Council Participation Report - 27.01.2021

As promised, what follows is my regular councilor activity transparency report. This report details votes cast and discussions participated in from Jan 8th to Jan 27th.

Kusama

Governance

• 👍 Motion 252 for funding onFinality's SaaS costs. They are currently serving the role of Infura in the Polkadot ecosystem and with Web3 Foundation's devops shutdown (they no longer run Polkadot or Kusama servers) this is a much needed backup. However, with Vedran on the way this will soon be unnecessary and I will stop voting yes for their maintenance cost once we have p2p treasury-funded public infrastructure.
• 👍 Motion 253, Kusama's runtime upgrade to version v2027. The runtime includes a fix for locked KSM of some Councilors, tips will now go 100% to the author, a more extensbile multi address format was added and some features for reserve-backed stablecoins. All good updates.
• 👍 Motion 256, Kodadot's NFT explorer / minter UI. As the author of RMRK I want to see this happen, since it's a UI that works with RMRK. The more UIs for people to mint NFTs through, the better.
• 👍 Motion 258, funding illustrations about Polkadot facts. While I was initially skeptical about this project due to plagiarism (explained in previous transparency reports), it turns out they actually paid for the stock comics they're modifying. This would still not convince me to pay anything for these comics because they're full of typos and simple color palette switches, but they now say they will be developing custom comics from scratch and I'm willing to give them a chance because the engagement on the tweets to far was impressive.
• 👍 Motion 259 funds onFinality to create additional features on the platform, helping developers gain more insight into their requests and the apps they are serving. I voted yes with a reserve - it seems like a very expensive upgrade for such a trivial task. I expect to be thoroughly impressed.
• 👍 Motion 260 is the fulfillment of the social contract with Polkascan for maintenance of the Polkascan blockexplorer and accompanying toolset. Since this platform is the default everyone uses when looking at network info, it's a true public good worth supporting.

Discussions

Post 463 proposes extending the Bounties pallet with sub-bounty functionality. I had long wanted this functionality in order to be able to delegate authorship of posts on Dotleap.com to fellow web3 enthusiasts, so this is a clear yes from me.

Tips

1 KSM = $95.

• 0x0e94...aa5f is to reward AlexPromoTeam for a video about using the W3F registrar to verify one's on chain identity. It's a good guide, the editing quality is excellent. The language is still a problem, the speaker just isn't good at English pronunciation, she's hard to understand, but the video was clear enough to not make this a problem. I supported this with the median of 7 KSM.
• 0xe3b0...9436 is to reward AlexPromoTeam for a Hot Dot News video. The editing is excellent, but with news videos pronunciation and speaking clearly so everyone can understand is more important than with guides. I did not think the speaker was very good at this, so I tipped with half the median: 3.5 KSM.
• 0x351f...abb7 is to reward Alexandra Heller from Parity for some cool Kusama gifs. I am following precedent in not rewarding employees and contractors of W3F and Parity for additional Polkadot-related work and voting to close the tip with 0.
• 0x5cdf...eac7 is to reward a community member for updating the scam-sites list in Polkadot JS, helping the extension and the Apps UI prevent sending tokens to scammers. I do not think finding a few scam links and submitting them is worth $300, but I will encourage this work with 1 KSM.
• 0x0813...6298 is for supporting MIDL.DEV in their plan to host Polkadot and Kusama full node downloadable snapshots. I would prefer these were IPFS or Torrents rather than direct links, and I am unsure what this cost covers and for how long, but as a first encouragement I think 10KSM is adequate, perhaps the service will improve. The impressive part is that it's a daily snapshot, so much more up to date than my Snaps, but the less impressive part is that it's full nodes, not archive nodes, so of questionable use to Validators.
• 0xaa27...47a9 is for a Spanish-language video on DOT, parachains, auctions etc. It is too speculative for me, focusing too much on marketcap and price, so I'm voting to close it with 0. I think this is a cheap pumping tactic we should not encourage.
• 0x1ac6...a9a8 is the same as above but in Russian. I do not wish to support videos talking exclusively about tokens and prices.

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