Null / Rafael Brochado - Program Lead Application

null · November 11, 2022, 2:50pm

1.) Preferred Display Name and Age

Display Name: Null / Rafael Brochado
Age: 30

2.) Social Media Handles

Twitter: @rafaeldjpb - https://twitter.com/rafaeldjpb
Discord: Null#1163

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

I fell in love with IOTA’s vision of a feeless L1 and joined the community in mid-2017. Later, after it became clear to us all that the original dev plan wasn’t ever gonna work, I felt compelled to join the IOTA X-Teams and try to contribute in any way that I could.

Since then, I’ve been looking for opportunities to further support the community. It’s been tough figuring out where my skillset may drive the greatest impact, but now, after reading through the Program Lead skills wishlist, I was surprised to see so much overlap with the skills that I have. So, having finally found a clear role in the community that I felt I could excel at, I decided to apply.

Long-time community advocate for transparency & decentralization
Worked with IF members to drastically improve our Discord, enable GH Discussions across all of our repos, improve Firefly, improve the Wiki, communicate ideas, and other small things

4.) What is your educational and professional background?

Educational Background:

M.S. in Interactive Entertainment, 2018
University of Central Florida

World’s top Game Design program as consistently ranked by the Princeton Review
Awarded Fulbright Scholarship ($25,000) & FIEA Director Fellowship ($22,186)
Led a 16-person multidisciplinary team from whiteboard to Steam in a record-breaking 7 months
Led the pursuit of VR research which received over $1.3 million in awards

B.S. in Game Design - Summa Cum Laude, 2015
Polytechnic Institute of Bragança & Kajaani University of Applied Sciences

First-gen student
Graduated as top student; awarded the “golden diploma” for it
Perfect grade on practical training (internship at CoolGames, in Amsterdam)
Brokered a new exchange partnership with one of Finland’s top universities, which has since then allowed dozens of students to travel there for year-long study exchanges (myself included)

Web3/Crypto Background:

Supporter, Investor (2012 – Today)

I started learning about Bitcoin by reading posts on bitcointalk.org around 2012 or thereabouts. Since then I’ve tried to keep up with the latest innovations & schools of thought in the DLT space. I enjoy reading through academic papers, participating in constructive discussions, and generally thinking about DLT adoption. If you’ve been in the IOTA community for a while, you may have seen some of the discussions I started in our Discord from time to time.

Professional Background:

Founder, CEO, Developer (2018 – 2022, 4+ years)
Not Suspicious – VR Research & Development Studio

Received over $1.3 million in awards from the NSF, Meta, HP, and others, for innovative R&D
Repeatedly featured at the Kennedy Center, at the invitation of the US Department of Education
Responsible for product design & roadmap, development, business, community management, recruitment, etc

Co-Founder, Administrator, Developer (2010 – 2017, 7 years)
Wartale – Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

Grew player base to 100K+ registered users, ~3K unique daily active
Free-to-play model with in-game transactions; very profitable; consistent growth year-over-year
Responsible for product design & roadmap, business, community management, recruitment, etc
Dev team peaked at ~8 people, plus another ~15 global mods, regional mods, Game Masters, etc

Co-Founder, Administrator, Developer (2008 – 2011, 3 years)
Mundo RPG Maker – Game Dev Community & Magazine

Mentored indie game devs, equipped them with the tools and resources for success
Grew the community to 100K+ registered users, ~3K unique daily active
Number of staff peaked at ~25 people, featuring global mods, regional mods, content creators, etc

Grant Reviewer (2021 – 2022)
SBIR grant program by the National Science Foundation (NSF)

Invited by the NSF to review Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant proposals in the areas of Learning & Cognition Tech and Human-Computer Interaction

Guest Lecturer (2019 – 2022, yearly)
FIEA Ventures – Business Incubator at the University of Central Florida

Helping grad students pursue indie game dev, secure grant funding, work with Publishers, etc

VR/AR Coordinator (2019 – 2020, 1 year)
University of Central Florida

Supported grant-funded VR/AR research
Mentored grad students on VR/AR development and consulted with them on their VR/AR projects
Produced internal reports to keep faculty informed of relevant VR/AR developments

Technical Game Designer (2016 – 2017, 1 year)
LisbonWorks – Film & Games Studio

Worked with unconventional middleware and resource constrained set-top boxes to bring games and apps to millions of TV customers (working with AT&T, Telefónica, Altice, VimpelCom, etc)
Designed and prototyped a white-label games portal to be deployed on partner TV networks
Worked on 5 existing live games/apps; designed and prototyped 7 new ones, 3 of which shipped

Intern Game Designer (2015, 6 months)
CoolGames – Casual Games Studio

Always involved in the production and pre-production of multiple games at the same time, working on known IPs such as Tetris, Pac-Man and Snoopy (Peanuts)
Shipped 8 casual and social games for desktop browser and mobile devices

5.) What experience do you have that is relevant to this position?

XP as Grant Reviewer & Grant Awardee (2017 – 2022)

I have experience reviewing grant proposals for the National Science Foundation SBIR program, as well as with writing and pursuing grants, as the recipient of over $1.3 million in awards (see above)

XP as Builder, Leader & Manager (2006 – Today)

Experience with software design & development, shipping products, scaling businesses, growing ecosystems, managing large multidisciplinary teams, and more (see above)

XP as Mentor & Ecosystem Developer (2008 – Today)

Experience with mentoring grad students at UCF’s FIEA Ventures business incubator every year since 2019, as well as equipping indie game devs with tools for success since 2008 (see above)

Expertise in Game Development (2006 – Today)

Web3 games appear to be a popular type of project proposal for Treasury DAOs, so my vast experience in game development will be critical in helping us identify & prevent misallocating funds towards proposals which aren’t feasible. I have experience with many of the public game engines (Unity, Unreal, Game Maker, Phaser, etc), as well as a few proprietary ones (e.g. see Wartale above)

6.) In your opinion, which of the skills you obtain are the most important and valuable for this Grant Committee Lead position? If possible, provide proof of how and where you obtained those skills.

All of the skills and professional experience I listed above will significantly contribute to my ability to execute in this new role. The gamedev tech stack is incredibly complex, which has given me a lot of insight, and managing large multidisciplinary teams & communities has equipped me with good communication skills, sharp emotional intelligence and the ability to work in public, despite the pressures that come with it (trolls, etc).

7.) 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.)

Yes (see above). I have developed games & apps for VR, AR, mobile (iOS & Android), PC, consoles and browsers. I’ve worked with C#, C++, JavaScript, HTML5 and more.

8.) Are you willing to reveal and verify your identity through a KYC process? Will you also sign a binding contract as a full-time team member with the legal entity of the Shimmer Community Treasury Committee?

Yes to both.

9.) Can you commit to focusing the next 12 months solely on the Shimmer Community Treasury as Program Lead and be available 40 hrs a week, if not a bit more? As the Program Lead, you will not be able to work other side jobs or support other Dapp projects regularly. If acting against this, the committee will seek a replacement at that time.

Yes. I am passionate about our vision and I have full confidence in the tech the IF has built, so it’ll be my pleasure to wake up every day knowing it is my job to support the growth of our ecosystem. I’ll sink however much time is necessary - after all, I too am a stakeholder in the network and I want it to succeed. I have no plans to engage in other projects. When I commit to a project, I obsess over it.

10.) As the Program Lead, you most likely will support the Shimmer Community Treasuries’ interest in the Growth Committee. This may require more time above and beyond the 40 hrs (paid hourly, of course). Are you willing to commit to this?

Yes.

11.) As a member of the Shimmer Growth committee, are you willing to sign a service provider contract with the Tangle Ecosystem Association and respect the included Non-Disclosure Agreement? Breaking the contract or Non-Disclosure Agreement may bring consequences financially and or legally.

Yes.

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

N/A – links have been embedded in the answers above, when relevant.

13.) Do you have affiliations with any Crypto projects? The community would like to know particularly if you are involved with projects as a creator, on the board, or employed. Please list any projects or applications you have affiliations to.

No.

14.) 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 vision for the Treasury is one that evolves every day to adapt to the needs and circumstances of our ecosystem, as expressed by the community in governance calls and forum discussions. Treasuries play a central role at the heart of every other DLT ecosystem, and ours will be no different, so it is important that we treasure it. I’m interested in exploring ideas for how we can potentially create a virtuous cycle that would feed new funds back into the Treasury over time (so we can keep supporting new projects indefinitely), but at the same time I am also acutely aware of our need to move fast in equipping community developers with the resources they need for success. So my vision is for that of a hands-on, nimble approach. We’ll move fast when we need to, and slow down when we don’t. I’ll enforce the utmost rigor, professionalism, accountability and transparency, making it my personal mission to maximize our collective odds of success. We’ll make sure that rejected grant applicants get guidance and mentoring through constructive, actionable feedback, so they can better position themselves and apply again in the future. Working in tandem with the community and the Treasury team, I’ll continuously re-assess our areas of interest, strategic goals and growth metrics.

If managed carefully, the Community Treasury will transform our ecosystem. For hints on what that kind of success could look like, it’s best to look at other DLT ecosystems and their respective Treasury DAOs as examples. Given the level of talent I’ve seen in our community, there’s no doubt in my mind that we can not only match the success we’ve seen elsewhere, but surpass it.

Do you support my application as Grant Committee Lead?

Yes

0 voters

Sissors · November 11, 2022, 4:49pm

I am impressed by your presentation. You are the first one who managed to transform the template into something which is actually easy to read. Maybe a small thing to mention here, but at the same time clear communication is of course an important task for the lead.

In general it looks good, I would just have one question for you: Of course you did write you can spend 40 hours a week on this, but you also seem to have plenty of other things going on. Are you planning to do it side by side, or to reduce the number of hours you spend on other tasks?

(@moderators, it would be nice if we could actually have an open discussion with applicants, to get to know them better and get useful information).

TGCE · November 11, 2022, 5:27pm

Hello,

in particulary I would be interested in your last job role.

What is the reason you are not working for ‘Not Suspicious’ anymore / in which month did you part ways?
What were the main achievements? (e.g. products, business figures)
How did you manage the $1.3m fund / what are your key take aways to make the best use of it?

Generally I am interested in:

What is the most important argument for you funding a project, how do you measure it?
What do you think are the biggest obstacles in funding and measuring progress?

Deep_Sea · November 11, 2022, 5:34pm

We absolutely agree as moderators and thus have the reply comment section just for this reason. Please note statements such as: “This applicant sucks”, will be deleted as is not adding or supporting a positive community discussion.

Saying that, any good questions that pertain to the position and to the applicant is gladly accepted in both Reviewer and Program Lead threads. Please feel free to initiate such discussions, this is exactly what we envisioned. A location for community members to apply, as well as, a location where community members can discuss, vet the applicants, and provide constructive comments.

Regards,
DeepSea

null · November 11, 2022, 8:04pm

Great question, thank you for asking that. These days I have all the free time in the world – I’ve already transitioned out of other responsibilities I had, and currently am only associated with my previous ventures in the capacity of an advisor/consultant.

For the last few months I’ve actually been enjoying a long-overdue break, while learning more about my areas of interest (including DLT & IOTA) and thinking about what I wanna do next. So I was very excited to see this opportunity pop up when it did. Perfect timing!

Thanks for the compliments on the presentation!

Short answer: there’s a lot of bureaucracy that goes into keeping me employed (it requires getting a special permission from the US government). I’m originally from Europe, but the company emerged from work I was doing while living in the US on a temp visa (the company is legally based in Florida). When COVID hit, my plans to extend my stay in the US were thrown out the window, as immigration services came to a halt. Plus, I started worrying about my family back in Portugal, who all became unemployed, so when my visa expired, I chose family & left the US. Problem: because Not Suspicious is primarily funded by the US government, there’s strict rules with regards to where the grant-funded work has to be done. So with me being in Europe, it makes it impossible to cover my salary, unless a) we get a special waiver, which they did grant me, but only for a few months, or b) the company raises $ from a Publisher, for example (which is impossible atm). Anyway, long-story-short: ever since leaving the US, I worked unpaid for quite some time to scale the team up while mentoring them in everything they needed to know, in preparation for the day when I may shift my full focus elsewhere, which is essentially what I’m trying to do now. The new CEO (John) is flying to me next week for a few days so we can touch base & discuss their next steps, which is something we might do once or twice a year.

Sometime around August or so is when I officially passed the baton to John and Rahul. I also gave them both a significant chunk of my equity, to maximize their incentives.

Research & development is ongoing, but you can get a quick summary of the work NS is engaged in by looking at the slide deck for Tablecraft, which is the product being researched in classrooms (by UCF and WestEd) and intended for commercialization. Success is not guaranteed yet.

To be clear, spending is ongoing. Only about 50% of that has been spent thus far. Every cent goes into payroll, benefits, software licenses, equipment and other essential business costs. Key takeaway: slow down spending when the vision gets murky; accelerate spending when there’s a clear vision to execute on.

I’ll think about these questions and answer them when I get another chance (tomorrow, probably).

Thanks for the great questions, please feel free to keep them coming!

null · November 18, 2022, 11:43am

Coming back here to address these 2 other questions I didn’t get a chance to address earlier.

It varies a little depending on our strategic goals and areas of interest at the given time, but generally speaking, myself and other reviewers I’ve worked with will primarily look at:

What is the intellectual merit of the proposed project?
What are the broader impacts of the proposed project?
What is the commercial potential of the proposed project?

The intellectual merit criterion encompasses the potential to advance knowledge. In other words, is the project innovative?

The broader impacts criterion encompasses the potential to benefit society (or, the ecosystem) and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal/ecosystem outcomes. In other words, how practically useful / necessary is the proposed project? Can it realistically be deployed at scale to solve a problem or provide a useful service?

The commercial potential criterion encompasses the potential to generate revenue.

The process is far more detailed than that, but these 3 are the main things we look at. At the NSF, this is measured by averaging out the reviews of multiple grant reviewers, then having the Program Lead make a final decision on it, for which they are held accountable.

Hmm not sure I fully understand the question, so I’ll try to answer my interpretation of it.

Measuring the progress of funded applicants is fairly straightforward, and is usually accomplished via mandatory milestone reports that grantees have to submit every X months, monthly call check-ins with the team, and so on.

When I look at progress, I’m not looking at the micro-scale (e.g. code commits on GitHub), but rather the macro developments – e.g. is the project closer to generating revenues? Does the project have users, and is that number snowballing up? Etc. These are the closest things we have to objective metrics we can look at to evaluate whether the project is meeting our strategic goals.

–

Thanks for the great questions! If you have more, feel free to shoot!

Phylo · December 3, 2022, 12:14am

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

Phylo · December 3, 2022, 11:41am

Rafael Brochado Grant Reviews

Proposal 1: Shimmer - Hackathon Proposal 3 (underfunded Version Budget 55.000 instead of 90.000 USD)

Proposal summary:

EasyA is a free learning app with 13 user reviews on the Apple App Store
Requesting $55,000 to host a 2-day-long Shimmer hackathon for students in London
Tier 3 proposal, requiring a score minimum of 15 for approval

Missing nice-to-haves:

Letters of support or testimonials from partners/venues
Paying customers
Engaged community
Links backing up claims

Personal recommendation: Rejection (eligible for re-submission after 30 days)

I have not seen evidence that this team is capable of exceptional execution.

Reasoning:

No examples of previous success stories. The website proudly displays $597K given away, but doesn’t make an effort to show what actually emerged out of all those hackathons that the team has allegedly put together. E.g. How many of the past hackathon projects went on to become products?
Claims can’t be verified. EasyA claims to have been featured on “Apple App of the Day”, WSJ, and more, but none of that could be verified on their website and they didn’t bother submitting links.
No moat, no USPs.
It’s a one-off, in-person 2-day event in London, i.e. barely impactful in the grand scheme of things. There are better ways to drive impact with $55K.
EasyA has no traction on the iOS store, no presence on the Google Play Store, no traffic on Youtube videos, i.e. no engaged community.
Pitch starts off with “EasyA has one of the UK’s most popular student communities, with a vibrant and highly-engaged student base of over 500,000 students”, but then the app has 13 user reviews and no active users.

Note: The bullet list above is ordered randomly, not with respect to importance.

Total score: 6

Score breakdown (see rubric):

Relevance to the Shimmer/IOTA Ecosystem → The project treats Shimmer as one of many chains and doesn’t seem loyal to the Shimmer/IOTA network.
Plan and Funding Model → The team has a semblance of expectations for their milestones, but they are unrealistic.
Execution → Initial steps taken are poorly executed or sloppy. If there are socials (Twitter, Discord, etc.), their following looks inorganic (fake).
Verifiability and Quality of the Team → The team is somewhat doxxed, but it may be difficult to verify background information.
Overall Quality & Originality of the Idea → The project would have little impact on our ecosystem or the Web3/crypto ecosystem as a whole.

Proposal 2: Crypto APIs Shimmer Spending Proposal 2 (Overpriced priced Version 90.000 USD instead of 60.000 USD)

Proposal summary:

Crypto APIs is seeking to integrate Shimmer in their B2B blockchain development suite
Requesting $90,000 to develop and deploy 3 specific software solutions:
- An open-source, blockchain-agnostic private key management SDK
- A pool of shared public Shimmer nodes
- A block explorer
Tier 3 proposal, requiring a score minimum of 15 for approval

Missing nice-to-haves:

Letters of support from devs/businesses interested in using this service for Shimmer
ROI projections - how much growth can we expect from this $90K investment?
A clear value proposition
Links backing up claims

Personal recommendation: Rejection (eligible for re-submission after 30 days)

I am not convinced that the proposed solutions would lead to a significant influx of new Shimmer developers, nor does it seem like existing developers would need this service right now.

Reasoning:

We already have an open-source, blockchain-agnostic solution for secret management – Stronghold. It’s unclear how the proposed SDK would differ from this.
More public nodes is a nice-to-have, not a strategic priority for the community right now. We already have access to existing public nodes which are sufficient for dev purposes today.
We already have an explorer, which we’d rather improve, as opposed to funding a brand new solution.
Claims can’t be verified. Pitch includes “Among our customers are PayPal, (…). On an institutional level, we have been trusted by the University of Cambridge, UCLA, NYU, and Stanford University” but none of that could be verified on their website and they didn’t bother submitting links.

Note: The bullet list above is ordered randomly, not with respect to importance.

Total score: 7

Score breakdown (see rubric):

Relevance to the Shimmer/IOTA Ecosystem → The project treats Shimmer as one of many chains and doesn’t seem loyal to the Shimmer/IOTA network.
Plan and Funding Model → The team has a semblance of expectations for their milestones, but they are unrealistic.
Execution → Initial critical steps have been taken (interesting website, socials, etc.), and it seems like a decent project, but extremely early.
Verifiability and Quality of the Team → The team is somewhat doxxed, but it may be difficult to verify background information.
Overall Quality & Originality of the Idea → The project would have little impact on our ecosystem or the Web3/crypto ecosystem as a whole.

caprisun · December 19, 2022, 12:08am

excellent proposal

MannyYolo · December 19, 2022, 4:36am

Take my Maney. Liked is as well. Bright future that talent has

null · December 20, 2022, 10:47pm

Oh, thanks for the nice comments! Let me know if you have any questions/thoughts and feel free to share my application with others so they can also get a chance to ask questions.

Btw, at this stage I think it’s highly unlikely I’ll be voted in as Lead, so if you’d like to keep me around supporting the Treasury efforts in the future, please consider voting me in as a Grant Reviewer when the Firefly vote comes out.

Some community members on Discord suggested I try to do a better job highlighting the differences between me and the other candidates (to kickstart some kind of discussion in public), so here goes.

You should vote for me because…

I’ve been a contributing member of our community for well over 5 years now, longer than many IF employees. I’ve been around long enough to have seen a lot, with respect to both IOTA governance and tech.
Of all the candidates, it seems I’m the only one who has actually been a Grant Reviewer in the real world (bonus: for one of the most rigorous & prestigious grant programs in the world - the same folks that funded the birth of Google and many other innovations we all use on a daily basis).
Of all the candidates, I applied the most scrutiny to the proposals we reviewed. I gave them the lowest scores out of everyone else, with actionable steps for how to fix them, while maintaining clear and concise communication. It’s worth noting (again) that these were legitimately bad proposals - literally copy paste jobs that Phylo did in a few mins for the sake of this challenge. Yet, somehow, most of the reviewers thought that was good enough or close to good enough to qualify for the next phase of Treasury funding. If you have higher standards than this, vote for me.
I was one of the few candidates who reviewed both the technical & non-technical proposals. Many of the issues I raised were not raised by anyone else. Some of the other reviewers chose to reject the proposals on technicalities, rather than addressing the real issues, perhaps because they didn’t fully understand what was being proposed.
I care about readability. For reference, just have a look at my reviews compared to that of most other candidates. Mine are concise, clear, easy to read, and aligned with the evaluation rubric. Can’t say the same about other candidates. Some even decided to use the proposal reviews as a platform to promote their random ideas, further extending their walls-of-text with even more unnecessary filler, in complete disregard of the reader’s experience. Here’s a quick piece of feedback I screenshotted from our Shimmer governance channel on Discord:

I wholeheartedly agree with Lenis, and this will be the first issue I’ll address (with respect to the Treasury, not overall governance) if I’m voted in, as it is pointless to have a Treasury framework in place if no one wants to engage with it. To address it, I would:

Create simple and beautiful visualizations that explain easily at-a-glance to laymen the entire Treasury framework, application process and so on, then centralize all that info on a webpage
Propose significantly better templates that grantees must follow when applying for Treasury funding, so we can keep things standardized & with good UX
Propose significantly better templates that other grant reviewers should follow when conducting their reviews, so we can keep things standardized & with good UX

Among other things.

There’s so much room for improvement across so many different areas. So, in short: vote for me if you’d like to see me involved in the Treasury efforts. I’m arguably the most qualified candidate, but don’t take my word for it – simply compare my application/reviews to that of other candidates and judge for yourself.

Cheers.

Sissors · December 21, 2022, 6:23pm

While I don’t know if my approval for Rafael will be overall positive, my vote did go to him. And besides the reasons mentioned above (where to be fair giving them the lowest scores might not necessarily be best ), there is one other point related to your last one: if I compare the different applications, Rafael is (imo by far) best at separating the major issues from the minor ones. Which is a very important quality in a program lead, both in the readability department (which is where it refers back to his last point), but also in keeping discussions, meetings, etc efficient.

null · December 22, 2022, 3:37pm

Thank you for adding that! I always appreciate your comments.

Regarding your endorsement and whether it’s a positive thing or not:
I understand that over the years you’ve accumulated a bit of a negative reputation with some folks because of your slightly aggressive communication style and consistent questioning of IF decisions. However, I’ve always found many of your criticisms to be valid. So I’d honestly rather have more folks like you in the community, who aggressively question our ideas & decisions, as opposed to having an army of mindless drones who never try to poke holes in the things we try to do. Without scrutiny, we can’t have excellence - and I do think your scrutiny over the years has had a positive impact overall. So, I am honored to have your vote and I fully expect you to keep doing your thing going forward.

Regarding the lowest scoring: tbh I was quite surprised (and slightly concerned for the Treasury) when I found out that other reviewers didn’t end up with similarly low scores. I just followed the rubric they previously designed, which I thought was a nice framework. For reference, let’s just have a quick look at one of the evaluation metrics: Relevance to the Shimmer/IOTA Ecosystem

Both the technical & non-technical proposals we reviewed were explicit about the fact that they work with multiple blockchains. Neither proposal made an effort to talk specifically about Shimmer or IOTA (which makes sense, because these were originally Polkadot proposals). Yet, somehow, some reviewers (including Lead candidates) still gave them more than 1 point on this metric.

I genuinely don’t get that. Could it be that the inclusion of “(…) plans to deploy later onto IOTA Mainnet” in the rubric there is what led some reviewers to hand out 3 points instead of 1?

It’s unclear. It’d be interesting to hear the perspective of other reviewers on this. In any case, I still stand by the scores I awarded them. These proposals were bad in their current state - they shouldn’t come anywhere close to getting funded. If Polkadot decided to fund them, that’s their problem. I bet they got nothing out of it.

We don’t have as much $ as Polkadot, so we must uphold significantly higher standards.

Deep_Sea · December 22, 2022, 3:53pm

Among other things.

There’s so much room for improvement across so many different areas. So, in short: vote for me if you’d like to see me involved in the Treasury efforts. I’m arguably the most qualified candidate, but don’t take my word for it – simply compare my application/reviews to that of other candidates and judge for yourself.

Cheers.

Thank you for the positive criticism Rafael. I just want to point out that we, and especially me, would love to have some support with building the Governance processes for the community. Just to be clear, you do not have to wait to be appointed to the position. This is a “community” initiated endeavor to be built by the community. This is literally what we are doing right now, on our free time. It’s a bit difficult to do all this on our and my free time, and we certainly would like more support. Please reach out if you want to help at present.

Indeed, we will be able to do so much more and refine all these processes when we have full time staff members and access to the Treasury. Yet until then, we have to do this on our free time and we have to do this before people are appointed. Any support is greatly appreciated at present.

Thanks!
DeepSea

null · December 23, 2022, 3:02am

JD, let’s get one thing straight: you have done more than enough for this community already, and we can’t thank you enough. You’re not getting paid, so you shouldn’t feel pressured to deliver at a higher standard than you already have, nor should you feel like you have to work on this stuff unpaid.

For now, I still stand by what I wrote a year ago, specifically this part:

I must acknowledge that since I posted that, I’ve had several discussions with IF members, and they have listened (for the most part). Since then, this governance forum was created, Phylo started leading these efforts full-time from the IF side, the legal department started providing more support, Firefly started working again on further empowering the community with on-chain voting, etc.

However, the work is not done yet. It’s still the IF’s responsibility to manage all this imho, at least until we have a full-time team, since they are the ones in control of the Treasury tokens anyway.

This vote for a full-time team was a brilliant initiative (largely thanks to you, Phylo & others), and I agree it might be a turning point, but only if we elect people who are qualified and capable of doing the job.

It’s not just difficult - it’s virtually impossible. You can’t attract great talent to work on this stuff unpaid, that’s just not how the world works. For me personally, at any given time there’s a handful of projects I follow that would benefit from my time and support, so it’s not possible to justify sinking countless unpaid hours on this project when I could instead be getting paid top dollar to work on a different one (which coincidentally might also be less risky or less stigmatized than IOTA, which has yet to redeem itself).

In retrospect, I’d say I’ve been more than generous with my time & support over the 5 and a half years I’ve been around, as have you & many others in our community.

Now with this Treasury initiative there’s finally a rare opportunity to get me engaged full-time (or at least 40 hrs/mo). Let’s wait and see if the community is interested. Until then, I’ll be keeping an eye on developments, but I can’t justify sinking hundreds of unpaid hours into this - which is the level of hours I’d have to sink into this if I were to take us to the next level.

Deep_Sea · December 23, 2022, 2:53pm

Ya, it’s a tough one. As I agree it would be great to have you supporting the communication process, the problem with that is the 10 hrs per week (i.e. 40 hrs per month) is only for reviewing projects. Reviewers can not invoice that time to the Treasury for doing “non-reviewing” work.

There is no doubt that we need to work on better communication processes, eventually a website, better designs, etc., but that will most likely come from bounties or proposals from the treasury. It brings up a good question though, “Can a reviewer take part in bounties and be a reviewer at the same time”? I"ll bring this up in our next meeting. I know previously we discussed reviewers and whether they can submit proposals or not. I believe we said they can’t, but I’ll double check this.

This was a good discussion, thanks.

MaverickMind · March 18, 2023, 5:18pm

Rafael, I´m impressed by your Presentation and by your Mindset. Will see what the other Canditates have to say… GoodLuck !