Updates on the partnership with Gilberto Gil, pallet changes and more

The last few weeks have been agitated and we have multiple news to share.

Updates about the new proposal

Last month the Society approved a partnership with Gilberto Gil. On April 20th, coincidentally around 4:20 PM, the team met with Gil and finished executing the first step of the proposal. We had the opportunity to chat a bit, explaining how the Society works and how it relates to his work.

Here are some pictures of this special moment:

• Setting up

• Scanning one of his most iconic outfits, which he wore in the cover of the Tropicalia album from 1968

• Meeting up with Gil, explaining the details of the partnership and showing some previous works

• Applying makeup to mitigate reflexive oils present in the skin

• Capturing his bust with a simpler technique and some preliminar results

• Gil having a good time at the production and capturing his full body with advanced techniques

The next steps

The team is now working on some optimizations and a process called retopology to shrink the file sizes. This optimizations are important to include a small enough file in the website. After that, we will start working on the dedicated page with all the information about this partnership and how the society relates to Gilberto Gil's work. Finally, we will work on creating a beautiful and unique digital art that will be distributed to society members on his birthday (June 26th)

Society pallet updates

After delivering XCM3, Gav finally had some time and decided to give our society pallet some love! He added a lot of necessary changes, it still in progress but you can review the code here.

The next steps are finishing up and merging the code, including it an upcoming runtime upgrade and write some benchmarks.

The changes are called "Society V2" and here is a summary of the changes written by Gavin Wood:

Substantial changes to Society:

• The number of members are no longer limited technically (Members is no longer a Vec item).
• Proper use of BoundedVec.
• Max members and intake size can be altered by founder without runtime upgrade.
• Members are ranked. Voting weight is determined as a rank-plus-one-squared.
• Right now there's only two ranks, with all members starting as rank zero (vote weight 1) and all members eligible to become rank one (vote weight 4) if they return any funds they received from the society back into its treasury and give up the possibility of getting future funds.
• The concept of a suspended candidate is removed: Candidates can remain a candidate indefinitely, however unless there is persistent indecision among the membership and inaction by the founder, then all candidates will be either approved as a member or rejected entirely after a full additional intake round.

Candidate voting:

• The process for moving from candidate to member is no longer automatic and requires a call into one of a number of free dispatchables.
• The voting/reward/punishment scheme for candidates and challenged members is completely different.
• The candidate voting round is two phase, initially a voting phase and then a period afterwards where membership may be claimed based on those votes before the next candidate(s) are selected.
• There is now only one Skeptic and their duty is changed.
• No members are rewarded for voting.
• Only the Skeptic is punished for invalid/missing votes.
• Unlike the original voting scheme, the new scheme involves no random input.
• The Skeptic is selected at random from the members, but no vote is attributed to them.
• Members may vote on any candidate at any time.
• The "clear result" of voting is when there are twice as many votes for either approval or rejection as there are for the alternative.
• There is no "clear result" of voting if neither the votes for approval nor the votes for rejection are more than twice as great as the other.
• A candidate may always resign their candidacy at any time, but this incurs the loss of their deposit.
• If they do not, then their candidacy may not end until the voting period is elapsed.
• Once the voting period is elapsed, they may elevate themselves to become a member if the clear result of voting is in approval.
• Once the following intake round is ended, then anyone may cancel the candidate's candidacy if there is a clear rejection of the candidate among voters.
• Once the voting period is elapsed, the founder may elevate them to member if there is not a clear rejection of the candidate among voters.
• Similarly, once the voting period is elapsed, the founder may cancel their candidacy if there is not a clear approval of the candidate among voters.
• At any point once the voting period is over, the Skeptic can be forced by anyone to receive a strike for any candidate on which they either did not vote or did vote but voted against the clear result (if there was one). The Skeptic may only be punished once for any candidate.

Member challenges:

• At every Challenge Period, a member is selected to become the new Defender and another member is selected at random to become the Challenge Skeptic.
  • The Defender is generally selected at random from the members.
  • However, if the previous Challenge Skeptic received a strike for missing or invalid voting, then they become the Defender.
• Prior to the commencement of the next Challenge Period, any member may vote on the continued validity of the member's membership.
• The Challenge Skeptic receives a strike and becomes the next Defender if they did not vote or if their vote is against the clear result of the voters (if any).
• A random member is selected as the next Defender if the Challenge Skeptic's vote is present and valid.
• If the clear result of the voters is to reject the Defender's evidence of continued eligibility for membership, then the Defender is removed as a member and placed in the SuspendedMembers list. The founder may restore their membership or remove them as before.

Website updates

Last week we onboarded a new member to the team, a Senior Software Engineer that will help us delivering the last features of the alpha version faster.