Linus Naumann - Grant Reviewer Application

Governance Proposals Community Treasury - Grant Reviewer applications
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Preferred Display Name and Age

Name: Linus Naumann

Age: 33

Social Media Handles

Twitter: @LinusNaumann - https://twitter.com/LinusNaumann

Discourse: Linus - Profile - Linus - govern.IOTA

Reddit: u/linus_naumann - https://www.reddit.com/user/Linus_Naumann

Linkedin: Linus Naumann - https://www.linkedin.com/in/linus-naumann-335957102/

Discord: Linus (Embrace the bee)#5313

Telegram: Linus

Medium Linus Naumann - Linus Naumann – Medium

What motivates you to apply for this position?

I am a genetic engineer turned IOTA/Shimmer builder and educator. Since 2017 I promote IOTA on social media and educate the public through blog articles, Reddit posts and Twitter threads. In 2022 I left my traditional job at a renowned research institute and became a full-time IOTA and Shimmer entrepreneur and project builder.

Today IOTA and Shimmer are perfectly positioned for explosive growth in both adoption and market performance - if we play our cards right. Success will depend on us, the community, to use our resources like the upcoming Shimmer Treasury to actively invite, educate and motivate new builders and businesses to join our space.

As a grant reviewer I will use my scientific training and hands-on building experience to judge incoming funding applications fairly and objectively. Only with good judgement from the reviewer team can the Shimmer Treasury unfold its full potential to push our ecosystem to new highs.

What is your educational and professional background?

Educational Background

  • 2010 – 2013 – Bachelor of Science in Biology (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)

  • 2013 – 2015 – Master of Science in Technical Biology (Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)

Professional Background

  • 2015 – 2016 – Research Engineer at BRAIN AG (Zwingenberg, Germany)

  • 2016 – 2019 – Research Scientist at Philipps Universität Marburg (Marburg, Germany)

  • 2019 – 2022 – Dissemination Manager at Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology (Jena, Germany)

Web3/Crypto Background

  • 2017 – Promoting and educating about IOTA on Social Media

  • 2020 – IOTA X-Team Simplify

  • 2021 – Reddit moderator r/IOTA, r/IOTAmarkets

  • 2021 – Educational blogging about IOTA on Medium

  • 2021 – IOTA DAO Pioneers Idea-a-thon winner (with IOTA Content Creators DAO)

  • 2021 – IOTA Treasury Bridge Fund Initiative (later Shimmer Governance)

  • 2021 – Co-founder IOTA Content Creators DAO (Community-elected as Governance Coordinator and Customer Coordinator)

  • 2022 – Co-founder Daobee (COO, Vision, Gamedesign, Marketing)

  • 2022 – Co-founder TangleVerse (Vision, Coordination, Content Management)

  • 2022 – Further involvement in (i.e. helping with content creation, review, coordination or other tasks):

  • TangleVerse News

  • TangleVerse Times (former Daily Degen)

  • Shimmer Infographics

  • Shimmer Academy (former CryptoWelter)

  • Shimmer Hispano

  • Shimmer Tweet Storm Initiative

  • IOTA Discord Spec-Channel (shit-talking and laughing about memes)

Educational Training Certificates

I can provide proof for my professional background and current involvements in crypto projects if needed.

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

As a former scientist I was trained extensively in quickly understanding new and complex topics as well as how to think critically and ask hard questions early. In the past year I additionally gained extensive project management experience in the IOTA/Shimmer space by building up several crypto projects from scratch, often in great teamwork together with others. Further I am involved in a colorful bouquet of educational and promotional IOTA and Shimmer initiatives (see above for details). All of these projects are committed to the greater good for the IOTA/Shimmer ecosystem and include start-ups like the IOTA Content Creators DAO, TangleVerse (largest ecosystem website) and Daobee (Shimmers first free2earn NFT-creation game).

This combination of scientific training, first-hand building experience and large network in the space will greatly help me to assess incoming funding applications fairly and thoroughly. It will allow me to understand new ideas quickly and judge teams, ideas and budgets based on both facts and my own hands-on experience.

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.)

I have basic coding knowledge in R for the purpose of data analysis and plotting, but I am no developer.

**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. **

*Note: This will in no way prevent you from being elected to the position. It is the opposite. We seek experienced reviewers that are specialists in different industries. The reviewers with affiliations will not be able to review grants within their category; however, they will be great resources and act as subject matter experts.

I am involved and receive tokens or other benefits from the following projects:

  • IOTA Content Creators DAO (Co-founder and community elected Customer- and Governance Coordinator)
  • TangleVerse (Co-founder)
  • Daobee (Co-founder)

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.

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.

If you are voted in the top 2 reviewers, you may have the option to join Growth Committee and work with the TEA representatives. In this case, you may need to spend up to 20 hrs a week for a few weeks in January and maybe February. Are you able to commit to this?

Yes - I am willing and able to commit up to 20 hrs a week to the Growth Committee and the Shimmer Community Treasury if required for the first quarter of 2023.

Are you willing to do KYC, sign 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 do KYC, sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), and absolutely will respect all binding effects within such agreement contracts.

** 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. **

IOTA Content Creators DAO:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/IOTAcontentDAO

Discord: IOTA Content Creator DAO

TangleVerse:

Website: https://tangleverse.io

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TangleVerseWeb

Daobee

Website: https://daobee.io

Discord: discord.gg/Yeg33ySf6g

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Daobeegame

A selection of my IOTA blog posts:

Parallel Universes and IOTAs breakthrough “Multiverse Consensus”:

Attention all IOTA-holders: You vote will control what happens to ~60 Terra-IOTAs – BUILD or BURN

Layer 0 – The real reason why Dominik Schiener said “IOTA is not an Ethereum killer”

A vision for IOTAs future ecosystem – The DAO landscape

Further involvment in:

TangleVerse News (build-up as part of TangleVerse)

https://twitter.com/TangleVerseNews

TangleVerse Times ((helping out on the side, occasional content)

Shimmer Academy (vision and build-up)

https://twitter.com/shimmer_academy

Shimmer Infographics (review of many infographics)

https://twitter.com/infiota

Shimmer Hispano

** 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? **

My goal is to let the Shimmer ecosystem grow in all its aspects: builders, token price and users.

This can only be achieved, if the network gets the public attention and influx of builders and projects it deserves. I wish to see the Shimmer Treasury to fund a healthy mix of start-ups and on-boardings of large project, as well as marketing and educational activities such as hackathons, videos, podcasts, newsletters and much more. I am not a fan of spending large sums on influencer- or billboard marketing. However, I will always listen to arguments first and let all sound and well argued proposals convince me.

Three years from now I see a bright future: IOTA and Shimmer will be the most functional, most decentralized and most adopted networks in crypto space. The Shimmer Treasury will have funded successful start-ups and hundreds of talented builders through its marketing and on-boarding efforts and by that helped immensely in that success.

Do you support my application as Grant Reviewer?
  • Yes

0 voters

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I have one question:
To make it easier for the community to understand what potential conflicts of interest a reviewer may have, and as not everyone may be familiar with the platform you have stated here, could you shortly describe what IOTA Content Creators DAO, Tangleverse and Daobee is and in which sector it operates or plans to operate in the future?

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Ayy sure!
IOTA Content Creators DAO (ICCD)
IOTAs and Shimmer oldest and biggest DAO (decentralized, autonomous organization). It is the headquarter for a variety of projects that all promote or educate about IOTA and Shimmer. Its community (open to everyone) regularly elects its core staff, so called Coordinators, which in turn run everything and grow the projects and community.

Potential conflict of interest: I dont see much, since the ICCD is a community-driven non-profit organization that wants to provide marketing and education to our ecosystem.

Tangleverse
IOTA and Shimmers biggest ecosystem website. Its goal is to be the one link you send to someone who say “This Shimmer thingy sounds interesting, got a link?”. It showcases all projects in our ecosystem, learning materials and soon news, governance and other topics.

Potential conflict of interest: I again dont see much, except someone would try to create a very similar website.

Daobee
Shimmers first free2earn NFT-creation browsergame. Players create pictures and stories in little minigames and sell those to the community. Owners of these NFTs unlock more features on the website.

Potential conflict of interest: You could argue that other play2earn games are be our competitors, however it is also true that a lively crypto-gaming market brings more attention to everyone, so this should in most cases not be a hard competition. A conflict of interest exists if a team wanted to create a very similar game though.

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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 @Linus ‘s participation in the Grant reviewers’ Test challenge. More details about the challenge can be found in this post

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Linus Grant Review

Reply to Hackathon proposal from EasyA

Answer to proposal: In its current form the proposal cannot be approved, because it contains formal errors in the milestones section. However, its content is viewed favorably and has a high chance of approval after these errors are corrected.

Evaluation of the project idea:
The EasyA x Shimmer Hackathon proposal by EasyA describes the plan to create an in-person hackathon event in London, UK, with around 200 young students who exhibit interest, but not necessarily hands-on experience, in DLT and project building. EasyA claims to be able to reach a community of over 500.000 students over their platform and to have an extensive track-record of hosting successful hackathons (in a real application that would be fact-checked).
The Shimmer Community Treasury has the explicit goal to reach new developers and project builders and to bring them into the Shimmer ecosystem. Hackathons are generally an appropriate tool to reach this goal.

Evaluation of the proposed budget:
The funding ask of $55.000 roughly consists of the following categories:
$25.000 towards the hackathon prize pool
$20.000 towards location, food and staff
$10.000 towards pre- and post-event marketing
, which seems appropriate for an event of this size and location. The budget also contains considerable pre- and post event marketing efforts (including a dedicated aftermovie / highlight reel).

Evaluation of the proposed milestones:
EasyA proposes the following milestones and upfront payment:

  •      $50.000 at start of planning phase

  •      $40.000 after the hackathon

First, these numbers do not add up to the originally asked budget of $55.000. This must be corrected, before the application can be approved. A commentary about why a certain amount is asked at the beginning and after the hackathon is highly appreciated, too.

Errors that need to be corrected:
The current Shimmer market capitalization is around ~$70 million, which means that every proposed budget of $25.000 or more is handled as a Tier 3 proposal. Tier 3 proposals need a minimum of three milestones and a maximum of 30% of the budget can be paid out upfront.
Possible milestones could be:

  1.  $16.500 paid upfront

  2.  $6.750 after the location is booked

  3.  $6.750 after the hackathon is officially announced

  4.  $25.000 after the hackathon was performed (price money)

Compliance with the Shimmer Grant Committee guiding principles:
This proposal does not violate any of the Shimmer Grant Committee guiding principles

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Very usefull! Thank you for your time and for all this information… Just started here and I like what I can find out from here :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: