Heya, friendly Kusama Council Member JAM here!

As I did on Kusama I want to make it clear what interests I intend to represent and what direction I want to help the network develop in if/when I am a member of Council. My intention for how I want to participate on Polkadot Council is significantly different than what I am trying to do in Kusama, so I wanted to share that here.

My primary objective is to attempt to broaden what I see as an overly narrow view of what "Web3" means to our community - something that largely seems to mean "technology one can use to build a cryptocurrency, and occasionally IPFS" - to something more inclusive of the broader dweb space - including technologies like SSB, Hypercore, Aether, things like meshnet tech, CRDTs, and other things that don't expose a shared global state. I strongly believe that Polkadot in particular will make it possible for there to be a middle ground or shared context between these technologies and the more cohesive blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem.

As part of that I want to explore what I can personally help effect in discovering ways to enable these technologies and their communities, which inherently do not subscribe to the incentive hypothesis cryptocurrencies embody*, to be more sustainable through the future interactions Polkadot will enable.

I've been trying to put my code where my mouth is with DatDot - a W3F Grant-funded** project intended to allow substrate chains to incentivise the hosting of Dat/Hypercore feeds - but it is very apparent that one project to integrate Polkadot with a single external ecosystem will not lead to the outcomes I wish to see - A Web3 that can act as a true commons, not only with an objective and persistent worldview provided by Polkadot and it's network of secured parachains, but also one that enables subjectivity, ephemeral content, and does not require people to be constantly connected and online.

Ultimately, the goal of my efforts, similarly to on Kusama, is to encourage real change through technology, and to help ensure that this (systemic) change is one that does away with hierarchy, instead of just replacing one hierarchy with another.

*I had initially intended to gather a small group of individuals who shared my values on this topic and collaborate on setting up a consortium/multisig as a council member - unfortunately it seems pretty clear that this will be an uphill battle on both the fronts of finding support and building acceptable models of sustainability, and convincing people that formalized governance systems do not always devolve into authoritarian plutocracies - this is something I hope I can help combat in the long term as well, but I will be fighting that particular fight more on Kusama than here :)

**I have not personally, nor do I ever intend to, receive any of the grant funding intended for this project - so far the team behind this has spent all of their budget on contracting domain experts (indirectly supporting their other work within their ecosystems). This is obviously not a sustainable model for funding an ecosystem, and is one of the things I intend to try to address.