The Office of Inspector Generals (OIG) is an essential part of the WAX Governance. Their primary job is to be an overseer of all the WAX Guilds reaping rewards from the WAX Blockchain. What happens in many POS and DPOS blockchains is that the teams validating the blockchain are doing the bare minimum of work, to maximize profit. What the OIGs are doing is to validate their metrics and contribution to the WAX Ecosystem to make sure they are not doing a bare minimum, but doing as much as they can to provide value to the WAX users. This is a huge benefit, as the guilds on WAX are highly capable to create DAPPs, Services, Marketing and Content that are of high quality and factual correct.
If we look at the EOS Blockchain, whos governance system also rely on DPOS, many of the paid teams are not putting in a huge effort in adding value back to the ecosystem, rather they sell their rewards to the highest bidder to maximize profit for voters and themselves.
On WAX, instead of selling their rewards, they are using that to build products to provide value and usecase for the WAX users. This is by far a superior model which has proven itself over and over again over the previous years. For this to work, the Office of Inspector generals need to understand all aspects of the WAX Guild operations, as well as what the users actually want. Which so far, they have done an amazing job. Some of the guild products are (Anyobservation content, like this academy), Atomicassets, Atomichub, Simpleassets, Simplemarket, Alienworlds, Bloks, Anchor wallet, Hyperion, tokenhead, nfthive, public endpoints and much much more.
How the Office of Inspector generals work
Each person in the OIG has been elected by the WAXP tokenholders. Every 6 months there is a new election to give anyone a chance to replace one of the current elected Inspector Generals for the coming 18 months. That means that if you get elected, you got a job equal to a fulltime position that currently pays 75,000 WAXP per month. That is a big chunk of money, and that is because this job is highly important and require a persons full dedication and motivation to stay ontop of all the guilds, their projects and work. Being an Inspector General is not something to take lightly, as they have a lot of responsability.
Each month they need to review all technical aspects of all the guilds, to help with this, they are also building internal tools to streamline and make it more efficient, something some of the guilds also have assisted with. They also need to constantly review the guidelines and requirements of guilds to match the needs of the community and the growing ecosystem, such as maintaining a high quality of Block Production, reliable API and peering infrastructure as well as build products the community actually needs.
This process, rating guilds, can sometimes result in different opinions and heated discussions. This is because each guild rely on a good review to keep their income afloat to pay for expenses, and most teams are highly proud of their work and deem it as something highly valuable to the ecosystem. This can be toolings for infrastructure, or consumer applications. And if the OIG review your product as of lower importance than you think, this can in return result in dissapointment, frustration and a lot of angry messages.
Why I even mention that here, is that in case you ever think of applying for one of the positions of Inspector Generals, you need to understand that the pay you get is not for sitting and doing nothing, but there will be a lot of responsibility, deadlines and discussions to deliver upon.
The OIG Election
You can follow the election process over at https://oig.wax.io, each election starts with a nomination phase, where you can nominate someone you deem as a great candidate for the office. When all the nominations are in, the voting stage starts, where anyone that got staked WAXP. As the position that is elected is highly important for the health of the WAX ecosystem, this is one of the times your activity is appreciated and reqiured. When the voting phase is over, the newly elected IG will start to get introduced into the process of the OIG, and start their job.
Here is an about text taken from the oig website
The Office of Inspector General (OIG)
The OIG is a watchdog agency for the WAX network staffed by a committee of 3 elected inspector generals (IGs) who publish a rating report ranking the Guilds on a monthly basis.
How is this ranking report relevant?
The ratings can be used by WAX token holders to make voting decisions. The aggregated WAX votes determine the rank of Guilds in the block production rotation. The top 21 ranked Guilds are the "active" block producers, rank 22 and higher Guilds that are passing minimum requirements are "standby."
Our mission
Evaluate WAX Guilds using an evolving heuristic. The OIG determines which service providers are best suited to operate the network based on competence, value add, and other metrics.
Responsibilities
Among the responsibilities of the OIG is overseeing and ensuring the continued evolution of the evaluations framework to improve Guild rating accuracy, identify and remove operational inefficiencies, and promote healthy competition among Guilds.
What skills and interests should you have to apply for the OIG?
Firstly, this might change overtime, we are still at a startup stage, and a lot of the tools required to do this job more efficient are not yet built. With that said, not everyone in the OIG need to have coding skills or experience, although that is something that gives you an edge and is needed inside the team. Now the skillset and traits I mention below are not an official list, neither is it any complete or full list. It is mearly here to help you get an idea of what type of person you need to be to do this job, some tasks can be learnt along the way, so don't be to frighten. But if you lack many of the core features, you are probably not the right person for the job.
What you need to be comfortable with and have the skills of:
- Github - All guild entries are on github.
- Voicing your opinion - You need to have a strong character to be in the OIG and not afraid of lifting your thoughts in text and voice if it goes against other people.
- Reviewing code - Now, you don't need to check for bugs, but you need to be able to understand the submitted work from guilds and if that is good.
- Deep knowledge about tech - The most important task of guilds are maintaining high quality infrastructure, and you as an IG have to understand how to review teams tech properly.
- Interest in governance - A lot of your job is meetings and discussions in regards to governance of the WAX Blockchain.
- Interest in NFTs - WAX is an NFT Blockchain, without an interest in NFTs, you will have a hard time to understand what is important from a user perspective.
- Dealing with critique - At times, guilds and community members will voice their opinions about the work and requirements put forth by the IGs, you will have to be able to see this with an open mind and not feel attacked.
- English - You need to be highly fluent in English
Bonus aspects:
- EOSIO knowledge - You as an IG need to understand the ins and out of how to interact with EOSIO, and if you also know how to operate nodes for EOSIO, you will be in a better position to review the guilds.
- Programmer - The more tech and programming you know, the easier the job will be for you.
- System Administrator - A lof of the technical aspects is in relation to system administration, for you to follow the discussions and review this, you will benefit greatly of a deep knowledge.
Summary
The Office of Inspector Generals is one of the foundational pillars of a healthy WAX Ecosystem. Each Inspector General is elected by the token holders and their term is running for 18 months at a time, with a new election every 6 months for the ability to change one of the IGs. This is a paid position by WAX and is to be seen as fulltime employment to the Blockchain.