Grant Reviewer Application

1.) Preferred Display Name and Age (If you do not want to enter your age, enter that you are above 21 years of age, which is the minimum)

Name: Al

Age: 40

Social Media Handles

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alanjohnbirch

Discourse: N/A

Discord: AlBirch#7469 Previously Al (gifs)

2.) What motivates you to apply for this position?

Having been a follower of IOTA since its inception and observing the development and achievements made has inspired me to take a more active role in the community and eco system. There are many intelligent and enthusiastic people who have great ideas for the future of the protocol who need support to help them add great benefit to its future. By being a part of the community grant team will allow me to actively help grow and promote those that will help benefit our ecosystem to fulfil the great potential it has.

3.) What is your educational and professional background?

Educational Background

Education

Batchelor of Science Degree in Forensic Science University of Lincoln, UK

National Diploma in Forensic Science

NVQ in Business Administration including marketing and finance.

Professional Background

Current – Police Sergeant (12 Year)

Previous
Finance and Marketing Manager (6 Years)

4.) What experience do you have relevant to this position (grant reviewer, Project manager, etc.)? Please describe

During the last 12 years I have been employed in the Police Service. My current role which I have held for 6 years has allowed me to manage and develop a team to ensure force priorities can be met through the engagement and interaction with local businesses, partner agencies and the local community. An aspect of this has been to apply, review and develop project work via grants and matched funding to assess, implement and review local projects that can have a positive impact to community and its residents. Having also sat and chaired review panels in relation to ensuring any funding is appropriately allocated ethically, impartially and without bias to ensure openness and transparency to the wider community in relation to why and how funds are used.

5.) Are you a software developer? If yes, please provide info on your skills and proof of the projects you already have built/worked on (Github, languages, certificates, etc.)

No.

6.) Do you have affiliations that may cause a conflict of interest when reviewing applications? The community would like to know particularly if reviewers are involved with projects as a creator, on the board, or employed. Please list any projects or applications you have affiliations to.

I have no affiliations that would cause a conflict of interest which I believe is an essential part of being a grant reviewer so that the community can have trust that any allocation of funds has been done with honesty and integrity to ensure full and transparent disclosures can be made without fear of criticism.

I also feel having a varied group of people present on a committee those with experience, knowledge and current developments within crypto can be strengthened by those who look from the outside in aswell.

7.) Are you willing to sign a legally binding service provider contract and reveal and verify your identity through a KYC process with the legal entity of the Treasury Committee?

Note: KYC is required for this position. If you are unwilling to KYC and sign a service provider contract, you will not be accepted to the Shimmer Community Treasury.

Yes - I am willing to KYC and sign a service provider contract with the Shimmer Community Treasury.

8.) Can you commit 10 hours weekly on average to work as a grant reviewer for the Shimmer community over the next 12 months?

Yes - I am willing and able to commit 10 hrs a week to the Shimmer Community Treasury.

9.) If you are voted in the top 2 reviewers, you may have the option to join the Growth Committee and work with the TEA representatives. In this case, you may be required to work hours over the required 10 hrs per week. Are you able to commit to this if required?

Yes - I am willing and able to commit to the Growth Committee and the Shimmer Community Treasury if required.

10.) Are you willing to sign a service provider contract, including an NDA with the Tangle Ecosystem Association, and respect the Non-Disclosure Agreement if selected as a member of the Growth Committee? Breaking the Non-Disclosure Agreement may bring consequences financially and or legally.

Yes - I am willing to sign a service provider contract and Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). I absolutely will respect all binding effects within such agreement contracts.

11.) Provide any web links or supporting documentation you would like the community to see when assessing you for the Shimmer Community Treasury Grant Reviewer position.

12.) What is your long-term vision of the Shimmer Community Treasury? How do you see the Community Treasury affecting the Shimmer & IOTA ecosystem, and what does the Shimmer & IOTA Ecosystem look to you in three years?

I see the shimmer community treasure catapulting the IOTA and Shimmer ecosystems into the heart of not just the crypto communities but that of the lives of everyday people. I want to help promote the enthusiastic and highly intelligent people we have within our communities to help them develop and launch their protocols on the networks to push the limits and capabilities of the ecosystem.

I see the community treasure being the catalyst to help support and promote this growth to those that without support could never see their ideas come to life. Every persons can have ideas, but it is those that are given the helping hand to bring those ideas to life that can impact the world.

I envisage that the shimmer and IOTA ecosystem in the next few years will show the talented and brilliant individuals who have become family to our community explode throughout the world with the concepts and designs that will strengthen and promote all the hard work which has been undertaken and continues to be done within our Shimmer and IOTA Family.

Thank you for your time in reading my application and I hope it gives you enough to vote for my inclusion as a grant reviewer.

Do you support my application
  • Yes

0 voters

7 Likes

I asked our Grant reviewer candidates if they would agree to take part in this challenge on 19 November with this message sent out to everyone:

Hey, I want to challenge all potential Committee members with a little task.

I want to present you with a grant application and give you one week to come up with an opinion about this application based on the information provided to you. Please put anything that comes to your mind in your response to this message, and if possible, come up with an initial opinion if you would support funding this Proposal.

You may want to use the evaluation matrix developed for the Treasury committee: Shimmer Community Treasury Grant Committee - Version 2

The Proposal is a copy of an original proposal submitted to another Ecosystem Grant program.

I have chosen two types of applications, one that is a bit more developer oriented for the reviewers with experience in software projects and one that is more community/event focussed for the others.

Every Proposal is presented in 3 different versions. I have changed some parameters in every version, so your competitors may be presented with the same Proposal with some small but important changes to the original version.

I hope you agree to this little challenge. It may be interesting for the community to see how different candidates approach this task and to which conclusions they come regarding the grant proposal.

I will DM every candidate with the same text you got here and send them their challenge privately. I hope we can keep this private until the challenge is finished in one week.

Next Sunday, at 11 am CET, I will post the information about the challenge in reply to your application post and will include the response you sent me via DM in this post.

This will, in my opinion, be the fairest process to give everyone the same conditions without revealing a challenge that a competitor has to solve or making answers public that others could consider in their own approach to the problem. So everything will stay with me, and I am the only one who knows who gets which challenge and who replies what until the reveal.

I try to make sure that applicants who are part of the same project do not get the same grant challenge, so they cannot support each other.

Please reply within 24 hours if you agree to this challenge, and I will send you the Proposal.

Thanks again for offering your skills to the community. I hope you find this a fair approach to give the community some better insights.

This is the publication of @Al_gifs ‘s participation in the Grant reviewers’ Test challenge. More details about the challenge can be found in this post

Al_Gifs Grant Review

Proposal: Shimmer - Hackathon Proposal 1(Unchanged Version 90.000 USD)

Hi Phylo,

Is the below sufficient?

Al

EasyA x Shimmer – Hackathon Proposal

Grant reviewer: Al

Relevant to Shimmer

The project plans to build exclusively on Shimmer teaching up and coming students the knowledge they need to further develop and grow the Shimmer Community.

3

Plan and Funding Model

The plan and funding model albeit doesn’t go into great detail regarding expenditure does show how they expect the funding to reach there milestones.

3

Execution

The team whilst has provided a proposal of how they want the students to engage and raise awareness of Shimmer, there are no apparent steps been taken to gage the interest of such an event. There are no details of any attempts to engage with the community to establish interest from students or academics.

0

Verifiable and Quality of Team

The team involved does not specifically include their relevant experience in using Shimmer protocols. Further details regarding who would be supporting the hackathon and their background and expertise would be beneficial in determining the quality of those involved during the event. Research via there Website shows a list of persons who are linked to the company so are fairly doxed.

2

Overall Quality and Originality

The event is a good idea to promote the Shimmer ecosystem and allow future developers and students the chance to create applications that could benefit the ecosystem.

It would somewhat impact the Shimmer ecosystem and Web 3 but isn’t a unique idea in regards to running these types of events.

2

Conclusion.

Whilst the event would be shown as a great way to attract future developers to the Shimmer Ecosystem and is good for promotion to a wider audience the proposal lacks finer details which would allow it to score higher given the amount of funding requested.

I would request details regarding there past events in regards to total participants and total applications developed during like events which have previously been run.

Details of any outreach they have or could perform in the interim to gage community interest and also knowledge and expertise of any teachers/professors they would get involved would benefit the scoring.

Full details of the staff responsible for helping the students understand and utilise the protocol and there experience with the Shimmer Network would be beneficial. Given the infancy of the Shimmer protocol how knowledgeable are the persons involved around using the network to ensure a successful event is run.

In response to future events they have planned for across Europe how is this intended to be funded? Who benefits from the projects created and will any of them feed directly back into the Community treasury if successful?

In response to the requested amount of funding being $50,000 initially and then $40,000 I would suggest this is marked down into smaller amounts at recognised and agreeable key stages to ensure key targets are met.

Total Current Score: 10/20.