[ANN][KMD][dPoW] Komodo - An Open, Composable Smart Chain Platform, Secured by B

Is the voting based on regions this time, are there still going to be 16 NN in each region?

I can see a scenario where a candidate gets enough VOTES to be in the top 30 in the election, but they are in a sort after region with many candidates, and they don't win one of the available places to make up the 16 from their region. What would happen in that situation? Would they get option to move to another region?

We wont be enforcing it directly, but the limit of one node per region will prevent getting too imbalanced. Also, unlike last year where there were no pre-existing notaries and it wouldnt have been good to have them all clustered, this year half the notaries are in place already and pretty spread out, so we will let the elections decide where exactly the nodes end up

That makes sense, good decision! If an imbalance in the regions does occur you could always give a slight advantage to candidates running in that region next election to compensate, get more high quality candidates running in that region.

Yes, and if anything this way the geographic distribution will likely more correlate to the userbase locations.

Of course if we end up without any nodes in a region where there should be, we will fix that in the following election.

By only electing for the bottom half, we preserve the top half each year and it provides the stability to the notarizations, while still allowing anybody with skills to get a notary node spot. There is no need to have a large stake, or lots of mining hardware or even lots of money. We need notary operators that can manage the servers, using unix command line, making docker images, bash scripts, or are even full stack devs and all the technical work that goes into running a network.

I want to discourage votes for candidates without a solid technical background as they wont be able to help at all if there are technical issues and that is the role of a notary operator.

So assuming that a candidate has sufficient technical skills, ie. would you ask them to help you out with a shell script that isnt quite working right, the the secondary factors would serve as a tie break for your VOTE2018

Keep in mind some candidates already have one (or more) in the top half and already are notary operators. Many are also KMD team members. These can be viewed as either an advantage or a disadvantage, there is no agreement internally on which it is. So we are taking the position of disclosing all such pre-existing relationships and letting the voters decide what is and isnt important

geopreference: it turns out that there is a simple way to balance the geo-regions. basically just go down the richlist until you find a candidate in that region. So by picking an unpopular region, it might give an advantage

Im a little confused about how many nodes are up for election in any given region