My Candidacy for Polkadot and Kusama Council

By Bruno Škvorc July 19, 2020 blockchain

Polkadot, the next generation blockchain infrastructure layer, is live and in full swing, with its crazy cousin Kusama leading the way in innovation and risk-taking.

As chains with built-in governance - meaning the tokenholders can decide the fate of the chain with auto-enacting proposals - Polkadot and Kusama are challenging the idea of blockchain immutability and code as law. They value governance consensus first, everything else second.

This consensus has three tiers in Polkadot and Kusama:

the tokenholders are the main decision makers and have absolute decision power, as long as they turn out in big enough numbers.
the Council is an elected set of up to 24 seats who have the ability to put forward proposals that are biased towards passing, meaning only a minority of Aye votes is needed. The tokenholders elect the Council members.
the Technical Committee is composed of protocol implementer teams and has the ability to speed up a proposal, so that the voting and enactment period is much shorter. This helps with urgent bug fixes.

More info on governance can be found in this helpful and comprehensive video by technical educator Bill Laboon, or this shorter explainer by network founder Gavin Wood. If you're looking for readable material, this post by Joe Petrowski is an excellent primer, and for more details you should look at the wiki.

Bruno for Council Member

I am hereby announcing my candidacy for Council on both chains.

You may know me from such efforts as:

technical education at Web3 Foundation
the Dot Leap newsletter and the Dotleap.com tutorial website
several crowdcasts and technical education video explainers
my past work in the Ethereum ecosystem, the Two Point Oh series among other things
my past work as educator and investigative reporter on my site Bitfalls.com
any of my side projects

What I can bring to the table is:

healthy skepticism and decentralization purism I'm known for. In particular, I've noticed some irregularities in the Kusama Council activities in the past few months, like absolute inactivity of some members, or like the council-submitted injection of a new registrar into the system, and using the Technical Committee to speed up that inclusion - both illegal overreach in my opinion - and I fully intend to veto such attempts in the future.
outreach and ecosystem expansion due to being an active participant in the blockchain conference organization scene (see my conferences Blockconf and Blocksplit), as well as being a board member at UBIK, Croatia's official self-governing NGO for blockchain education and regulation.
technical expertise needed to test all early releases and node upgrades.
full disclosure on all voting decisions - I pledge to elaborate every single vote I cast in blog form or as a post on Polkassembly, and I intend to participate in every referendum and motion.
regular digests of Polkadot and Kusama governance. These will go out as part of the Dot Leap newsletter.
I intend to build helper tools for the public to monitor Council activity, as well as helper UIs for other Councilors to cast better informed votes and see their own and others' past activity (this is planned as part of my Hackusama submission).

How to Vote

Voting costs transaction fees (a few cents worth), and nothing else. It's a 2 minute process, and, arguably, every token holder's inherent duty.

Note: to vote, you need to have an account with DOT tokens on Polkadot, or KSM tokens on Kusama. It does not matter if the tokens are locked in staking or vesting - you can still vote with them.

Open https://polkadot.js.org/apps/#/council
Connect to the right network - use the selector in the top left corner of the screen to switch to Kusama or Polkadot, whichever you want to vote on (preferably both!)
Pick "Vote" in the top right corner.
Click on the candidates in the left column to put them into the right column.
Make sure "Bruno" is selected first (this will be "Bruno | W3F" on Kusama). If there are multiple Brunos in the list, the address on Kusama is CpjsLDC1JFyrhm3ftC9Gs4QoyrkHKhZKtK7YqGTRFtTafgp and on Polkadot it's 128qRiVjxU3TuT37tg7AX99zwqfPtj2t4nDKUv9Dvi5wzxuF.
Submit the transaction.