Hey there, I'm quite thrilled to vouch for anyone interested in being a validator.

However, the sheer magnitude of the operations and efforts required to restore the network in the last three weeks and observing the behavior of a few passive validators and many incredible active validators has changed my perspective on what is required and reasonable to become a validator.

# I believe a validator has two primary roles
- to be a great infra provider and
- to govern and be actively involved and contribute to the project.

## Infra provider
- The least expectation is always to be attentive to your nodes and keep them healthy and updated with the consensus and latest releases and configurations.
- Your nodes should have minimal hardware requirements: 8 cores, 16 GB RAM, and 300 GB disk space.
- Two nodes: each validator node should have a dedicated VFN server. We all love a fast consensus, right?
- We need to monitor and see how the network behaves at different moments and how the validator nodes are performing. Please set up Prometheus metric collector on your nodes and provide your node addresses to `nourspace#6652` on Discord. We have tutorials for it here: <https://hackmd.io/9dxv7ZwYS1yOmBVSjSV2wg>
- Any infrastructures need active maintenance and presence in the community to coordinate that. Anything else will lead to issues such as network slowdown or, worse, network halts. So please keep that in mind and respond to validator calls on Discord quickly.
- Medium levels of knowledge with working with a Linux machine and terminal are all I care about as a network operator. The rest, we can help you out as long as you have enough patience and show enthusiasm to learn and educate yourself.
- More than one validator node is simply Sybil activity in my opinion and should be disclosed to the community.

## Governance, active involvement in the community, and contribution:
- To govern: I expect you to be actively involved in the community. Many people can provide infra and have DevOps skills, but only a few clearly show their commitment to the project by actively participating in the community. Promises of work in the future are off-putting and a flag. I even noticed occasions where a candidate is only active for one week to gain trust, and when s/he gets in the set, they disappear and never respond back anymore. I strongly prefer to surround myself and the community I am in with people who have a self of agency and are proactive by nature. Not waiting for commands or directions but can lead themselves, find where help and improvement are needed, and attend to it while being respectful to others contributions. So, be genuinely active and care for the project.
- Joining working group meetings consistently and providing feedback is a great place to dive into the project and get recognition.