Decentralized Voices — Cohort 2 Delegates Announced
Web3 Foundation is pleased to announce the second cohort of the Decentralized Voices (DV) program for Polkadot and Kusama, to allow more people to be significantly involved in OpenGov by delegating 180’000 KSM and 42 million DOT worth of voting power to active voters in the ecosystem. For more information, please see the article on the DV Program on the Polkadot Wiki.
Changes and Overview
Web3 Foundation is excited to announce the second round of Decentralized Voices delegates, consisting of ten Kusama delegates and ten Polkadot delegates — an increase from the last cohort. Each Polkadot delegate will be delegated 700’000 DOT at 6x conviction, or 4.2 million DOT voting power per delegate, and each Kusama delegate 3’000 KSM at 6x conviction, or 18’000 KSM voting power. Note that this is slightly less voting power per delegate, but the total voting power remains the same.
Additionally, delegations will include other tracks: particularly Wish-for-Change and Treasurer, along with the Spender and Tipper tracks which were delegated in the original cohort.
Delegates will have this DOT or KSM delegated to them for a period of three months. At this point, a new batch of delegates will have the same amount of DOT/KSM allocated. Just as in the first cohort, it is hoped that the Decentralized Voices program will encourage users to delegate their own DOT or KSM to some of these delegates going forward.
The delegations will be changed on-chain on Monday, 10 June 2024.
This was an extremely competitive process and there were numerous excellent candidates that were not selected but certainly could be in the future. Web3 Foundation would like to encourage applicants who were not selected to apply again for the next round.
Selection Criteria
Web3 Foundation attempted to get a diverse set of delegates who can properly represent the will of the community. The key criterion was active participation in governance, both on-chain and through respectful and thoughtful off-chain interactions (e.g. on Polkassembly, blog posts or similar long-form content, and social media such as Grillapp and X/Twitter).
People building in the Polkadot ecosystem or having long-term thoughtful participation in the community were also given preference. Community sentiment, based partly on responses to candidates’ “political philosophy” posts, was taken into account. Based on the previous cohort, which showed the ability of collectives to handle a large number of referenda as well as represent a broader group of people, we also weighted them positively.
Finally, Web3 Foundation attempted to include candidates with diversity in outlook, background, and geographic location.
The Delegates
Note: names are given in alphabetical order and do not imply any order of preference or rank.
Delegates should not attempt to change any votes made by previous delegates on specific Referenda. They should only vote on Referenda that previous delegates did not vote on.
Polkadot
Kusama
To all of the Cohort 1 Decentralized Voices delegates, Web3 Foundation would like to thank you for your service. We are looking forward to Cohort 2 raising the voice of the community!
