Council Participation Report, 27.10.2020.

As promised, here's my regular transparency report concerning my actions as Polkadot and Kusama Council member. Previous posts can be found here.

Polkadot

Treasury

Proposal 17

Proposal 17 was created by Chinese team OpenSquare to finance the creation of a "knowledge tip authoring tool". In simple terms, it's a meme generator.

Building this tool is not a very complex task, and certainly not 833 DOT more complex than distributing a Google Slides template that does the same thing.

The immediate benefit of this tool for the network is not obvious - the author of the proposal states that this type of communication is common in WeChat, something the Western world is admittedly oblivious to. However, I am skeptical of the value add here as this can easily be used to promote the wrong things while still making them look "official".

If no Councilor proposes a rejection within 24 hours, I will do so.

Proposal 11

Proposal 11 was created a month ago by AlexPromoTeam, and is a renewed attempt at the failed Kusama equivalent. It seems that this was already pushed to the Council as a motion, but that motion failed which is why this proposal stuck around.

Given that the quality is still questionable and the team gets tips from Kusama's treasury (as per the last Councilor activity report), I have pushed it forward as a motion to reject.

Tips

• Tip 0xbbc6...e813 is for rewarding the translator of Polkadot JS Apps UI into Korean. Jaco has confirmed that it's this pull request that's being tipped, so I opened the endorsement round by suggesting 15 DOT.
• Tip 0x2bc7...f55a is for a YouTube video. The description says "Access the Acala Mandala App : https://youtu.be/AifEASVetJ8" but the video is objectively terrible so I'm following suit here and also canceling the tip with a 0.
• Tip 0x4be9...de4d is a graffiti rant. Someone felt the need to vent some frustration. Canceling with a 0 value.
• Tip 0xb727...8a6a is for "https://youtu.be/EtLAOsPc3kc - Animation:What is Polkadot,One minute a day to fully understand Polkadot". The animation itself is fine, but I just can't endorse a video that uses text to speech to read the script, and which contains factual inaccuracies and typos. I expect better from our community members. I'll limit my tip to 5 DOT for the effort.
• Tip 0xc747...1b88 seeks to reward an alleged Italian translation of the Polkadot JS Apps UI, but given that Jaco is one of the tippers who put the value at 0, I'll follow suit as there's no other person more qualified to opine on this.
• Tip 0xe9e1...4890 for "How To Get Your On-Chain Identity Verified By A Registrar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFrD_4Fy-VQ". The video is fine but very basic and unlikely to last long as up to date content due to coming UI changes. I agree with the median 5 DOT reward.
• Tip 0x8778...1027 rewards the maker of a rather well made Indonesian video on restoring wallets in the Polkadot JS Apps UI. I supported it with 10 DOT.
• Tip 0xf64c...1d4a rewards a Spanish-language video on how to stake with the Ledger wallet. It's well done and I supported it with 10 DOT.
• Tip 0x5fdf...1b03 seeks to reward the creator of dotjobs.net, similar to ksmjobs.net from the Council Participation report of October 14th. The site performs terribly, has no Web3 functionality, and is generally trivial to build so I do not see a reason to reward this effort. I also do not understand why ksmjobs and dotjobs are two separate things. Stateless Money (the maker) is a team of two people one of which works at Parity, so tipping a non-trivial 100 DOT to someone who is already paid to work on all this doesn't feel right, especially given the precedent we set with Jaco and other hired contributors.
• Tip 0x0b89...23b2 is for creating DotSpot.io, an interesting (albeit still "all over the place") news site for DOT related content and projects. Looking forward to seeing what becomes of it - supported with 15 DOT!
• Tip 0x7b2d...5cd5 is for polkadot.university, a CryptoZombies-like tutorial for interacting with the Polkadot ecosystem. I supported it with 10 DOT instead of the median 50 DOT because it's just a remake of the Kusama version that was created for Hackusama, and it's still riddled with typos and missing functionality it had before. In fact, the copy is the same too, just with a find/replace of Kusama for Polkadot, which makes for some awkward paragraphs like "Polkadot is an early unaudited release of Polkadot that is available first and holds real economic value. For developers, Polkadot is a proving ground for runtime upgrades, on-chain governance, and parachains."

Discussion

• Patract Labs published their post-delivery treasury report for Elara milestone v0.1. Elara is already shaping up to be a phenomenally useful tool, and v0.2 is a promising next step. When this is brought up to a vote, I will most likely be voting Aye.
• After a successful implementation on Kusama, LocalCoinSwap is back with a proposal to add P2P trading with DOT. They list expenses as 3000 DOT which, in my opinion, is far too much for the work required, so I've asked for clarifications.

Kusama

Referendum

• I voted Nay on referendum 91 seeking to implement a redenomination of KSM in a ratio of 1:100 similar to Polkadot's. I see no reason to do this other than aiding speculators, and given what we know about the chaos that ensued with Polkadot, it would certainly be much worse for Kusama. The implementer team (Parity) has much more important things to worry about - namely, launching parachains.

Tips

• Tip 0x874d...c5a7 is another tip for the Polish-language Polkadot ecosystem update video from what seems like a well visited Polish-languag Youtube channel. The channel was previously already tipped 10 KSM for a video. 10 KSM seems steep for just a narration into a camera. I'll support this video with the median, but I'd like to see some variety or an increase in quality for future work.