Grassroots magic: ETHMagicians Council of Paris
In July last year, ECF attended the Council of Berlin. We were really impressed with the quality of discussions, the people involved, and with the total openness to discuss both pressing topics in the Ethereum ecosystem and evaluating what we, as a community, needed to work on, in order to scale and walk towards mass adoption. You can read our report here.
After that great event, we started talks with the group, in order to ensure the sustainability of these face to face events. ETHMagicians work is mostly online, within their forum, and is aimed towards generating EIPs and discussing issues as the Ethereum roadmap, as well as being one of many interfaces between the developers and the community. However, these live events bring great value to the ecosystem, as we were able to see in Berlin. ECF decided to sponsor this initiative for their upcoming three events. Prague (October 2018) was our first one, where the magicians not only generated insightful discussions on EIP standards, education, UX, and more — but also hosted the ETH2 developers and researchers on a much-needed community Q&A session, which you can read about here.
Fast forward to March 4th, 2019: ETHMagicians keeps on running and new people come into the community with fresh ideas and in high spirits to participate more actively in the improvement of the ecosystem. The Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians was born in Paris in 2018, during EthCC, and had its first anniversary this past edition of EthCC (where our Executive Director, QJ Wang, revealed the future of ECF Network — slides here and video here).
A day before EthCC, the wizards got together at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers or CNAM — whose founding dates from 1794), for a new edition. The day kicked off with discussions on education, identity, and reputation.
During this edition, we noticed there was a slight focus on better coordination tools and groups — both ETHCatHerders and DAOs were discussed. It is clear that there is a very pressing need for better project management in the space, especially to alleviate the coordination between core devs, clients, and miners for instance. ETHCatHerders is another grassroots effort directed towards this goal, born in the Magicians Council of Prague facilitated by Hudson Jameson, and discussed by Lane Rettig (Ewasm), Joseph Delong (Pegasys) and the wider community during this edition.
DAOs were also discussed: how to define them, how to assess their impact, classifications between DAOs, and of course, the future of DAOs — will they ever replace organizations? Many teams in the ecosystem are using them for coordination, coincidentally, Cat Herders has an Aragon DAO to manage the funds from their Gitcoin subscriptions; and we have seen the rise of Moloch DAO, a new way to fund infrastructure in the ecosystem, in the past few weeks. We are very eager to see how both projects evolve and believe the future of coordination relies on making these structures robust and transparent.
