umair - 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: Umair

Age: 29

Social Media Handles

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laumair/

Discord: Umair#5376

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

I have worked for IOTA Foundation for almost five years. I had to part ways recently because I start pursuing a PhD in a different domain. However, I am still a big proponent of IOTA and try to follow the project as much as I can. On the side, I am also working on a project (very early stages) for IOTA.

3.) What is your educational and professional background?

Educational Background

  • PhD (ongoing) - Computer Science
  • MSc - Information Security
  • BS - Software Engineering

Web3/Crypto Background

  • Worked at IOTA Foundation for (almost) five years;
  • Researcher (part of MS thesis) in blockchain privacy - see publication

Professional Background

Current position: Scientific Researcher at Technichal Univerisity, Berlin.

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

I have worked around IOTA technology for a very long time so I am very familiar with the tech, vision of IOTA. My experience with IOTA and as a researcher / software engineer in general, puts me in a great position to review the future projects, their feasibility and relevance.

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.)

Yes - laumair (Umair Sarfraz) · GitHub

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.

*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.

Yes, recently I have started working on a (browser-based) wallet project & SDK that will be launched and be open sourced in the coming weeks.

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 but depends on the number of extra hours.

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.

See GitHub contributions to IOTA projects.

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?

As the Shimmer Community Treasury grant reviewer, the aim would be to promote Shimmer network and get more adoption. The best way to go about adoption is to have more people building around the network and thus brinding more value. By being a grant reviewer, I will have a chance to contribute to the decision making process of ensuring that the focus is put to relevant projects.

Working around IOTA for this long, puts me in a very comfortable position to understand where IOTA should head in the coming years. In the coming years, Shimmer needs to have a maturer ecosystem in terms of tools and covered use cases. I understand the important of a strong and active community for continuous adoption of the project and I want to play a role in it with other people.

Do you support my application as Grant Reviewer?
  • Yes

0 voters

9 Likes

Hi Umair,

First I would like to say thank you for applying, you have an amazing application.

Right now the committee is really focusing on any affiliations applicants have and I simply making sure those are captured for future review processes.

I see in your Linkedin that you are Co-Founder of Millicent Labs Limited. Can you please expand on what Millicent does?

Thank you very much,
DeepSea (JD)

Hi,

Of course - Millicent Labs is a very early stage start up focused on building blockchain rails for stable coins (based on Cosmos). I contributed to the initial idea, design & architecture based on which a grant was received from UK govt. My then & current involvement is very minimal and is more of an advisory one, however, in future it may change.

Happy to share more details about it, however, it is completely unrelated to IOTA / Shimmer.

However, what might be relevant is a browser-based wallet & SDK project that I have been working on, which will be released / open sourced in the coming weeks. That may have a conflict of interest when reviewing applications.

1 Like

Great thank you for the explanation.

1 Like

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

1 Like