| Report Date | 2025/08/01 |
| Submitted by | Jesse Chejieh |
Since joining the Fellowship, I’ve focused on the collective parachain, empowering developers, and hardening runtime primitives. Below I detail systems I’ve built, mentored, or refined, each addressing critical gaps in protocol flexibility, safety, or accessibility. Every contribution aligns with Rank II’s mandate in the Fellowship Manifesto §6.3.1: to own major components, share knowledge, and prepare for network stewardship.
Implemented the Secretary Collective for Polkadot and Westend.
Enabling other collectives(starting with the Polkadot Technical Fellowship) delegate operational and administrative tasks to a dedicated team/member in the collective. This separation of duties improves workflow efficiency by offloading non-decision-making responsibilities. Candidates are proposed and promoted by OpenGov or Rank 3+ Fellows and can later be extended to other collectives.
Future implementations aim to empower secretaries to submit proposals on behalf of their respective collectives, provided the UI can support this further expansion of operational utility.
Subsequently the NoOpPoll trait was introduced to eliminate unnecessary governance overhead for collectives that do not require internal referendum-based decision-making. While some pallets mandate the presence of a Polling trait, they do not always make use of its functionality.
A practical application of NoOpPoll is in the Secretary Collective, which delegates decision-making(currently just onboarding) to external governance systems (e.g., OpenGov or the Fellowship) and therefore has no need for internal voting mechanics.
My work on the collectives parachain extended to hardening core funtionlity from - Introducing the MaxRank configuration trait to pallet-core-fellowship, replacing hardcoded rank limits with dynamic constraints that enable flexible collective structures while maintaining backward compatibility through storage migrations.
Implementing rank clamping in fellowship benchmarks to respect runtime-configured MaxRank boundaries, eliminating out-of-bounds rank generation and ensuring reliable weight calculations for constrained configurations.
And Creating the generic GetInto type converter implementing the Get trait, enabling type-safe transformations through Rust's Into trait and eliminating boilerplate conversion code across runtime configurations.
My commitment to Polkadot operates on two equally vital fronts: Technical Contibutions and knowledge dissemination/sharing. Through streaming sessions, what began as a private study group is now adapted as part of the Polkadot Africa Initiative as the "Runtime Developer Guide" and "Runtime Development Guide" focucing on both aiding developers in untilizing the Polkadot stack and keeping up to date with recent developments respectively. This has translated in code contributions and increased developer activity in the region, here are some contributions over this reporting period: Psykyodai implemented the BlockNumberProvider for PureCreated Events to address UX concerns raised by Valentun/Nova Wallet; Runcomet created genesis dev accounts while rainb0w-pr0mise developed the Utility Call Fallback; and Nathy-bajo enhanced the Proxy pallet with view functions for runtime-specific type configuration - all demonstrating the growing technical capability.
I addressed a critical accounting oversight in pallet-balances where essential events were missing, impacting systems that depend on balance update tracking. Two key gaps were identified and rectified: First, the fungible trait implementation for Hold/Release operations had omitted event emissions when balances were placed on hold or released. Second, Burn/Mint events were not being published when Credit/Debt fungible types were dropped, despite total issuance being adjusted.
Helped in creating comprehensive documentation that demystifies on-chain processes—from salary cycle management to rank approval workflows—through detailed visual guides and technical specifications for the fellowship dashboard. Documenting core parameters like the promotion/demotion timelines while developing step-by-step interaction guides for key functions including evidence submission and payout period.
During this period I also spearheaded the implementation of the Ambassador Fellowship's new technical specification. This involved aligning the fellowship's operational requirements with Substrate's runtime constraints.
Enabling permissionless onboarding at Rank 0 through InductionDeposit, which required reconfiguring both pallet-core-fellowship and pallet-ranked-fellowship and ensuring comprehensive benchmark coverage.
Although this configuration might not be used in the runtime, I count this as readiness to address the needs of the ecosystem.
This period marks my evolution from executing isolated fixes to owning critical protocol subsystems. Where I once resolved specific issues. Advancement to Rank II would accelerate this trajectory by enabling deeper protocol ownership and serving as primary on-call maintainer for components I've built.
I stand ready to uphold Rank II's mandate: merging protocol expertise with ecosystem stewardship to make Polkadot more accessible and resilient.
| Ranks | Activity thresholds | Agreement thresholds | Member's voting activities | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | 90% | N/A | N/A | No Rank-I votes this year; counts as 100 % activity. |
| II | 80% | N/A | ||
| III | 70% | 100% | ||
| IV | 60% | 90% | ||
| V | 50% | 80% | ||
| VI | 40% | 70% |
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