In the last days of the week of events in Rio (October 17 & 18), the unconference took place.
This year, something never done before in an EOS Conference was attempted: a 2-day Unconference. Teams from 20+ countries attended the event.
The goal of opening 2 days in the agenda for the Unconference was to have enough space to let ideas breathe and mature. That way, we hoped to reach a minimum consensus that could be turned into actions moving forward.
A first day was discussion day, to go deep in the reflection of perceived issues on the network, trying to validate them and get to the core of each. The second day was dedicated to building solutions for those issues.
The general dynamic was one of small groups discussion that was summarized and presented to the larger group. All presentations were filmed and are now made available and the maturing of concepts and its alternatives.
What is an Unconference?
An unconference is a conference with no predetermined topics to be discussed. It is conducted in 4 stages:
Stage 1 — Apply topics
Participants wrote the topics they think are important to be discussed during the unconference. Each participant could write as many topics as he/she wishes.
Stage 2 — Divide topics per category
Topics were divided into groups according to which category they fit best. Duplicate topics were removed.
We divided the categories as: governance 2.0, legal & regulations, tech issues, future features, usability for stakeholders and existential crisis.
Stage 3 — Vote for topics
Each participant gained 5 stickers to vote on the topics of their preference. They could vote as they see fit, 5 votes all in one topic, 1 vote per topic, however they thought was best.
Stage 4 — Discuss the Most voted topics and try to reach solutions!
The most voted topics in each category were picked and discussed.
In this case, each category had 3 topics. Each group had 30-minutes sessions to discuss a topic. Each topic had a group leader that took notes and that had 5 minutes to present what was discussed to everyone later.
People could move freely from one topic to another that interested them most.
Day 1 — Discussion Day
The first day was dedicated to discussing all the pressing topics happening on the EOSIO ecosystem and EOS mainnet. It was a day to lay down problems and propose solutions following the unconference model.
To all the readers, please note that the network congestion issues weren’t present at the time at the event (October 17 & 18). We believe this would have been the most pressing topic if the unconference had happened now.
Disclaimer: none of the videos is solely the opinion of the group leader. The leader is merely presenting what was discussed in the group.
Governance Track
‣ Session 1 — DAC/DAO EOS Foundation
Leader: Luke Stokes — eosDAC
Following on the topic of the previous day, the participants in the group went more in-depth into discussing the possible creation of the EOS Foundation.
The group defined the EOS Foundation as “a non-profit built
into the blockchain itself, that serves the EOS community through facilitating
code, capital and connections and by acting as an advocate for EOS to the
outside world”.
‣ Session 2 — Discussing Dan’s and EOS NY Proposal
Leader: Luke Stokes — eosDAC
On October 14, Daniel Larimer released a governance proposal. On the same day, EOS New York also released a different governance proposal. The events at Rio were the first opportunity the community had to discuss these proposals face to face.
The group discussed the pros and cons of the proposals.
‣ Session 3 — EOS Governance Fireside Chat
Leader: Luke Stokes — eosDAC
The last session of the governance track ended up being a very organic conversation between participants in the room.
Luke summarized the conversation, which escalated from exchanges to Dan’s proposal and ownership concerns.
Existential Crisis Track
‣ Session 1 — Who is Building the EOS Community?
Leader: Yves la Rose — EOS Nation
Who is the EOSIO community? BPs, token holders, Block One, EOS VC
exchanges, dapps, enterprises, proxies… More than that, the group defined the EOSIO community as “no matter how big or small their contribution, it’s really anyone who has an interest in EOSIO and they dedicate any kind of resource”.
After defining that concept, the discussion shifted towards “What kind of value can we bring to the EOSIO community?”.
‣ Session 2 — WPS & Retaining Talent
Leader: Yves la Rose — EOS Nation
This was another hot topic throughout all the week of events in Rio. The discussion revolved around how to retain talent on the EOS mainnet and what are the challenges of modeling a WPS (Worker Proposal System) 2.0 for EOS mainnet.
Technology Track
‣ Session 1 — Full History Nodes
Leader: Sergii Vasylchuk — Attic Lab
Sergii presented the discussion in his group about the current problem of Full History on the EOS mainnet.
Currently, the v1 history from Block.one is deprecated, and it became too complicated and expensive to run a full history node.
Some solutions are being built, for example, dfuse paid solution, Hyperion by EOS Rio, and a Cassandra solution by Attic Lab. However, the problem new developers face when they arrive in the EOS ecosystem is the lack of documentation and standards. Also, there is no way to prove the integrity of the history data.
The group discussed some solutions for this:
- V2 History Standard
- Global API Load Balancer
- a Geo-distributed DNS
‣ Session 2 —Inter Blockchain Communication
Leader: Michael Yeates — eosDAC
What are the real use cases for inter blockchain communication right now?
Is it a pressing issue on the EOS network?
This discussing group concluded that, although IBC is a pretty cool concept and feature, it’s not a pressing issue right now. The group is sure IBC will evolve; it may be some time before we start to see the use cases for it!
‣ Session 3 — Issues with Network Peering
Leader: Igor Lins e Silva — EOS Rio
This group discussed the issues caused by inadequate network peering and the producers’ schedule currently being in alphabetical order.
They worked on proposing a solution that involved collaboration between producers’ nodes that would share their peering latency data to an opt-in contract. This would allow visualization tools to be built around it and an optimized peering strategy to be defined.
Dapps & Usability Track
‣ Session 1 — DeFi (Decentralized Finance) on EOSIO
Leaders: Hernan Arber (Yolo) & Alex Melikhov (Equilibrium)
Alex gave an overview of what was discussed, about how is the DeFi space nowadays, and why is it important to bring more projects like this to EOSIO as EOS doesn’t have many consolidated apps in this area yet.
Then, Hernan explained a cool dapp idea example the group reached, the Decentralized Arbitrage Bot (DAB).
‣ Session 2 — Onboarding & Training Developers
Leaders: Edgar (EOS Costa Rica) & Carter Feldman (EOS Rapid)
The group mapped out what is being done today for developers, like documentation, educational tools, events, and also hackathons. Another aspect that was discussed was funding for developers, falling into the EOS Foundation or WPS topic. Also, the group saw the need for more IDEs for compiling and deploying smart contracts on the go, like Remix on Ethereum.
‣ Session 3 — EOS User Resource Fund
Leader: Hernan Arber — Yolo
After discussing CPU and resource shortage on EOS mainnet, the group came up with a fresh idea of the Developer Resource Pool (DRP). The DRP would be a DAO making decisions on various parameters and stages to allocate network resources for developers. The conversation revolved around questions like: where does the funding come from? Which projects would get the funding? How much funding is allocated? In which stages?
The network congestion issues weren’t present at the time at the event (October 17 & 18), but this was a nice insight that could be applicabble even now.
Day 2 — Building Day
People were encouraged to sleep on the ideas that were discussed on the first day and to arrive on the next day with the solution they wanted to hands-on build with a working group.
Governance Track
‣ Working Group: EOS Foundation
Luke was by himself hoping to work on the EOS Foundation and was surprised when a group of people joined him! Together, they started to work on specifics about the EOS Foundation concept and how to get the whole community involved!
‣ Working group: EOS DRP
The conclusions about the EOS DRP can be seen at the end of the video above. The working group of the EOS Developer Resources Pool decided that it would be interesting if the EOS DRP was launched as a campaign for a steward of the EOS Foundation.
Existential Crisis Track
‣ Working Group: WPS (Worker Proposal System)
This working group started modeling the WPS 2.0 proposal suited to the specifics of the EOS mainnet.
Technology Track
‣ Working group: Peering System
Michael and the group worked on the way to measure the latency between nodes to create a better peering network.
Dapps & Usability Track
‣ Working Group: IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
This group did work on an IDE that Carter is developing and showed a live demo at the presentation!
‣ Working Group: EOS DAB
Alex gave us a quick overview of what his group envisions for EOS DAB.
We hope this recap was enlightening about the events that happened in Rio and its discussions. An unconference is a productive environment for thinking outside the box, and we hope some of the ideas that came up here will go forward and develop further! Even if they don’t go ahead, we hope they will spark debate and flourish a path of new ideas that may be important solutions in the future.
Thank you to our awesome co-host EOS Argentina and again, thank you to our amazing sponsors, without their help none of this would have been possible: platinum sponsor EOS Nation, gold sponsors Boscore and NODE ONE, silver sponsors EOS Cannon and eosDAC!
Also, props to our supporters EOS Detroit, Equilibrium_EOSDT, EOS Venezuela and EOS Costa Rica.
