Hi all, thanks to those that attended the Polkadot summit in Copenhagen prior to decoded.
One of the sessions that was held was to discuss a new proposed initiative called the Ecosystem Technical Fellowship. An initial discussion has been created here → Technical Fellowship Manifesto how ever I wanted to kick off a new thread to first capture the notes from the session and allow people to read and contribute with context.
Please see a high level summary and notes from the session below.
Attendees/key participants:
Lead by: @gavofyork (Parity)
Key Participants: @gavofyork (Parity) @sam (Imbue), Zoe (Phala), @lucasvo (Centrifuge), @bjorn (Parity), @joepetrowski (W3F), @nino_apillon (Apillion)
High level summary
The workshop was set up to discuss creating a technical fellowship for Polkadot, different from the existing fellowship which is solely focused on Polkadot’s runtime code.
This technical fellowship would seek to recognize generalists with technical expertise who understand the complexities of tasks such as building parachains and infrastructure, and can provide support to the Polkadot ecosystem. However, we don’t want this group to turn into a trade body, this fellowship is not just for parachain team members, for example, technical educators could also fit into this collective. This proposed fellowship would also have levels and be an on-chain collective.
There is a huge opportunity to give informed individuals stronger voices and to help build individual reputation, with the thought that this group would be best at coming to consensus about what’s required for the ecosystem.
The discussion yielded an aligned view that a fellowship of this nature would be needed for the ecosystem and there was agreement that this would be a net positive for the ecosystem with the next steps being for several individuals to start drafting a manifesto for the fellowship.
Discussion points:
The current fellowship has 45 approx core devs, with a plan to grow this further to at least 100+. Given this team is solely focused on substrate core technology, would it make sense to create an ecosystem / technical fellowship to help the ecosystem?
The code to create fellowships is written and a new group could easily be created - the majority of the work required is the social construct, including items like the:
- Manifesto / purpose / goal of this fellowship
- Specific levels / grades / ranks
- Entry criteria to join and how individuals progress through the ranks
The fellowship could be used for the following uses:
-
Social capital / reputation
-
Governance body
-
Parachain rescues
-
Speed up / whitelist upgrades
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Adoption of Polkadot
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An on-ramp into the core runtime fellowship
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Technical support e.g. answering questions on stackexchange.
-
Levels / grades / ranks
- This will probably be the hardest social contract to work out as part of the manifesto, as we’re seeing with the discussion surrounding the ranks for the new ambassador program
- Should there be a 1 year per rank as a baseline?
- What is the minimum contribution required to keep your rank
- We need to formalising the ranks in the manifesto, so it’s clear based on reputation and skill where people sit.
- Potential accomplishments for defining ranks
- Launching a parachain
- Upgrading a chain
- Compile / build a runtime
- Build a pallet used by other teams
- Build tooling that’s used by other parachains / parties (that’s deployed in production)
- Build something that captures liquidity / users
- A measurable contribution could be, developed a standard, worked on developing a standard. E.g. users that help standardise how governance messaging / data should be stored.
Next steps:
- Post these notes on the Polkadot forum
- Community to create a draft manifesto with the levels/ranks documented
