EIP0 Summit — Statement of intent to support Ethereum governance initiatives

Recently, a number of important governance conversations have developed in the Ethereum community around topics like ASICs resistance, fund recovery and future issuance. As the community continues to grow and diversify — and the platform continues to scale — these challenges will only become larger and more frequent.

Having community-wide conversations around these topics is difficult without having a set of shared values we can all use to guide the discourse.

As the community grows, it will also become increasingly difficult to gauge sentiment on these issues if we are not able to effectively track the signals different stakeholders like developers, client maintainers, ETH holders, users or miners send each other every day.

We all agree that we need to be having productive conversations around the future of Ethereum. But reaching consensus on protocol changes that may need to be implemented can only happen if we work in parallel to ensure the legitimacy of our shared governance processes.

EIP0 Summit gathered a range of stakeholders in this conversation and focused their effort on discussing Ethereum’s current governance issues before EDCON this year. Parts of the event were offline, to allow all to freely engage in debate. Others included input from live stream viewers and attendees of a meetup and discussion panel EIP0 Summit hosted. We used an unconference format with Chatham House Rule for the offline sessions. While we are acutely aware of the response this format might generate, it is just as clear that these conversations require a delicate balance of venue to ensure the most productive outcome.

There were some key takeaways to help understand, document and improve Ethereum’s governance.The signers of this public statement commit to supporting one or more of the following next steps:

1. Work on a statement of shared values of Ethereum, trying to extract those from the original mission of the project but also from the voice and current expectations the wide range of stakeholders have.
2. Support and build open source tools to collect key signals and metrics from the Ethereum community (via grants, for example). Examples of signals are coin voting, transaction volume, number of contracts deployed, number of ERCs submitted, number of GitHub contributions, hash power, prediction markets for possible forks, and public statements from relevant teams and individuals.
3. Host a monthly governance call, starting with representatives of each team, defining working groups to get deeper into the individual topics, and opening up a part of the call for an AMA.
4. Organize a second #EIP0 Summit, building on the model we have started to develop and expanding opportunities for interaction from viewers not in physical attendance (time, location and participants to be determined).

All signers of this statement want to involve the community as much as possible in this process. This initial group statement aims to serve as a stepping stone for stakeholders to recognize the importance of legitimate governance, get together and commit to keep working and thinking about these critical issues for the future of Ethereum.

Signed by:

• Aragon, supporting all next steps
• L4, supporting all next steps
• Web3 Foundation, supporting all next steps
• Lane Rettig, ewasm developer, supporting all next steps and volunteering to organize regular governance calls
• Griff Green, Giveth, supporting all next steps
• Hudson Jameson, supporting all next steps
• Gnosis, supporting all next steps
• Parity Technologies, supporting all next steps
• Rhys Lindmark, #ETHCommons, supporting all next steps
• Dan Phifer, Musiconomi, supporting all next steps
• Varro Technologies, supporting all next steps