Office of Inspector General Guidelines v1.1

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) is a neutral third-party role designed to evaluate WAX Guild Candidates’ contribution to the ecosystem and provide ongoing transparency for the community. The office is designed as a committee with 3 inspector generals who will standardize WAX Guild evaluations, and properly recognize those WAX Guilds making valuable contributions to the WAX ecosystem.

ZenBlocks (Marlon Williams) is the First Active Inspector General.

EOS Detroit (Rob Konsdorf) is the First Standby Inspector General.

EOS Barcelona (Josep Rosich) is the Second Standby Inspector General.

Evaluation Process

Guilds will be evaluated on a monthly basis on the criteria below. The committee will publish the cutoff date for rating Guilds each month.

The criteria will consist of binary line items in a range of weighted categories; either the Guild gets the full mark or none. The committee believes this will make it easier to evaluate Guilds fairly.

Core criteria must be fulfilled to be considered for a rating. Bonus criteria will improve a Guild’s score, and isn’t required to gain a rating.

Guild Interview Process

Administrative Maturity

Ability to communicate to the greater WAX community, coordinate with other Guilds, and keep status up to date on commitments and obligations to the network. Shows up to agreed upon meetings on time.

Required Skills

Organizational, Written Communication, Time Management

Core Criteria

• Joined WAX Guilds Keybase team.
• Added emergency contact information to Guild roster (available in Keybase).
• Make intro blog post based off this guide.

Bonus Criteria

• Have proposed a Guild Showcase project using this guide.
• Responds to requests for missing Guild Roster information within 2 days.

Technical Operations

Professionalism on the technical operations front. Technical Operations encompasses running all required services in a secure configuration, meeting the performance demands of the network, coordinating with other guilds to test and upgrade the network, providing publicly available infrastructure, and implementing processes to minimize risk and maximize availability.

Required Skills

Systems engineering and infrastructure management (TechOps), Information Security (InfoSec), IT Admin (CorpSec)

Core Criteria

• Seed node endpoint is publicly available for peering.
• API node endpoint is publicly available for submitting push requests.
• HTTPS is available on API endpoint.
• wax.json metadata available at regproducer url.
• chains.json metadata available at regproducer url.
• Public website available.
• CPU latency on EOS Mechanics below 2 ms on average.
• Quick response to outages — responds in 5 rounds or less.
• Contributing on the WAX public testnet (when available).

Bonus Criteria

• Contributing on at least 1 public EOSIO testnet.
• Proven track record in the EOSIO community for at least 6 months.
• Produced blocks for more than a month in at least one EOSIO chain.
• Hyperion API node endpoint is publicly available.
• Live Video inspection of rack.
• Warrant canary set up.
• Participates in proposing and evaluating of multi-signature proposals to update the system.
• API node endpoint provides full history access.
• 99.999% uptime on block signing or less than 630 blocks missed (52.5 rounds) per annum.
• Responds within 2 hours to network-wide security incidents.
• Invalid request filtering set up on RPC endpoint (e.g. Patroneos).
• HTTP is available on RPC API endpoint.
• HTTP2 is enabled on RPC API endpoint.
• CORS is configured on RPC API endpoint to support desktop wallets and explorers.

Technical Contributions

Measurable software, engineering or educational contributions for the WAX community. This involves creating primarily open source tools and services to benefit the entire WAX network, such as wallets, interactive bots and data analysis tools.

Required Skills

Software Programming, Development Operations (DevOps), Systems and Infrastructure Management

Bonus Criteria

• Builds useful software tools and services (e.g. explorers, interactive bots, portals, reports/analytics, wallets).
• Proactively provides technical assistance to peers and other community members (e.g. how-to guides, tutorials, live support).
• Publishes contributions using open source licenses for further collaboration/benefit of the community.
• Contributes toward creating and maintaining open standards and interfaces.

Geographic Distribution

Maintaining a geographically distributed block production network across the WAX ecosystem. To deliver 99.999% availability and reliability of WAX services amongst diverse jurisdictions across the globe.

Required Skills

Systems, Networking and Infrastructure Management

Bonus Criteria

• Nodes present in countries with less than 2 active and 2 standby guild candidates.
• Supports geo-located block production nodes across 2 or more jurisdictions.

Business Development

Bringing businesses, products, and liquidity to the WAX network. Facilitating integrations into the larger blockchain ecosystem with services such as: wallet providers, exchanges, and interoperable DApps. Getting funds interested in the project.

Required Skills

Business Development, Finance, Product Partnerships, Product Development

Bonus Criteria

• Contributing to user acquisition & account creation.
• Working with a business to leverage WAX in their product.
• Managing an exchange integration with WAX.
• Facilitating institutional interest in WAX.
• Bridging service providers that enable new use cases, e.g. stablecoins, DSPs, oracles.

Community Engagement

Doing the work necessary to make the WAX ecosystem accessible to existing users and potential newcomers. Educational initiatives, fostering conversation, disseminating information, and providing support to people in WAX social channels. Designing experiences, both physical and digital, to evangelize WAX and its ecosystem to the world.

Required Skills

Communication, organizing events, multimedia creation, developing programming and curriculum for educational purposes, translation services.

Bonus Criteria

• Creation and/or translation of educational training materials.
• Organizing and hosting meetups.
• Supporting community members in Telegram.

Category Weights

Each of the aforementioned categories will be scored according to the weights outlined below. Ultimately, the candidates with the highest scores are considered the most valuable Guilds to serve on the WAX blockchain (Weight Table).

Technical Operations 30%

Technical Contributions 20%

Community Engagement 20%

Geographic Distribution 10%

Business Development 10%

Adminitrative Maturity 10%

On-boarding Guilds to Keybase

Keybase is a secure and modern PKI tool for team chats. It is the recommendation of the committee that WAX Guilds coordinate in a dedicated Keybase team in order to share secure peering info and other operational data, and to provide a common place to respond to network incidents.

Joining Keybase

1. Download Keybase to your preferred devices.
2. Make an account or sign in with an existing account. Make sure to back up your key.
3. Add your BP social accounts to your Keybase account to improve assurance of ownership.
4. Send a DM to robrigo, eosmiami, xebb, or eosbarcelona to ask for an invite.

Guild Roster

The Guild roster will be maintained in Keybase as an emergency contact info sheet that can be called upon in emergencies.

Next Steps for Guilds

The next steps for Guilds are as follows:

1. To request an invite to the wax_guilds keybase team at the earliest possible convenience and,
2. Schedule an evaluation meeting with an inspector general before Nov. 16th, 2019. This will involve each Guild filling out a simple interview questionnaire beforehand, and following up in a short meeting to discuss the criteria, per the inspector general’s availability.

On November 16th, the committee will take the day to collate the results into a report that will be published the week of November 18th, 2019 and can be leveraged by the WAX community as a factor when considering how to cast their Guild votes.

As this is the inauguration of the Office of Inspector General, it’s possible that the framework isn’t perfect. The committee welcomes feedback from the Guilds on the processes and criteria outlined above.

In the spirit of transparency and accountability to the Worker Proposal System, you can follow along with the inspector general committee in the IG Notion workspace.