Adam Rusch - Candidate for Intersect Board Member

Governance Member Based Organisation (MBO)
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Dear #Cardano Community, I’m very pleased to be running for a Board Member seat at @IntersectMBO as an individual member! I hope to make my case over the next couple weeks and earn your vote.

Here is my voter profile:
https://committees.docs.intersectmbo.org/v/intersect-elections-2024/board-elections/candidates-for-membership-board-seat-election/adam-rusch-board

I have been following Cardano since 2017 and got active in the community after finishing my PhD in 2019. For my day job, I am a Teaching Assistant Professor of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with a teaching and research focus on the ways people use technology and information to collaborate and build in online communities.

Blockchain Governance has been a passion of mine ever since I realized its potential to empower participants to have real influence over the networks that they participate in. I got practical experience on Cardano working with developers in @ADAOcommunity and @SummonPlatform to design and test some of the earliest community governance tooling. I started @IRI_Blockchain, a non-profit organization, with my friend @MatthewPlomin to advance blockchain network social research. I’ve also worked to educate traditional governments about Blockchain issues with my friends at @awen_online with educational programming at @crypto_rnc and @crypto_dnc!

I participated in the CIP-1694 Workshop in Longmont, which kicked off the community review process. I hosted a regional workshop in Chicago and an Online workshop to educate the community and gather feedback for the synthesis Workshop in Edinburgh. I became an early DRep on the Sancho Governance TestNet and participated in the stress-test network attack devised by Mike Hornan (@Hornan7) among other things.

I signed up to be an individual member of Intersect when the MBO launched because I wanted to help ensure the decentralization of Cardano. While the genesis entities did a great job setting up checks and balances between their organizations and the Stake Pool Operators, we will need new institutions to ensure Voltaire governance can achieve its design philosophy. Intersect must serve as a coalition of community members who provide the support layer of research and education on governance issues with implementation of Cardano technology according to the on-chain votes of Ada holders! Within Intersect I have been a part of the Civics Committee, led the Governance Parameters Working Group of the Parameters Committee, and been part of the Community Advisory Board which gave recommendations to the Governing Board from the community perspective. I have always sought to keep my perspective grounded in the community and relay the concerns that I see coming from individuals building individual projects not affiliated with the network founders.

At the same time, I also understand the burden that must be carried by institutional leaders. I’ve been involved with several non-profit organizations that maintained 501(c)3 status with the US Internal Revenue Service, including service as the Chairman of my collegiate fraternity’s Educational Foundation. I serve on the Zoning Board of Appeals for my city, which requires hearing citizen requests for zoning variances and determining whether those can be granted based upon city law and staff findings of the case at hand.

Intersect MBO is an organization by and for the members of the Cardano community. I have been very proud to be involved for the past year and I hope that you will trust me to be your representative on the board going forward!

If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me here (I will try to keep up with this thread!) or via my X Profile: https://x.com/AdamRusch/

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Good luck Adam!

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Good Luck Adam!
I think you are crypto expert.
If you have got a talent idea about crypto logic, I can help you in short time.
Best Regards.

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GM, Cardano Community!

I’ve had some of my friends in the space encourage me to write some more about my experiences in Blockchain tech and Cryptocurrencies to give a background on where I come from personally. I’ve always had an interest in technology and in the the ways that people form groups online to find friends, play games, and build things together - so becoming part of the Web3 world may have been inevitable for me.

My interest in Cardano started in late 2017 when a friend asked me to join him in researching cryptocurrency coins for investment purposes. This was a very volatile time in the market and he thought that we could profit from making the right trades. Luckily I put very little money into this speculation before the market crashed in early 2018.

But even though the market crashed, I saw something very interesting. A lot of people did not leave these projects. People still believed that Bitcoin was sound money. The Ethereum community kept designing applications. The Cardano community kept advancing ideas to connect the unconnected and bank the unbanked. It was in the “Bear Market” of 2018 and 2019 that I became a believer in Blockchain technology because people all over the world were willing to put so much time and energy into improving it.

During this time I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois writing my PhD Dissertation on Learning Technology. I joined the Blockchain Meetup Group at the University Research Park and found a great group of people to discuss ideas with. When I finished my PhD, I continued working for the University as an eLearning Specialist, training faculty members on how to teach with online tools and organizing the online courses for my unit in the University. When our campus shut down for a year during the Coronavirus pandemic, I helped shift almost all of our activities online and ran several academic conferences online in addition to facilitating online courses. This gave me an appreciation for how innovative people become when they need to use new technology to solve problems in a crisis.

By 2021 I felt very comfortable with the Cardano community, having read extensively about Cardano’s research, listened to Cardano podcasts, and engaged on various online forums. I decided to join Twitter so that I could learn more about Cardano projects. I was lucky enough to meet some great builders interested in DAOs. We started ADAO, which put the first Smart Contract DAO script on Cardano. We also started the Summon Platform which offers DAO management and Community Coordination tools.

It was around this time that I started my new job as a Teaching Assistant Professor of Information Sciences, with a teaching and research focus on the ways people use technology and information to collaborate and build in online communities. It was great to move into a role where I could embrace my new passion, moving beyond the legacy systems we currently use to organize classes at the university.

In 2023 I participated in the CIP-1694 Workshop in Longmont, which kicked off the community review process. I hosted a regional workshop in Chicago and an Online workshop to educate the community and gather feedback for the synthesis Workshop in Edinburgh. I became an early DRep on the Sancho Governance TestNet and participated in the stress-test network attack devised by Mike Hornan.

I signed up to be an individual member of Intersect when the MBO launched because I wanted to help ensure the decentralization of Cardano. While the genesis entities did a great job setting up checks and balances between their organizations and the Stake Pool Operators, we will need new institutions to ensure Voltaire governance can achieve its design philosophy. Intersect must serve as a coalition of community members who provide the support layer of research and education on governance issues with implementation of Cardano technology according to the on-chain votes of Ada holders!

Within Intersect I have been a part of the Civics Committee, led the Governance Parameters Working Group of the Parameters Committee, and been part of the Community Advisory Board which gave recommendations to the Governing Board from the community perspective. I have always sought to keep my perspective grounded in the community and relay the concerns that I see coming from individuals building individual projects not affiliated with the network founders.

At the same time, I also understand the burden that must be carried by institutional leaders. I’ve been involved with several organizations that maintained a 501(c)3 non-profit status with the US Internal Revenue Service, including service as the Chairman of my collegiate fraternity’s Educational Foundation. I serve on the Zoning Board of Appeals for my city, which requires hearing citizen requests for zoning variances and determining whether those can be granted based upon city law and staff findings of the case at hand. I have always considered community service to be important and want to continue my service to the Cardano community.

As a Board Member, I will do my very best to be a reliable public servant of Intersect MBO and serve all members of the Cardano Community. While I have a bias that comes from where I am situated, I’m always reaching out to friends and colleagues around the community to understand their perspective and see how I can work to make our global system inclusive of everyone.

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. I hope that you will give me consideration for the Intersect Board of Directors seat. If you are an Intersect member, please be sure to log in to “https://members.intersectmbo.org/” by October 20th, select “Voting” on the left, click “View details and vote” under “Board” to cast your vote. You will find me listed as Adam Rusch. If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to reach out, as I would like to hear from you!

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Congratulations Adam for your election in the board of intersect!

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