Greetings Polkadot Community,
This is my public statement about #1186, reflection and advice on how to move on.
First of all I think it is a must for transparency to understand the timeline and events before #1186 was posted. Based on the information I received and the discussions with involved people, this is how I understand the timeline:
- Problem: The new Ambassador Program kickstarted mid-summer and we are here at the end of September, still without a decent and official plan on how to get things done. We still can’t even onboard Candidates which I am very unhappy about. Most meetups stopped, which is a huge loss. There were a few people pushing hard to make the Program happen, but it became clear 20 people cannot manage a program at the same time and we lost months because of bureaucracy and trying to be hypocritically democratic. What we need is a decentralized balance, but lets get back to this later.
- There was already some heat between a few members and this escalated. Most importantly, we, HAs already worked for approx 3 months without payment. I think this is not acceptable in such a position if the community wants something serious from us.
- DonDiegoSanchez initiated #1186 discussions with a few individuals he trusted to avoid initial drama. He is a person who decided his actual time, left his previous job and started to focus fully on the Ambassador Program. After months passed it can be understood he started to seriously worry - and not just him. He made a move. I agree this is not a fully democratic approach, but if he starts the same publicly, we lose months again with another drama. I don’t fully agree with the list, but he took a brave action in my opinion going into this. For some people its just a position, for some it is a real job - big difference.
- This is what I can say so far for the initiator’s side. Unfortunately, I was only dragged into this proposal in the last hours before they made the extrinsic live. I was not aware this was going to happen.
- DonDiegoSanchez told me there was another proposal planned by unnamed individuals to “kick all Head Ambassadors out”, so this is why they started #1186. Looking at his position, working without payment in a job, even if this is a just a rumour, panic response can be understood. Looking at the comments of the proposal and forum post, some people seemingly really wanted to nuke the whole program.
- I only had a few hours to take action Friday night after a f*ckin hard week so my default is this: mediate between participants and deescalate drama as much as possible. The proposal was about go out, so I decided to help rephrasing it in the last hours so it is less offensive against the 10 HAs being potentially moved to SA position and avoiding the “kick all Head Ambassadors out” referendum. I assumed the story I wrote so far is True and nobody lied to me - if this turns out to be different, of course, consequences are going to come along.
- The drama started last Friday. Here we are.
I vote 7 Aye and 3 Nay ratio based on this. Note that normally I vote only with 1 DOT because everything is decided by whales in the end. I signal I am participating but my DOT voting power is nowhere compared to them and wish for a more meritocratic approach in the future (people voting on what they are actually experienced about, not on everything).
What I believe we need to do now is staying together as a community and make more community-friendly moves. As I worked with the following individuals, I provide my full support to make them stay or return as HA: William, Max, Irina and MarioS. These four people did show me activity and capabilities for being decent HAs. I saw them live on stage, joining calls and taking serious actions. For the other 6 people on the list I abstain because I don’t have enough information about their activity. Regarding those who are not on the 1186 list I only haven’t seen Angie and Rish doing much HA work - neither on the mandatory weekly calls or otherwise, but that might be because they haven’t shared what they do, so I also abstain about them. Maybe they work hard too and will show later, Im looking forward to see their reports. As I saw, the other 8 indeed worked hard all the time.
For what we have so far is not just the 100-day plan, but also a document where I am the main editor merging all the work we have done in the past few months: Polkadot Ambassador Program - Main Merge and How-tos - Google Docs
I think we need to kickstart the Candidate application as soon as possible with a basic structure, bring back the meetups globally and push hard the marketing around it. The bull is most probably coming soon and we don’t have time to loose. We can show the world we can get back on top of blockchain space and enter real world markets. The Ambassador Program and local meetups are key to success in my opinion. Meetups and local communities have the potential to connect Polkadot the many entities all over the world. Physical present should not be underrated and this is one of the best thing we can do to make Polkadot alive like it used to be a few years ago: do you remember when we were on top and had hundreds of meetups? This needs to be back - this is what brought us some of the best ecosystem teams and top successes of Polkadot.
The “Salary Ref” needs to be sent out this week - we need to respect everyone working in this job by actually paying.
I also think all HAs must report their work so far publicly, by next week.
If 1186 fails, I finalise the “Polkadot Ambassador Main Doc” (linked above) and propose a referendum that requests it to be the official way the Program work. It will include names, positions and responsibilities and mandatory work to be done by each HA - an updated version of the current one.
Regardless of 1186, I keep working on the Program’s process, support the becoming of local communities globally. I have a “Local-Global Community” vision which I believe aligns with many people here and this will give us, Polkadot access to many new users, investors and projects.
Less drama and more success.
Have a great day!
Timestamp: 1727678094 / GMT+2
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Originally pusblished in: six: "Greetings Polkadot Community, This is my public …" - Infosec Exchange
IPFS link: https://ipfs.filebase.io/ipfs/QmR6wR4mGyeywNh9LPJFwHjYN6apE923d6zsfHtFUVzKDr
> sha512sum 1186_Statement_by_six.txt
970112859869746be9d79a4bac19717a54af98a6127e6046cf0003e429e9ee0de7df129223216f6d61c42c83fbeddb756431f1a987a3959d41ae170abb2bc6e0 1186_Statement_by_six.txt