Transparency in DN Validator Selection — Community Concerns

Governance
2

As stated previously (several times in various channels), I have personally reviewed both the selection process and the results. Please note the selection process was done entirely independent of me - I had not even seen the spreadsheet before reviewing or provided any input.

There are also several inaccuracies or misunderstandings above. I will highlight some of them but this shouldn’t be considered an exclusive list.

  1. One of the publicly stated goals of Cohort 3 was to bring in fresh validators, especially from outside the ecosystem. This is explictly mentioned several times here: Decentralized Nodes - Processes, Selection Criteria & Rules I want to quote it directly here, to be clear: “New applicants (that haven’t participated in the previous cohort) will be favoured” and “Participants with no or little previous Polkadot affinity that join the program will be favoured.”
  2. The rules are stated here and have always been publicly available: Decentralized Nodes - Processes, Selection Criteria & Rules
  3. All validator candidates can write to validators@web3.foundation and receive feedback on what they could do to improve. Once again, as stated numerous times, we cannot provide comparisons to others, as they may have provided private data.
  4. There were several reasons to shift from 1KV to Decentralized Nodes, including complaints from people on other topics (e.g. inability to stay in the active set, technical problems with the setup which caused long periods of downtime, even - and I remember this clearly - problems with communicating with the maintainers of the program)
  5. I don’t know how we could be clearer that speaking up is not penalized. We have not communicated anything that would imply that, except to say that people should not be insulting the selection committee.
  6. Inclusion in each Decentralized Nodes program has never been a guarantee, and never described as such. It is similar with Decentralized Voices - nobody is “kicked out”, they are just not selected for the next cohort.

It is important to note that Decentralized Nodes is a project run by Web3 Foundation, not by the protocol or by OpenGov. While we do our best to help nodes join the active set, the final truth is on-chain. Community members can and should nominate good validators, and validators should do their best to reach out to the community to earn their trust and nominations. DN helps people with that, but it should not be seen as the only - or even primary - way for validators to join the active set.

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