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# System prepended metadata

title: Case for Good Intention Evaluation

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# Case for Good Intention Evaluation

Cases for Good Intetions will be evaluated by a rotating comittee of Parity/W3f employees and assessed as objectively as possible based on some of the following criteria.  

## Criteria

### Self Stake Amount

Validators should have skin in the game in their operations in the form of stake that is self-bonded to their validator stash, ideally as close to the minimum amount as possible (10k DOTs).

Examples:
- How close validators are to 10k Minimum
- This doesn't need to be in main stash account at the time of evaluation, but validators may need to "prove" that they own the funds, and have the intention to move it to the stash. In this case the amounts should be in the process of unbonding

### Previous Validator Experiences

The more experience running validator nodes and other infrastructure on substrate based chains, the better.

Examples:
- How long validators have been in the Kusama 1KV Programme
- How long validators have been on Kusama / Polkadot
- Participated in previous testnets (POC-2, POC-3, POC-4, Alexander, Westend, etc)

### Ecosystem Contributions

Validators will be assessed on their contributions to the ecosystem. These contributions and engagement in the community show strong support for the newtork and are a factors by which validators often attract more nominators. 

Examples:
- Contributions in the ecosystem:
    - Open source software contributions relating to the ecosystem
    - Tutorials / Wiki Contributions / Educational content
    - Polkadot / Substrate codebase contributions, issues, or PRs
    - Ambassadors
    - Active in Community
    - Active Participation in on-chain and off-chain Governance

### Validator Setup

Validators' infrastructure setups will be assessed based on how they plan to avoid slashing, how closely they follow recommendations, how well thought out their operational strategies are, and how much they contribute to decentralizing the network.

Examples:  
- Strategies to avoid slashing
- Contributions to decentralization
    - Custom hardware / local datacenters
    - Underepresented cloud providers
    - Underepresented Regions
- Monitoring / Observability practices
- Machine Types / OS / Software used
- Security Policies
    - Key Handling
    - Firewalls / Proxies / Server hardening
- Outline runbooks
    - On-call practices
    - Responding to alerts
    - Key rotation
    - Upgrading Client versions
    - Moving Servers
    - Restoring DB snapshots
    - Backing up DB snapshots

### Strategy for Attracting Nominators

Validators should have a strategy for attracting nominations outside of the thousand validators programme. This should ultimately entail how they plan to be self-sufficient in the future.

Examples:
- Dedicated Validator Website
- Dedicated communications channels (telegram, discord, matrix, etc)
- Competitive commission
- Claiming rewards in a timely manner