**DRAFT** RPC DAO Elections - Q1 2022

Governance
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The Harmony RPC DAO had its first meeting today. The decision was to move forward with elections on talk.harmony.one. However community feedback and input is needed. Below is the elections announcement soon to be posted. Given the urgency of resolving the RPC issues sooner than later, a 48 hour commenting period will be open for this draft.

Some questions needing feedback:

  1. Who should vote? Validators or the community in general?
  2. Who should qualify? It was brought up that Harmony shouldn’t support a Governor’s own RPC. Thoughts?
  3. How fast? Below has a rushed timeline. Should we slow down? Speed up more?
  4. What should be changed in the draft below? What should be added?
  5. Anything else?

Calling all Harmony RPC DAO Governor Candidates

The Harmony RPC DAO is tasked with managing the direction of the JSON RPC services which interacts directly with the Harmony blockchain. The RPCDAO will educate, direct and plan for future expansion of these services to existing web, mobile and future metaverse application builders, to be able to interact with the chain, via RPC interactions, since it’s a service to help builders and creatives bridge from web2 development to web3.

The Harmony RPC DAO Mandates

  • To onboard and incentivize Harmony node operators to run non-malicious RPC nodes; measure and reward for secure, performant and resilient operators within a trusted endpoint
  • To research and improve upon RPC node operation best-practices to help manage traffic at scale while fending off malicious activities
  • To collaborate with the Harmony Foundation’s core team as well as major node-runner ecosystems with the best practices of RPC node operations

For the first few terms of the RPC DAO will NOT operate like a traditional DAO. Given the Harmony team’s understanding and expertise of the current Harmony RPC structure, Harmony will lead the RPC DAO. As a Governor for the Harmony RPC DAO, you will work closely with the Harmony Team. The Harmony Team may assign tasks that need to be done within a timely fashion. RPC DAO, in discussions with Harmony team, can determine when the RPC DAO is able to work independently from Harmony and as a traditional DAO.

We encourage all who are interested to submit their candidacy for an elected position as a Governor of the RPC DAO. The dates regarding the election process are as follows:

Submit your Candidacy

Monday 7th February at 12am PST/8am UTC: Submit Your Candidacy — To submit your candidacy, go to Governance - Harmony Community Forum and make a new topic with the title: RPC DAO Council Q1 2022 Candidate: XXXX as the subject line (replacing “XXXX” with your name, of course). Fill out any details you believe are important for the community to know about you in order to receive their vote.

NOTE: The pool for candidates CLOSE at Midnight PST, Monday, February 21st (Midnight PST the Night Of The 21st). No candidates will be considered who enter AFTER that time. Sunday, February, 22nd at 12am PST/8am UTC: The Field is Closed — Once a candidate has submitted their candidacy to talk.harmony.one, they are free to campaign. Visit reddit, visit telegram, twitter or other social media channels.

Campaigning

The days between Monday, February, 07th and Monday, February, 21th will be dedicated to conversations and communications about what you can do for the the Harmony RPC DAO and asking the members of the community to vote for you.

There will be an AMA on talk.harmony.one on Saturday, February 19th, at 9am PST/5pm UTC. The community will submit their questions in a thread before February 19th. After Saturday, February 19th, at 9am PST/5pm UTC, the candidates will respond to questions from the community.

Elections

The election runs from 12am PST/8am UTC, Wednesday, February 23rd until Midnight PST, Wednesday, March 9th. At the end of which the new Governors will be elected into their positions. The vote will be held on Snapshot in the Governance - Harmony Community Forum .

Once the election closes at 12am PST/8am UTC on Wednesday, March 9th, we will know who our governors for the RPC DAO will be. They will be integrated into all current communications systems and start the organizing in discord channel to be provide.

Best Wishes to our Future Governors!

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Thank you, @HankTheCrank, for writing down this draft.

I’m very interested in helping out by sharing knowledge on setting up an RPC. Also, personally running multiple RPC`s is an option for me.

To determine the needed resources, we will need more insights into traffic data by the team and how exactly this will get funded.

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  1. Either way would be okay with me.
  2. For governor? People who have demonstrated experience and leadership within the Validator space, have an appropriate technical background, and communicate well. I personally see no issue with a governor also helping to operate their RPC as long as the reward mechanism is agnostic to owner of the RPC (which it should be).
  3. The rushed timeline is okay with me as long as we are able to source enough governor applications and RPC operators. It may be hard to recruit operators until the compensation mechanism is described.
    4&5. I cannot think of anything additional at the moment.
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In terms of compensation, generally the DAO applies for funding. The standard is $75 per hour for a total of 10 hours of work per week.

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I am extending the review time for the draft review due to such low responses.

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Hi, I’m new to the harmony community but somewhat experienced at maintaining harmony explorer nodes.

I’m very enthusiastic about delivering high quality RPC services to users of the harmony network.

I’d be happy to be a part of the conversation for this effort. I have self funded explorer nodes on bare metal servers in the US used for my own use and as part of the pocket network. (I am independent and not a part of the pocket team).

I am setting up additional harmony explorer nodes in Asia and I have a load testing application to measure the latency my configuration can achieve.

I’ll be happy to support others in setting up the harmony explorer node and to supply Linux support with queries and commands etc. I can also support others with downloading the snapshots and utilising these. I can also talk through the hardware and bandwidth requirements and talk through the options of setting up the nodes on Digital Ocean, AWS, or on bare metal.

An exercise I’m particularly interested in sharing with others is the tailored load testing based on real use from dapps like defi kingdom to ensure the configuration is successful in delivering fast responses for all types of relay requests.

Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer. Even if not a governor on the dao, I’ll be an enthusiastic participant in the discussion to deliver a diverse range of operationally resilient RPC services for the network.

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I don’t have experience with RPC directly but have been itching to get involved somehow and honestly this seems like the most pressing need for Harmony. I do ITSec for a living so plenty of technical skill and technical project management experience, and happy to help any way I can.

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Great write up!

  1. I say Validators but I am okay with either choice.

  2. So that we do not limit the quality or quantity of candidates that we receive for governor, I think we should allow governors to get rewarded for running RPC servers along with everyone else who chooses to do so.

3, 4, and 5 everything looks good to me, thanks.

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1 How do you ensure a sense of engagement and validity? It could be argued a more inclusive voter group would create a better feeling of connectedness between the governers and the wider community.

2 I am not sure restrictions are helpful, however each governer should be kept honest to the reason why they are a governer.

3 I’m not sure there is looming deadline. An engaging process is more important than an expedited process in this case. However, I’d suggest a general aim to wrap up the vote within a reasonable period to avoid the exercise running scale. Around 45 days seems reasonable.

4 A focus on fair and accurate measurement of quality of available services and enabling the community to select appropriate services seems important to me.

5 An exit mechanism might need to be described. Either if a governer is no longer able to fulfil responsibilities, or if the DAO feels a change to the governer group is required.

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I contacted a bunch of harmony orgs on discord and directed them to this thread. I changed the above DRAFT to include new dates and a longer timeline.

The vote will most likely be on the new harmony snapshot. I’ll have to look into who to contact about making the space.

I talked to @Jacksteroo about removing the Harmony financial support restrictions for governors and he agreed. If this restriction would affect your decision to run please state so in this thread because transparency is important to the community.

I am planning an AMA this Saturday 9 pm central on the Dingos Discord. I can plan more if requested, they just asked me to do one for their community.

Due to the way the new vote will work on the new snapshot, it will be a community vote.

I’ll make the final changes on Sunday and post the final version then. I look forward to what the new governors can do for Harmony.

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This is a fantastic idea for a DAO. I would leave the vote open to everyone, not just validators. Anyone who uses Harmony dapps has a stake in a better RPC for the network.

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Happy to join the call. Ping me on Telegram / Discord. I have it on my calendar

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Thanks, Coinkin! :blue_heart: I’ve added it to my calendar with reminders every hour down to reminders for 15 mins before so I should definitely not miss it lol.

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Austin from Hermies Defi and I had a discussion the other day with the idea of using NGINX for load balancing and reverse proxy (or have numerous load balancers). Then possibly having all other RPC servers added to the load balancer/s. Any feedback on this idea would be greatly appreciated so we can figure out a game plan here and get this moving forward as fast as a transaction on Harmony Protocol :blue_heart:

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We could use a GeoDNS service as the primary entry (i.e., https://rpc.harmony.one) for RPC-related requests and forward it to regional services that would act as load balancers and round-robin all requests to connected RPCs. Governors can be responsible for their region/continent by educating and onboarding new participants, offering RPCs, and keeping an eye on their areas’ total traffic/workload.

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Hi guys, I haven’t officially put in my application for governor yet, but I am planning on it! Just wanted to update ya’ll.

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The final draft was posted.

Applications open tomorrow.

Let’s make Harmony awesome!

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I like this idea very much! The whole thing lol. Great thinking Paul. I had mentioned this to others in chats already as well and put the idea out there a little already and did give you credit, of course, hehe :blue_heart:

I think having one RPC URL for everyone to use will keep things simple in that regard. And to be honest, even though it may sound more complicated to have load balancers and region-assigned governors for each region, that would actually not only work out better and accommodate for everyone’s schedules, language barriers, etc., but would simplify things quite a bit overall. Trying to operate, manage, and balance all of these regions as a group of Governors taking it all on as a group, it delegates responsibility to the best people for each region.

Someone, I can’t recall if it was you or not, had mentioned about possibly having a main governor that works with all of the regional assigned governors which I said I would be willing to take on that position if I were to be chosen as an RPC DAO governor. I will be posting my RPC DAO candidate post here on the forums soon. I do think that is a good idea as well. Altogether I think this is a great way to approach this and start moving forward with this accordingly.

Thanks again for everything Paul. You are another one of the members of the Harmony family that is an irreplaceable asset to Harmony and I’m glad we have you here :blue_heart: :100:

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Thank you, Austin! You know that you fully have my support! I wish you luck with running for governor! I’m sure you will get voted in you are a great asset to Harmony as well! Thanks for your support and for running for a governor position! We need good people on this DAO :wink: :blue_heart:

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Awesome! Getting mine prepared and hoping to finish it tonight. If not I’ll definitely have it done and in tomorrow! Thanks so much for helping with all of this Coinkin you are amazing :slight_smile: You do so much for Harmony and this community! Another irreplaceable asset to Harmony :100: :blue_heart: idk what we would do without you sometimes tbh lol

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