Ethereum to Further Decentralize All Core Devs Governance with “Cat Herders” Initiative
On January 21, 2018, independent Ethereum developer Lane Rettig announced that the open source project is looking to improve decentralization in its management and governance mechanism.
The Ethereum team takes decentralization very seriously and as such it has turned this into one of its main goals for 2019. The team believes governance is equally important and labeled these two areas for improvement while focusing on the blockchain’s ecosystem development.
Allowing the Community to Contribute
A few years ago, the management of the Ethereum project was fairly simple and capable of being conducted by three or four core developers. These days, this has changed dramatically as the number of contributors has grown exponentially. Currently, there are at least ten teams taking part on independent implementations (including both Ethereum 1.x and Ethereum 2.0) while the coordination calls between these contributor teams have increased to include up to 50 people.
In the past, all the stakeholders participating in Ethereum governance were affiliated with the Ethereum Foundation but over time, the number of stakeholders has drastically increased and now many of the new stakeholders are not affiliated with the Foundation.
The decision to further enhance decentralization on the all core devs governance mechanism was held during a series of conversations around DevCon IV in Prague. The team also made three important announcements about Ethereum project management going forward.
As an experiment, the Ethereum team is joining forces with Gitcoin to establish an ongoing grant to fund project management. For now, the target funding is 250 DAI per month and is predicted to be used to pay for small tasks such as taking meeting notes, editing those notes, etc. The funds will be 100 percent transparent and auditable and if the experiment is successful, the team says it will increase the funding amount over time.
The team is trying to build the initiative without the help of the Foundation as it finds that it’s critical to have access to multiple funding streams to further solidify the ecosystem.
Afri Schoedon will be taking part in the upgrade coordination for the Ethereum 1.x workstream. Afri is a developer at Parity but he has a deep understanding of Ethereum and project management, so he will be dedicating his own time to bring a new breath of fresh air to the team.
The team is bringing together a group of experienced project managers to help out on an ongoing basis. The group is named “Cat Herders” and aims to ease the inter-team communication among contributors and to speed up the upgrade preparation process. This will enable network upgrades to be made more often, leading to a more consistent stream of improvements to the protocol.
Anyone can subscribe to the grant and contribute to the project, or make a one-off donation to the multisig address (Hudson Jameson, Afri, and Lane are the current keyholders) here.
