An Introduction to EOS Nottingham Block Producer Candidate

Please find below copy of our Introduction posted on
https://forums.eosgo.io/discussion/11/introduce-yourself-block-producer-template

We hope to be added to the Block Producer update published today, or next week.

Hello all EOSians!

Here is my introduction.

I am Roger Davies of Advanta Productions Limited, my team and I are operating under the official Block Producer candidate name "EOS Nottingham". Ultimately we intend to run the BP as a stand alone business but to begin with it will be a trading style of my existing company Advanta.
https://www.facebook.com/advantaproductions

My background in computing began with the Sinclair ZX80 and I just love to make computers do things! My Internet career started properly in 1995 with Xara Networks which supplied the first guaranteed bandwidth to Internet Service Providers and large corporates. In this role I was fortunate to be mentored by some very talented people, such as Alex Bligh who was a founder member of the LINX and later went on to become Nominet Chairman. Since 2004 I have run my own Internet solutions company and have watched the rise of blockchain and specifically EOS, with great fascination. I believe that EOS is the platform on which the rest of the world is going to be built! Clearly the current political and financial structures are failing us and it is my intention for the EOS platform to be the catalyst for the change the planet needs. To that end I am running as BP candidate.

As per my recent steemit post (@bodget) we are based in Nottingham, as are our core team and most likely the chosen data centre.
https://steemit.com/eos/@bodget/eos-nottingham-block-producer-candidate-advanta-productions-limited-outline-hosting-announcement

As far as the hardware specs are concerned we're working to a mean of the specifications being posted by other block producers, and when a final agreed minimum specification is agreed amongst the community we will publish our finalised configuration in conjunction without our own specialists. We're in talks with several highly skilled professionals regarding this. Having deployed more servers and Internet solutions than most people have had hot dinners, the deployment and scaling of the BP node is simply another project we will launch in our usual professional manner. We can honestly say we are not computer scientists but we are skilled at running businesses and delivering and managing Internet solutions, day in, day out. We see this opportunity as yet another project we can successfully deliver and we have a long and distinguished track record of delivering Internet solutions on time and on budget, to real world customers.

My team and I will apply our traditional business values and project management skills to launching and managing a highly efficient and robust node for the EOS community. I am honored to have the opportunity to participate in this highly important world event.

Our community support initiatives include running the EOS Nottingham Meetups and generally spearheading the EOS movement in the UK midlands and as far beyond as we can reach!
https://www.meetup.com/Nottingham-EOS-AN-INTRODUCTION-Meetup/

What we're working on right now is
trying to liaise with the Block.One teams to understand the resources available to support our efforts (currently ZERO, except Telegram channels, it has to be said!)
Designing and deploying a testnet node to gather test data and start developing test dApps
Publishing our plans on Steemit and our website is a priority at the moment so as to keep our supporters informed
Development of our own EOS blockchain dApp: StockBlockchain
Integration of StockBlockchain into one of our live products: Travel Matrix
In addition to the above we're also developing a couple of non-Blockchain(gasp, shock, horror!) based webapps for Minerals Planning Permission solutions, an e-commerce website, a couple of WordPress websites, a Reseller Migration solution and of course looking after our existing customer base of regular website and email hosting accounts.
So basically we eat, sleep & breathe this stuff!

There are many unanswered questions at the moment but some of the ones we are looking to get answered include:

1. How many EOS tokens should a BP candidate realistically need to hold themselves?
2. How many EOS tokens will a BP candidate expect to have delegated to them in order to achieve enough votes to win a BP candidacy?
3. Who is going to be the first publisher of realtime information with regards the candidate race and their current standings?
4. If a BP misses their production slot because, say they are offline or their server is down, what happens after the failover kicks in? Are they out, or do they get chance to come back in?
5. What kind of revenue is a BP likely to make? (obviously we're all doing it for the love of it of course, but......)
6. Are there any publicly accessible dApps running on the test net?
7. Is there really a tool which converts Ethereum apps into EOS apps?
8. EOS and GDPR? (Like KYC & AML but different, becomes law on 25th May 2018)

So many questions!

Our approach is to continue working on all of the above unless we fail to achieve one of the 21 (+100 Backups) or get voted out. I'm all in.

Thank you for you reading please contact us via [email protected] if you would like to get involved, have more questions you would like us to get answered, or if you have answers to any of these questions!

Best regards

Roger Davies
EOS Nottingham