Vengetha Grant Reviewer Application

Governance Proposals Community Treasury - Grant Reviewer applications
1

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: Vengetha
Age: +35

Social Media Handles

Twitter: @nickspas - https://twitter.com/NickSpas

Discourse:
Reddit:
Linkedin:
Discord: Vengetha [FI]#6701

Telegram:

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

The gain of knowledge trust and responsibility.

3.) What is your educational and professional background?

Educational Background

  • BA University of Chichester in Travel and Tourism
  • POS University of Sussex in International Relations (Geopolitics)

Web3/Crypto Background

  • Participant in ICCD
  • Tangle Labs

Professional Background

  • Customer service, transportation industry and technical support.

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

I have no relevant experience.

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.

Business board at Tangle Labs

*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.

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.

None available or at request.

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?

Shimmer Community Treasury should focus on a set of activities that encourage participation, inclusion and support. Incentives will enhance community growth and bring new initiatives, granting access will be based on good judgement and trust. Community Treasury will attract new members.

In 3 years time, Shimmer and IOTA have the potential to provide security and industry compliant framework to support critical infrastructure and beyond. I believe in a communication layer that services real world use cases.

Do you support my application as Grant Reviewer?
  • Yes

0 voters

3 Likes
2

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 TangleLabs is and in which sector it operates or plans to operate in the future?

3

Hi Phylo,

Tangle Labs is an IT solution provider that focuses on utilising IOTA identity for its products. The products can be seen on the website (https://tanglelabs.io/). Currently an event ticketing platform for the Tourism sector should or will be on the works. There is an active discord channel, feel free to reach out.

1 Like
4

Hi Vengetha,

Can we clarify please if you are a core team member within the Tangle Lab organization or a regular paid contractor?

Thanks,
JD (DeepSea)

5

Hello Deep_Sea,

I would consider myself a core member since I do not fit into the “paid contractor” category. I hope to have answered your question.

Best,
NSB (Vengetha)

6

Thank you very much for your reply.

7

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

9

Vengetha Grant Review

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

Here you go Phylo.

Note: I have noticed changes in the proposal :P, but felt that I should not remove my previous findings, I included them.

Having reviewed this project I have concerns about the clarity of this proposal:

  1. Claim of over 500.000 “highly engaged students base’ does not specify where do these students are coming from or on what is based this claim to be consider them “engaging”.

  2. Discrepancy, the claim of a “highly-engaged” student base yet the founder is a TickTock young streamer with little to non engagement from these social media channels. Previous hackathons show little content material and little social media engagement overall.

  3. There is little specification about how they aim to “supercharge” adoption of the protocol among developers.

  4. There was a discrepancy between the proposal of 55k and milestones of: 40k and 50k that has been fixed…(old)

  5. There is no information about possible venues and their location for a fair assesment.

  6. The date seems off as it is the end of student final exams and this will deprive engagement if any.

  7. There is no information about the academics they are willing to approach and their level of expertise in the industry.

  8. The target audience is for attendees with experience, yet based on previous events, anyone can participate ad their success is questionable. Hackathon may be drawn with little to non experienced students and prices for these are fairly high for such endeavours. This gives me little confidence in achieving their objective of integrating skilled attendance if any.

  9. There is no mention about transportation and how they plan to attract students across the country thus effectively selecting 200 attendees. The drawing of teachers and students is unclear and how would teachers be attracted to this event and there is no incentive definition for them to do so.

  10. The claim of having a sole “substrate” teacher does not provide insight into the right competencies of a learning environment and the hiring and coordination of unknown teachers/professors in the field. This may increase the difficulties of effectiveness in coordinating such event. (Old)

  11. Judging by previous event the Marketing and PR provided seem quite poor and there is not enough exposure nor engagement overall.

  12. Post event “promotions” are not specific enough to give a sense of purpose.

  13. The event does not provide a detailed scope of how it is going to be organised, it is fairly general. For example: “Life introduction to Shimmer example apps and to use them to kick start development”. Which apps do they intend to use? Hinders lack of search and possible knowledge gap. (Old)

  14. The EasyA team claims that will be gathering material and working with IF for its provision, they seem to be dependant on this and it may require assistance. This may be not so convenient assuming they seem to not be very connected to the IOTA community and did not provide specific information about how or trough whom they aim to request this assistance.

  15. The aim to have judges is obvious, however, there is no information about the assesment criteria, the judges competencies and objectivity to provide these generous prices.

  16. The experience of the team is questionable and dependant on great support.

  17. There is little information about how well they are positioned to and to which institutions will they encourage to incorporate shimmer into their teaching material. Also what teaching material will they present.

  18. Shimmer university is non existent and this is not relevant unless they plan to introduce this which is fairly questionable.

  19. The “70 top schools” is a wider representation of educational institutions, There needs to be.a more specific definition as the target attendees are university students. Also, would be beneficial to name a few and their commitment to the cause since schools and universities can be both top ranked independently.

  20. Confirmation of venue, prices and location seem very constraint in time for a wider public. More time should be allowed to have effective participation. There is little time for manoeuvring considering the event should be held on 2-3 July. Even considering that 2-3rd of July is a bad date, there is no clear process and date at this point in time, which will potentially have a negative impact. This seriously questions the availability of its participants and ultimately its success.

Resolution:Sine we are not able to gather more information from EasyA and the way they will achieve the goals they have purposed there is no possibility to draw a clear conclusion from an application that is presented in such way. This proposal should me more specific in its activities ,thus, showing some planning ahead ,and be met with a more confident assessment.

REJECTED

Let me know. Cheers