Hi, my name’s Alex Lorimer. I’m an experienced full-stack Web2 developer who discovered the IC within the last year. I’d like to formally register my application as a Subnet Management proposal reviewer. I’m a member of Synapse and CodeGov, and also regularly review TAGGR releases (when I have the time).
This activity is evident by checking any one of the IC-OS releases over the last few months. My activity is also evident on TAGGR, and has involved identifying a Severity 1 bug among other contributions.
Why I’m Applying As An Individual
I’m applying for this topic as an individual reviewer (while I’ll still be participating in IC-OS election propopsal reviews as part of CodeGov, as @wpb mentioned above). My motivation for applying as an individual is that I believe the funded time allocation for Subnet Management is too small to be able to make as significant an impact as I’d like (when split multiple ways).
Subnet Management is an important topic that I believe currently suffers from a lack of easily accessible contextual information during the voting process. If I’m selected as a reviewer I’ll endeavour to make this job easier by building reporting tools that quickly highlight details that may not otherwise have been obvious. The long-term idea would be to make these tools publicly accessible (once refined) for the sake of greater governance decentralisation. Ideas that I’m toying with are…
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Visualise added/removed nodes (e.g. fuqsr) and flag up scenarios that would result in reduced decentralisation (due to an over-represented country, node provider and/or data centre) and automatically verify the proposed nodes are currently unassigned.
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Display version deployments and config updates over time using a Gantt chart format, alongside timeseries data (subnet performance metrics and config values) in order to more easily verify claims made in proposal summaries, and spot potential for unintended consequences based on how other subnets have behaved.
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Visually cluster subnets with similar config, illustrating when a config update proposal would cause a subnet to diverge and/or converge with another cluster of subnets.
I believe convenient visibility of the above sorts of information is half the picture. The other half requires a reviewer to keep up-to-date with IC-OS changes (something which I believe puts CodeGov in a very strong position for Subnet Management - few others have put themselves forward for the IC-OS topic). Note that recent downtime events resulted from unintended interactions between IC-OS changes and subnet config (e.g. System (II), System (NNS)). Oversight of both in unison is therefore invaluable.
Anyone who’s followed my comments on IC-OS releases will know that I think proposal summaries are extremely important, and I reject proposals where these are inaccurate (as a matter of principle). I plan to carry this conviction into Subnet Management proposals. My belief is that the role of a reviewer isn’t just to provide a neuron to be followed, but also to facilitate others in making up their own mind. I expect many in the community will take proposal summaries at face value. There’s nothing wrong with that so long as others in the community take it upon themselves to validate the accuracy of these summaries, and reject when they are wrong or misleading.
Thanks for your time everyone! I’d also like to say that I’m super excited to see such a turn out for these grants. I’m looking forward to seeing more governance activity on this forum for technical topics 
Whatever the outcome regarding the grants, I’ll be happy.
I’ve recently been creating dedicated Subnet Management topics for each subnet on this forum, and I invite other Subnet Management candidates to engage in discussion on these and share your insights as new proposals emerge 
(and create new topics if one doesn’t already exist for the relevant subnet). Good luck everyone!