Referencing the Polkadot Technical Fellowship,
Fellowship is a self-governing body of experts and developers of Polkadot, Kusama, and Parachain protocols. It operates on-chain through fellowship referenda and off-chain through the community discussion repository
The Bifrost Fellowship aims to foster the long-term development and growth of the Bifrost Protocol by considering its long-term roadmap from various perspectives. This might include discussions, research, and implementation from diverse standpoints. For instance:
The fellowship will include members with a diverse range of expertise and experience. This includes developers with technical skills, founders and builders of other DeFi and Web3 protocols, blockchain researchers, professional infrastructure and node operators, community and opinion leaders, ecosystem contributors, and partners.
These individuals will form various sub-fellowships, each divided according to their specific expertise, experience, and skill set. Each sub-fellowship will have its own mandate, role, and responsibilities, and will consist of expert members.
Each sub-fellowship will be responsible for its specific field and will be tasked to initiate proposals, manage its sub-fellowship, onboard members, and initiate discussions of proposals related to its expert field. For each sub-fellowship, a leader will be nominated who will represent the sub-fellowship to lead reviews and discussions. The Sub-fellowships will be detailed in the following context.
This is primarily composed of the Bifrost Foundation, with a clear focus on treasury-related proposals and strategic management of treasury funds.
Criteria of Applicants
The following are the basic requirements to apply for membership in the Treasury Fellowship.
Exisiting Members
Find them in the Bifrost Discord channel: Treasury Fellowship
It is mainly composed of developers and members with technical backgrounds. The Tech fellowship is focused on releasing updates related to Substrate and runtime, discussing the latest technological developments related to Polkadot, managing the fellowship and onboarding of members, and participating in the discussion of topics such as hackathons and proposals for product delivery and integration.
Criteria of Applicants
The following are the basic requirements to apply for membership in the Tech Fellowship (any 2 of the following are sufficient).
Existing Members
Find them in the Bifrost Discord channel: Tech Fellowship
They mainly comprise business partners, product managers, advisers, protocol founders, and ecosystem contributors. Its objective is to develop and implement initiatives to drive growth and expansion across the ecosystem and beyond. The fellowship's main tasks are topics and proposals related to product roadmaps, the development and growth of the Bifrost protocol and its business expansion across ecosystems, and the Strategy fellowship's management and onboarding of its members.
Criteria of Applicants
The following are the basic requirements to apply for membership in the Strategy Fellowship (any 2 of the following are sufficient).
Existing Members
Find them in the Bifrost Discord channel: Strategy Fellowship
This group mainly comprises members involved in marketing operations, community leaders, and head ambassadors. It focuses on discussing community proposals, structuring events, and collaborating with other communities.
Criteria of Applicants
The following are the basic requirements to apply for membership in the Community Fellowship (any two of the following are sufficient).
Existing Members
Find them in the Discord channel: Community Fellowship
They predominantly include infrastructure providers, node & validator operators, Validator Boost List (VBL) members, and technical operations and maintenance members. Members are primarily focused on discussing VBL application proposals and initiatives around optimizing existing Bifrost infra and validator/collators programs, managing the fellowship, and onboarding members in the Infra Fellowship.
Criteria of Applicants
The following are the basic requirements to apply for membership in the Infra Fellowship (any 2 of the following are sufficient).
Existing Members
Find them in the Discord channel: Infra Fellowship
Anyone (including individuals or entities) interested in participating as a candidate in the Bifrost Fellowship program is encouraged to inform the community of their plans to run on the discussion forum by following the steps below:
Phase 1: Self-introduction - At any time
Phase 2: Discussion and evaluation by community & Fellowship
Phase 3: Initiate on-chain proposal-dynamic voting time
The fellowship's governance model has multiple tracks, each with its own approval and support parameters, where votes are weighted according to their ranks.
Members of the Fellowship can vote on any given proposal, and the aggregated vote of all members (weighted by their rank) constitutes the Fellowship's collective vote.
Most Bifrost Fellowship Referenda Origin are Runtime function extrinsic. Hence, most referenda are initiated by Strategy Fellowship and Tech Fellowship, and other fellowship members are led to vote on them.
The list of current and historic fellowship referenda can be viewed on Subsquare.
Fellowship members can request an update on their ranks at any time, and each year, they can be updated by one rank.
Polkadot OpenGov allows the Technical Fellowship to authorize an origin known as "Whitelisted-Caller" to execute with Root-level privileges for calls approved by the Fellowship (currently, only level-three fellows and above can vote for whitelist calls). Note that the fellowship cannot unanimously change the network parameters, conduct rescues, or move assets. The whitelisted proposals still have to go through the whole life cycle of an OpenGov referendum and can only be enacted when the referendum passes successfully.
The whitelisting process starts as a fellowship referendum with an embedded XCM call from the collectives system chain to the Polkadot relay chain. For instance, the Bifrost Fellowship referenda #14 was used to whitelist the Bifrost OpenGov referenda #14.
The Salary structure will be announced in Q4 2024.
