Membership Request

[jonasW3F]

I am Jonas Gehrlein and I have been involved with Polkadot full time for around two and a half years. I am working as Research Scientist at the Web3 Foundation. In the following, I want to state my intention to become a member of the fellowship and exemplify why, despite not being a core developer, my contribution and opinion would be valuable. My general interest lies in economic problems around the network and tackling those by preparing data to make informed decisions. I also work on ideas and concepts to make Polkadot more usable and thereby inclusive for the public.

The Manifesto (Draft 4) emphasizes the importance of technical expertise of core components of the Polkadot implementation. This is necessary as the fellowship will function as a substitute for the current technical committee, where well-informed decisions about technical matters need to be executed fast. The Manifesto, however, also states that

Since the Fellowship is about retaining protocol expertise, it is not exclusive to developers, but also to ideators, designers, formalisers and research analysts.

I believe this is an important part of the Manifesto, as it expresses the intention to diversify the perspectives of their members, which is crucial for proper decision-making. Thereby a situation can be avoided in which the collective ends up in an echochamber and falls prey to behavioral biases such as groupshift or groupthink, often with devastating consequences.

While often technical problems have a clear best solution, I believe that the fellowship is destined to be more than a simple replacement of the technical committee. Then, discussing hurdles from different perspectives and backgrounds becomes increasingly important. Eventually, the fellowship will function as a collection of highly knowledgable, experienced, and invested individuals that guides and oversees the development of the network in the future. It will be seen as important opinion maker to inform public governance. And as such, it requires members with different perspectives.

My notable contributions to Polkadot are:

Peer-reviewed publication:

• An Active Preference Learning Approach to Aid the Selection of Validators in Blockchain Environments. In this interdisciplinary study we apply methods to quanitfy the utility of a validator for any individual nominator and test our theory with 115 real nominators from the community in a rigorous experiment. It has been accepted to two international conferences (EURO 2022 - Espoo and MCDM2021), that are leading in the field of operations research. The paper itself is currently under review for a high-profile academic journal.

Public outreach as representative of Polkadot:

• Talk at Polkadot Decoded.
• Talk to broader audience about the token economics and staking system.
• Instructor at the first Polkadot Academy 2022.

Usability of Polkadot:

• Staking Rewards Collector: This tool is designed to give users a quick overview of their staking rewards from Relay Chain tokens and many parachain tokens and automatically cross-references them with daily prices.
• Validator Resource Center: I supported the community develop a better dashboard for nominators to find suitable validators.

Blog posts about Polkadot

• I analyzed the first and second batch of auctions and explained the background.
• Analysis of the first auctions on Polkadot.
• A profound explanation of the nominator/validator relationship.

I enjoy working with data from Polkadot and Kusama use statistical methods to inform decision-making. With the help of my colleagues at W3F, I set up a data stream that archives historical staking data (for nominators and validators) to allow for long-term data analysis. A small selection of reports:

Data analyses:

• Session Analysis: Some metrics of the a current session of Polkadot.
• Time-series Analysis: An analysis of how certain metrics changed over time on Polkadot.
• Kusama Crowdloan Analysis: The impact of crowdloans on KSM.

After joining the fellowship, I aim to further pursue this path and work on projects that strengthen Polkadot in achieving it's vision. Given the aformentioned contributions, I apply as a II Dan: Proficient Member.

[rrtti]

Hi @jonasW3F, thank you for your application. Contributions to the core repositories is an essential part of the Fellowship application. The Manifesto 2.4 Audience and Non-Goals states:

It focusses on the sustenance and enrichment of technical expertise relevant to the Polkadot network primarily concerning the core protocol and its implementation. While members may engage in a number of activities beyond immediate technical work (designing, programming, debugging), the goal of the organisation is nonetheless that of building technical knowledge for the protocol.

And, and important point regarding your application:

Pure research, general education, public outreach, developer recruitment, management and mentorship may be incidental activities of some members but it must be understood that these should not constitute the primary contributions for a member to receive recognition.

Also:

For now, we explicitly include expertise surrounding parachain consensus, cross-chain message passing (xcmp, hrmp, dmp & ump), consensus algorithms concerning the Relay-chain (babe & grandpa) and any cryptographic data-structures, languages and apis specific to Polkadot.

Secondly, we include the Polkadot node implementation including peer networking protocols, topology strategies, synchronisation strategies and the internals of complete node implementations.

Thirdly, we include the Polkadot business-logic (aka the “runtime”), including frame internals, runtime and host apis, pallets utilised by Polkadot and its system chains. Finally, we also cover expertise concerning xcm, grandpa-based bridges and standard RPCs.

If you believe you are a protocol expert and long-term active core developer, please provide details of your three earliest substantial PRs to a Polkadot core repository (Substrate, Polkadot, Cumulus) as well as a list of any significant design and development contributions to core code.

Other instances of the Fellowship are expected for ecosystem participants who are not protocol experts or long-term active core developers.

[gavofyork]

Seeding is now closed, but I'd be happy to put this forward on-chain.