k) in funding that they were asking for. So why weren’t they only asking for ~25% of that amount?
        • If they didn’t have a “cap” and they worked 40 hrs per week that’d be 8 curators * 40 hrs per week * US$50/hr * 50 weeks = US$800k, which is approx. the amount they are asking for (but that likely wouldn’t be realistic unless they delegated their responsibilities to staff or sub-consultants that may have legal requirements, as many of their main bounty curators have other jobs.

      • They mentioned the responsibilities of the “main curators” include:

        • Review weekly submissions.
        • Verify identity of proposers.
        • Help review and qualify basic information (proposers’ achievement, metrics, unit cost, KPI).
        • Verify all needed criterias of proposers to start proceeding (for on-chain, will check through Polkadot address).
        • Send an email to proposers to book a meeting call to qualify expectation.
        • Call with necessary proposers to qualify their request.
        • Comment and request adjustment directly to the proposal documents.
        • Answering feedback, questions from the community, proposers in email ONLY.
        • Start voting circle with multisig board.
        • Create child-bounties and reward proposers.
        • Generate reports (Main Curators will generate a 2 months report using a long-form structured report template using notion medium), Livestream to discuss publicly with the community (publish on Marketing Bounty X account and host a monthly open mic session on a livestream to directly engage with the community and devise appropriate plans for the following month)

      • Then they said over the past 6 months there had been ~100 marketing bounty proposals, but they didn’t provide a cost breakdown. So assuming over the next 12 months in 2024 the ecosystem receives 200 marketing proposals (approx. one per country on Earth), and assuming each was only asking for a ~US$35k spend, then the upper limit cost would be their 8 curator members * 16 hrs work each * 2 (for 12 months work, not just 6 months work) * US$50 = ~US$12800 * 200 = US$2.56M

      • So if that trend became apparent, we’d expect they’d have to remove their spending “cap” because their cap restricts them to only provide parent curator bounty services for up to about 10 OFF Tier 2 child bounty proposals (~US$12800 * 10 < US$140k). Even if they removed their “cap” and only their 8 main bounty curators did the work @ 40 hrs per week they’d still only be able to handle about 62 OFF Tier 2 child bounty proposals (~US$12800 * 62 < US$800k).

    • Other information that you would consider relevant to decision making, e.g. being part of other political groups or legislative bodies.I am a member of:

      • MetaCartel Ventures DAO
      • ImpulseDAO and participate in beta testing and DAO meetings on Discord
      • Ethereum Protocol Fellow from participating in cohort 4

Show significant participation in Polkadot or Kusama governance

I believe I have been an individual voter who has been shown to be an avid, active, and thoughtful contributor to governance, through both on-chain voting and off-chain interactions in these respective ecosystems, as shown below:

Contact details

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Lots to chew on in your post, but I found myself curious about this one. How do you reconcile the token-voting system used by OpenGov with liberal democracy as defined in the link you provided?

One requirement of liberal democracy is political equality amongst voters (ensuring that all voices and all votes count equally)

(To be clear, I’m pointing out what I consider a fundamental incongruity between these two political mechanisms, not commenting on their relative merits. That incongruity is that OpenGov means every DOT has equal voting power, not every voter.)

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Thanks for your feedback and great question. I’ve got a busy week but I’ll try and provide a detailed answer asap.

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I wish to add the following addendum to my original application.

Addendum:

  • Political Pallet (in addition to the proposed Procurement Pallet)

    • In addition to the new modular procurement pallet there would also be a new custom modular pallet that would be decoupled and would define the political approach mentioned in the political statement of my Decentralized Voices Program application. Each pallet would be built upon standard templates, and could be updated through decentralised community voting and on-chain updates. The standard templates could be used by others that may wish to evaluate proposals differently using alternative political stances for diversity.
    • These pallets would need to be able to concurrently and frequently perform an impact assessment of all active proposals, and based on the amount of available (or scheduled to become available) delegated voting power, recommend the appropriate amount of delegated voting power and conviction to apply to each proposal, or how much to adjust on existing delegated votes.

  • Agenda

    • The delegated voting power from the W3F would only be used to vote when driven by first generating the programmatic outputs from the latest and most suitable customised procurement pallet and the latest and most suitable customised political pallet (pre-approved on-chain by the community) and using those outputs as inputs to publishing optioneering tradeoffs for timely community stakeholder feedback, and if justified, and then using that feedback to tailor those pallets to regenerate the outputs that would be used to apply the delegated votes from the W3F.

  • Grant Preparation and Approval

    • Development of the “standard” pallets for the procurement and political approaches may be subject to approval of a grant application (retroactive if necessary), since they may be used broadly across the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems

  • Security

    • I wish to reserve the right to request the W3F to delegate the voting power to a different account that also has my on-chain identity, if necessary.
    • I wish to reserve the right to request the W3F to delegate their delegated voting power to a pure proxy account that would be used for the on-chain voting.
    • Prior to receiving delegated voting power from the W3F, I would publish the security procedures that would be followed to create and manage the multisig and pure proxy accounts, then seek community feedback to be provided within a reasonable timeframe, followed by subsequent approval from the W3F.
    • That pure proxy would be associated with a multisig entity account that has an on-chain identity.
    • Constituents to that multisig would each have on-chain identities and would each use their own pure proxies to interact with that multisig for ease of succession planning or in case I myself (or other eligible leaders) are not available.
    • Constituents to that multsig would need to be pre-approved by the W3F.
    • The multisig would be used particularly when on-chain voting using the delegated voting power from the W3F on the larger spending tracks, including the Big and Medium Spender (33, 34) tracks and the Big Tipper (31) track.
    • Refer to this image extract from 5:50 of this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqY6yU-YLO0

Screenshot 2024-02-12 at 12.37.57 pm
Screenshot 2024-02-12 at 12.37.57 pm1654Ă—668 123 KB

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I wish to add a further addendum to my original application and all addendums to date to help differentiate myself:

  • Security
    • Communication between constituents to the multisig entity account, as it relates to use of the delegated voting power from the W3F would be through public discussions where the discussions would be stored on-chain, and they would be fully auditable, such that appropriate action may be taken in the event of malicious behaviour by any member of the multisig. This would align with the Web3 ethos of being open to all and minimising censorship of voting ideas. This would solve the problem that may occur in other DAOs in the ecosystem that may follow similar behaviour such as hosting their private internal discussions using a centralised service. Those DAOs may use delegated voting power to make decisions in private internal discussions, and then allow each member to vote anonymously, and may not have their voting power or their delegated voting power slashed if they are malicious in a similar way to how validators and their nominators may be slashed for being malicious. Those DAOs may not even allow independent audits of those internal discussions, which could:
      • Verify that the desired majority was actually achieved for the DAO to vote in a certain direction rather than abstain
      • Verify there was a sufficient liveness of diversity in the backgrounds of the members that actually voted, even if the votes by that DAO were anonymous (e.g. not only members that are developers voting on a marketing proposal, but where none of the members that are marketing professionals were available to vote).
      • Verify that the members are not colluding in those internal discussions
      • Verify that the members that are voting or influencing the voting decisions do not have a conflict of interest (e.g. they may have created an OpenGov related market on Zeitgeist prediction market whose outcome depends on the outcome of an on-chain referendum or the associated release of a product in the ecosystem, and they may be able to assure themselves of a substantially profit if they are able to sway how the majority in the DAO vote, or individual members may be influencing voters to vote against one of their competitors because they may themselves be barred from voting against their competitor).
    • Constituents to the multisig would be from a diversity of backgrounds and have weighted voting power applied depending on a skills matrix of their background, and the thresholds would be subject to on-chain community votes. For example, constituents to the multisig may have a background with 70% marketing, 10% developer, 20% business, whilst other constituents may have a 100% design background. In that case, if the community voted that the threshold required substantial diversity, then if only members from the multisig that had 100% design background were available to vote on a referendum with the delegated voting power from the W3F, then the multisig entity account would choose to abstain from voting due to lack of diversity, even if the referendum itself was primarily related to design.
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  • OpenGov Delegated Voting Power

    • Automatic Delegated Voting Power + Direct Staking to Validators Directly

      • DOT holders that delegate stake with a minimum active bond of ~300 DOT directly on-chain by nominating validators must wait for the bonding period of 28 days before they receiving staking rewards, and must wait for that same bonding period to unlock/withdraw. They can concurrently use the staked tokens to participate in governance, for example with a vote with 3x voting balance would have a lock period of 4x duration (28 days).

    • Signalling Delegated Voting Power + Delegating Stake to Validators through Nomination Pools

      • DOT holders that delegate stake of at least 1 DOT in an active and sufficiently bonded on-chain non-custodial nominator pool may receive rewards, and they are also subject to unbonding period of 28 days. Those delegating stake to the pool cannot concurrently use their staked tokens for participation in governance. The nominator pool account operator that is being delegated stake gains the ability to stake the funds as a direct nominator. However, “Staked tokens cannot be used for participation in Governance.” [1].
      • In future, it may be possible that a “pool can signal at the time of creation whether the pool funds will be used for governance.”, but that “delegators can’t independently vote on a referenda” [2].
      • Delegators to staking pools need to monitor the pool operator to ensure they act in their best interest in their choice of validators nominated by the pool.
      • Similarly in future the pool may signal at the time of creation that the pool funds won’t be used for governance, and the delegators to the staking pool may need to monitor the pool operator to ensure that doesn’t change without their consent. Ideally it would not occur without their prior give their consent and acknowledgement that they know comprehensively and precisely, without any ambiguity, how the pool intends to vote on their behalf, which could be based on a proposal being prepared and ratified by the pool operator similar to the proposals like this that are provided to the DV Program.

    • Signalling Delegated Voting Power from W3F in Decentralized Voices (DV) Program + No Delegated Stake Requirement

      • Allows a DOT holder of at least the existential deposit (without any known delegated stake bonded to receive any rewards for helping to secure the network) to be delegated votes from the W3F (if considered a trusted community member that shares W3F values and vision for the ecosystem), possibly as an effective way for the W3F to participate in Polkadot OpenGov decision making by empowering them to represent the W3F and vote on their behalf, where their OpenGov voting strategy would be based on their DV proposal.

  • Definitions

    • Representative Democracy
      • Indirect democracy where sovereignty is held by the people’s representatives.
    • Liberal Democracy
      • Political equality amongst voters (ensuring that all voices and all votes count equally)
      • “Representative Democracy with protection for individual liberty and property by rule of law”
    • OpenGov
      • Current political inequality amongst voters:
        • Each voter does not have a level of voting power that is equal to other voters
          • Voting power of each voter is measured and affected by:
            • Own balance of DOT
            • Delegated voting power issued to them
            • Conviction used with their voting balance
            • Accessible DOT borrowing power of each voter and current loan-to-value ratios that apply to them
            • Excludes their own balance of DOT delegated to a nomination pool to secure the Polkadot network since those DOT tokens may not be used for voting in governance
            • Excludes their own balance of DOT inaccessible to them (lost keys, stolen, etc)
            • Excludes their own balance of DOT held in a custodial provider that does not support on-chain voting

  • Proposed Solution:

    • Delegated voting power from the W3F is to be used for voting in accordance with the contents of a DV Proposal (including Philosophical Statement)
      • Initially voting would be based on a Philosophical Statement that would preserve OpenGov’s current Representative Democracy approach, since sovereignty may initially be held by the the DV Program recipient or associated multisig (limited to between 2 and 100 members) representing the W3F delegated voting power obtained by them through the DV Program.
      • Later it would be transformed into one or more Polkadot Collectives (that may each have a maximum membership size) if approved by governance DOT stakeholders, and that may provide more flexibility and transparency than using a multisig, having their own Treasury (managed by its collective origins) that may even use a bulk fundings request to obtain funding from DOT inflation and transaction fees to fund each of the collectives [5]. These independent collectives would focus on using their delegated voting power to voting on referendums, and multiple collectives may vote differently since they may propose to the W3F and obtain approval to vote based on a “fork” of the contents of the orignal DV Proposal (including Philosophical Statement).
      • Each collective “fork” could define multiple privilege levels, that could be changed through on-chain voting based on established rules of each the collective that may be based on a standard, where members that have proven to be more experienced in their “fork” may be granted approval to vote with a larger amount of the W3F delegated voting power.
    • Some collectives that “fork” may wish to vote significantly differently, and no longer in accordance with the contents of a DV Proposal (including Philosophical Statement). In that case they would be required to first obtain approval from the W3F.
    • Each collective may specify in their rules that only members that have an on-chain identity judged by a reputable registrar may hold higher privilege levels.
    • Some collectives that “fork” may be humans or machines that may define Speciesism in different ways, and wish to vote in certain ways on behalf of living beings on the planet, other than humans, or even those living beings themselves, that may also have “rights” [9] [10] and may deserve “kindness over petty politics” [11] and “equality over exclusion” [11].

  • Benefits and thoughts:

    • Toward satisfying the principle of “equal consideration of interests” (ECOI) [8], even though “ECOI does not provide plausible grounds to presume that the interests of diverse individuals are actually equal” [8], through political voting activity and consideration, where “Equal consideration of the preferences and needs of all citizens is fostered by equal political activity among citizens; not only equal voting turnout across” [6], since any voter may join one of these collectives, increasing the consideration given to their preferences and needs, and they would be funded by the Treasury of the respective collective.
    • Toward “political equality builds community” [6].
    • Toward “political participation creates legitimacy” [6].
    • Toward “political participation is educative” [6].
    • Toward “equal protection of interests” [6] where they may maintain control of and tailor their political voices through collectives that may even extend cross-chains, since that “is the key to that equal consideration” [6], since it gives them the ability to inform the ecosystem of their “needs and preferences” to pressure the ecosystem “to pay attention”.
    • Toward “doing the most in terms of satisfying preferences” with our limited resources [7], given the “relation between equality and the principle of proportionality” [8].
    • Toward “equality of moral status” [8].

  • References:

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Description of why you would be a good choice for this program

  • Mandatory (Conflict of Interest)

I would allow any interested party to verify that my Decentralized Voices application, and any collective or multisig member associated it complies with a Conflict of Interest requirement, to differentiate this Decentralized Voices application from others that currently believe doing that is impossible, by requesting that they:

  • Review a Conflict of Interest document that’s pinned at an IPFS address
    Sign a message using the IPFS Content Identifier (CID) hash of data associated with that Conflict of Interest document using their on-chain identity that has been judged as having a reasonable identity level by a registrar
  • Record in a new document their on-chain identity, the IPFS CID of the relevant Conflict of Interest document along with the current timestamp and their signature that they generated by signing a message that contained that IPFS CID, and store that new document pinned at another IPFS address.
  • Share that IPFS CID to allow any interested party to access that document and verify for themselves that the address associated with their on-chain identity signed a message containing the IPFS CID of that Conflict of Interest document and that don’t so generated the IPFS signature provided in that document.
  • Optional: Try to set the “legal” on-chain identity field or a custom field with the value of that IPFS CID. However at the moment raw data values are limited to a maximum length of 32 bytes.
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(responded to this in another thread)

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I wish to make the following change to my original application.

Philosophical statement

I believe OpenGov should:

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I wish to make the following updates to my original application document to make it relevant to DV Cohort 2 that was published in this blogpost by W3F that I recently applied to.

Intro section

As DV delegations in DV Cohort 2 will occur on more tracks than in DV Cohort 1, namely with the additional inclusion of the Treasurer (11) track, I am also interested in being delegated to by the Web3 Foundation on the Treasurer (11) track.

How would you approach Community Feedback

In DV Cohort 2 the Web3 Foundation has highlighted that Community Feedback will be taken into account when selecting delegates, and that rather than just allowing the community to “post their thoughts on the candidates and their philosophies” to DV candidates and delegates in the Polkadot Forum, they expect a more formalized process to apply as the DV program matures.

In order to help mature DV community feedback into a more formalized process, I would summarise and aggregate all the community feedback that I receive, retaining the quality of the messaging, which would include all relevant community feedback that I receive as both a candidate and as a delegate in the event that I get chosen.

Initially it would be included in an publicly accessible Issues Register, that would include links to original posts that I would manage to allow the community to easily identify historic and current issues, and optimise everyone’s ability to search and respond in a timely manner.

In future I would endeavour to establish a Polkadot domain-specific community feedback search bot that could be integrated into OpenGov that would initially be fed with the summarised and aggregated community feedback associated with my political stance.

Similar to my proposal for a Polkadot domain-specific procurement bot, the Polkadot domain-specific community feedback search bot would incentivise the Polkadot community to crowd-source training data (including labelling, pre-processing, tokenising, stemming) that they would store in decentralized knowledge graphs (DKGs) for use in the development and testing of machine learning models for that community feedback search bot.

In the event that my political stance were to change, or that the bot matured and was applied to other DV delegates with different political stances, then the community would adjust their labelling of that training data.

11

Below is a status update since my inclusion as a Kusama delegate in the DV Cohort 2 was announced here.

Status update:

  • Confirmed with W3F to initially delegate to the Kusama address shown in my initial post in this thread
  • Reviewing and consolidating this application and addendums to prepare a schedule
  • Scheduled appointment with OpenGov.watch here to ask any questions
  • Joined DV Delegates Chat - Cohort II on Element
  • Reviewing degen communism political stance to prepare algorithm based on it
  • Participated in OpenGov Office Hours
  • Checked my inclusion in Polkadot Alpha Program
  • Brainstormed my thoughts on building an appchain with a Polkadot Fellow
  • Reviewing the ChaosDAO Youtube video by Leemo about delegating to a pure proxy
  • Reviewed this post on how to be a good DV delegate by Saxemberg
  • Requested help to determine the reserved deposit that is required to register a parachain on Kusama Coretime here and in Polkadot Discord, and by reaching out to RegionX and Lastic. Since the documentation implied the reserved deposit would be much less, it may be necessary to just pool the existing core that I currently have access to before its region ends to be able to retain it once I get a response from RegionX to this question, since there isn’t enough time to unlock staked KSM before that happens and I don’t know even know how much KSM needs to be unlocked to satisfy the reserved deposit, and then arrange to buy another Kusama Coretime core and use that to implement my custom pallets if the reserved deposit is affordable.
  • Reviewed current Kusama proposals in tracks relevant to my DV delegation, including:
    • Treasurer (11) - No proposals to review
    • Big Spender (34) -
      • #407 OG Tracker - Provided brief review comments
    • Medium Spender (33) - No proposals to review
    • Small Spender (32) - No proposals to review
    • Big Tipper (31) - No proposals to review
    • Tipper (30) - No proposals to review
12

Status update:

Participated in appointment with OpenGov.watch
Continued reviewing degen communism political stance
Registered ParaID #3352 and assigned it to Kusama Coretime core #54 with “Final” finality
Sent message to Nico from the Polkadot Alpha Program
Reviewed current Kusama proposals in tracks relevant to my DV delegation, including:

  • Big Spender (34) -
    • #408 Proposal: College Blockchain IUR(Industry-University-Research) Cooperation - Provided brief review comments here
13

Thank you for the opportunity to be in DV Cohort 2.
Unfortunately I will not be applying to be considered a candidate for the Decentralized Voices Program Cohort 3 for the following reasons:

  • I want to focus time more on my JAM implementation.
  • I want to focus time more on Coretime.
  • I wish to spend more time with family over the next 4 months.
  • I will be busy participating in a Devcon-related event throughout October and November 2024
  • I was disrespected on AAG multiple times. For example, I was subject to disrespectful comments by @Leemo on AAG #156 https://www.youtube.com/live/tsf2YGc9YII?feature=shared&t=1310 about the extensive comments I make on proposals when conducting due diligence. There was a sarcastic comment Telegram: Contact @ambxpert that I had made in the Ambassadors Open Forum Telegram: Contact @ambxpert Telegram group that he sarcastically said he liked the most, which was clearly a sarcastic comment but he decided to take it seriously and blow it out of proportion. It wasn’t even relevant to my DV remit since the HA proposal was on the Polkadot program, but I only had DV for the Kusama program.
  • I have not yet managed to recruit any members into my political club x.com.
  • I was unsuccessful in renewing a coretime core due to a misunderstanding, and I was not able to complete the political and procurement pallets.
  • I cannot risk being rewarded for my work voting with delegated DOT, because even if I conduct due diligence and write questions to proponents to cover as many edge cases as possible, the community could say that they weren’t happy with my comments and that my time was not valuable, and demand that I return the rewards even after I have incurred a tax obligation, which ultimately results in a negative reward. This actually happened to me during DV Cohort 2. I was involved in the establishment of the AMI Bounty Program AMI Bounty Program | Polkassembly, and I had rightfully earned some DOT tokens from the Polkadot Treasury during the financial year 2022-2023 through justified establishment tasks that were entered into timesheets, where those tasks were within an agreed budget that had been approved by Polkadot OpenGov, but because they were labelled as a “sign-on bonus” rather than just a “post-establishment milestone payment”, which is what they represented, false rumours and accusations were circulating that suggested mismanagement and the funds being spent badly, as highlighted at 1:41:40 by Max is this AAG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDiS6Frf3kk. It started with this tweet x.com. The way it was phrased “Asking for a fren”, came across as if they were suspicious about it and trying to make a mockery of it by posting it publicly. Adam Steeber who created our team later responded to that here x.com, and posted this video x.com. Then a team member said they were DMed by 0xTaylor about the hours I had billed, saying they were very suspicious about some of my entries and suggesting that I DM them. Only a few minutes after that, 0xTaylor posted this x.com and referred to me as a “Dude”. I eventually responded to him by extracting the relevant posts that I had made in our private AMI Bounty Program Telegram channel and posting them here Response to 0xTaylor - HackMD. I contacted 0xTaylor multiple times via X and Element asking him whether he was satisfied with my response to his question about my timesheet and if there were any other items in my timesheet that he was concerned about, but I was not able to bring closure to the matter as he chose not to respond. After that Shawn Tabrizi jumped into the conversation and incorrectly implied wrongdoing by saying “you should return your bonus no matter what
    @ltfschoen”, demanding that I return the sign-on bonus x.com even though he hadn’t adequately looking into the issue in depth himself either. Upon receiving that demand I reluctantly returned my 500 DOT sign-on bonus to the Polkadot treasury, even though that happened in the following financial year 2023-2024, causing me to incur a tax obligation for the previous financial year without any revenue to show for it. Then Adam Steeber got stuck into Shawn Tabrizi and demanded an audit of his Fellowship ranking and an apology x.com, to which Shawn Tabrizi apologised to Adam Steeber x.com. After that and after seeing this proposal approved Tip for exposing Michiko Watanabe | Polkassembly, I thought it wouldn’t be any more ridiculous for me to submit a proposal asking for a 500 DOT tip from the Polkadot Treasury to refund me the 500 DOT of remuneration that I had rightfully earned in the previous financial year from the Polkadot Treasury.

I may comment and vote independently anyway, and I would be interested in applying for future cohorts.