Council Participation Report, 05.11.2020.

As promised, what follows is my regular councilor activity transparency report. This report details votes cast and discussions participated in from Nov 2nd to Nov 5th.

Polkadot

I have passed Treasury proposal 20 to Council as Motion 36. The proposal is for funding LocalCoinSwap's integration with DOT and other Substrate-based chains, and developing their SDK in a way that lets them add support for other chains trivially easy in the future. They have been incredibly verbose in their deliveries when building for Kusama, and have delivered all previously promised milestones on time, so I have no problem backing them.

Having looked at Ramp's proposal in more depth, and having observed the discussion in Polkadot Direction, I concluded that Ramp deserves Polkadot's support in bootstrapping their integration. The precedent has, in a way, already been set with LocalCoinSwap, and Ramp arguably has a better use case with a different audience (easy integration for dapp devs, which I'm a big fan of). I voted Aye on their Proposal 21, which has been submitted to Council as Motion 37.

Tips

• Tip 0x3798...9b7f seeks to reward the creation of a Youtube video on cross-chain functionality, part of a "one minute a day to understand Polkadot" series. I like the comparison of the relay chain with a power strip, but the narrator is abysmal (not sure if machine-reading or just bad) to the point of the video being unwatchable, and the video itself seems like an abridged version of my explainer from a while back. The channel is also very young (11 subs) but has already produced some videos, implying that they're not picking up traction, likely due to quality. I endorsed the tip with a trivial 2 DOT, just as a signal that "we see you, but we want you to do better".
• Tip 0xb59d...5eb7 seems like it's a self-submission for a fake translation effort. Jaco - the only person qualified to gauge this - has voted with 0 DOT, which implies that the tip should indeed be closed without reward, so I supported the closing.
• Tip 0x352e...2e1c is for an Indonesian video guide on setting an on-chain identity. The channel has no subscribers, but I supported the effort invested in making this with 10 DOT (~40 USD), having already supported the same author's Account Recovery video before. Let's see how it goes after a few more videos, perhaps there's an Indonesian community to tap into.
• Tip 0x41e6...f372 is for AlexPromoTeam's coverage of Parachain Auctions. I am not sure why they ask for tips in two different treasuries, but as long as the tips are for different videos I'm fine with it. This video is a good one, got good coverage, and while I wish the narrator was a bit more fluent the improvement from the early stages is noticeable. Supported with median 60 DOT (~300 USD).

Kusama

Motion 234 has been proposed, updating the runtime of the Kusama blockchain to match the one produced by the new 0.8.26 release. I verified that the proposal hash matches using srtool, and voted Aye on it - the runtime upgrade contains only minor changes (weight optimizations and election calculations) and one notable change that is essential for Rmrk.app: batch_all functionality in the utility pallet. This new function allows atomic batching, which means that you can now issue batch calls in which either all calls succeed or all calls fail - no more partial batch execution.

Tips

• Tip 0x785b...7501 is for OpenSquare and their creation of DotBounties.com, a great little UI for reading the current status of bounties on Kusama. While we wait for the official bounty integration, I think this is a great temporary solution so I endorsed the tip with the median 30 KSM.
• Tip 0x6c75...2513 is for a Polish Youtube channel's new video on Polkadot ecosystem updates. This is the third or fourth time we're tipping the author with a non-trivial amount (18 KSM is ~$500). I appreciate the length of this detailed video (1 hour) and the engagement it seems to be generating (120+ comments at 10k subs), so I will endorse this tip but I don't think it's worth $500.
• Tip 0x135e...04e3 seeks to reward AlexPromoTeam for their regular production of Hot Dot News videos. The newest video is 22 minutes long and well produced, but I still had problems understanding the narrator(s). They really do try hard, though, so I agree with the 18 KSM median and have endorsed it. Because the narrator is hard to understand and the videos are very long, I would recommend to the team to focus on shorter videos that are easier to digest, and also easier to keep up to date. Make it a max of 5 minutes per video, make them topical.