Hi folks,
I’m Aaron Boyd, founder of atalma.io, developer and maintainer of Vido, and long-term Celo community member and forum lurker.
What roles have I had in the Celo ecosystem?
- 2019 - current: The Great Celo Stake Off participant which started my from-genesis validating journey, culminating in an independent validator company in Switzerland in 2022 called Atalma AG which operates on Celo, Nym, Namada, Ethereum, and a whole bunch of testnets and other experiments.
- 2020 - A few minor contributions to cLabs as software engineer / contractor
- 2020 - current: Developer and maintainer of the Vido visualization and monitoring tool for Celo validators, now expanding to be multi-protocol
- 2021 - current: One of the small group of validators operating the ODIS protocol for phone number privacy utilized initially by Valora and possibly MiniPay in the future
- 2022 - current: One of three directors and founder of Prezenti - a grants body fully funded by Celo governance / Celo Community Fund as the spiritual successor to the Celo Community Fund managed by @Patrick, @deepak and @Dee. Currently we have granted nearly $1M to grassroots builders and projects in the ecosystem.
- 2024 - current: Advisory steward of the CeloPG group managing larger scale budget management and community disbursement from the Celo treasury
What can you expect from my governance decisions?
My decisions will be entirely my own as a Celo community member, although I may be more or less informed on the context depending on the activities in any of the roles I have.
Generally, I will lean positively towards:
- Clearly articulated, time-bound, deliverable-oriented technical outcomes
- Proposals that push development forward in either Celo as the leading EVM-compatible stablecoin destination, that enhance Celo’s standing in the L2 and Optimism ecosystem
- Projects that push adoption in leapfrog nations that are utilizing MiniPay and have a credible plan towards self-sufficiency
- Technical proposals from proven contributors who can credibly deliver something of value to the protocol in infrastructure or development
- Technical upgrades stewarded by cLabs related to governance parameters or other protocol-level changes that are generally trusted to be safe and required
- Projects that are technically composable with the EVM community and additive to existing Celo features, projects, and concepts
- Projects that are open-source
Generally, I will lean negatively towards:
- Extremely high funding requests with open-ended terms
- Anything tied to metrics like social content
- DAO-looting or vesting backdoors for established entities
- Broadly off-chain and non-technical proposals without clear deliverable outcomes
- Hyper-local DAO creation for activities that can conceivably be managed under existing entities or programs
- Pay-to-play schemes or aggressive unbound terms from “too big to fail” corporate entities
- Funding of for-profit sub-entities bootstrapped by community funds
- Pure charities with no financial sustainability plan
- Vibes / good-times / party-DAOs
- DAOs that are not DAOs in any way (I prefer creating a time-bound working group for a particular outcome)
- Narrative chasing of any sort: NFTs, points, memes, etc, unless they clearly fulfill other criteria, have credible impact, and solve a problem in a new way that hasn’t been available in the market or on Celo before
- Closed-source projects that are dependent on the operator’s goodwill and support in perpetuity
Obviously there may be exceptions in either direction but I’ll aim to comment on every proposal with my reasoning if it’s a tough decision or potentially controversial. I probably have a reputation as a curmudgeon in the forum and I guess that might continue. 
Thanks for any support and I’ll do my best to steer the next chapter of Celo’s journey.