Celebrating 3rd anniversary with Ethereum blockchain
A look back, as we step into the future
The Ethereum Cat Herders (ECH) celebrates its third year anniversary. This year promises to be full of excitement, with many critical upcoming milestones. As ECH steps into a growing, inclusive and global role, it’s important to look back at past milestones and how they helped move the group to its current trajectory.
Three years ago, on this day, the origin of the Ethereum Cat Herders was announced as a decentralized group for project management to facilitate inter-team communications in the Ethereum developers community. Hudson Jameson, Lane Rettig, Afri Schoedon, Piper Merriam and a few other Ethereum contributors joined in as a grass-root group to help speed up processes needed for Ethereum network upgrades, with the aim to allow more consistent improvements to the protocol. ECH has not only consistently achieved these goals but has also built on its contributions and expanded its outreach across the Ethereum community. While old contributors leave, and new join in, the group has always maintained the core goal of providing decentralized project management support to the Ethereum ecosystem.
Roadmap 2022 (Q1)
In 2022, ECH aims towards increased education & community building on top of present support to the upcoming network upgrade (The Merge), client development team, projects and ecosystem infrastructure providers.
ECH podcast
With the launch of the ECH podcast in early January, Ethereum Cat Herders made a terrific beginning of the year. Hosted by William Schwab and technical support by Pooja Ranjan, two episodes (with Andre Cronje & Tomasz S.) have already been released and the next one is ready to be published on Spotify.
Learn2Earn
To increase participation and awareness of Ethereum upcoming improvement proposals and research, the Ethereum Cat Herders has gathered consensus to work on a project where participants taking the challenge to answer a few questions after watching an educational video on the topic will be rewarded.
Onboarding
Community building is one of the primary goals of 2022. Onboarding new contributors to the Ethereum ecosystem is a small step towards the broader dream. To facilitate onboarding to increase community engagement, working on in-house projects like Learn2Earn, ECH is onboarding new contributors to the ECH Operations & Engineering teams.
Events participation & coordination
Ethereum Cat Herders will keep interacting with mainstream users by participating in blockchain meetups, events, hackathons and even making contacts with colleges and universities. The salient support in organizing developers meetup events like Devconnect (Amsterdam) will be continued. In addition, the Cat Herders is looking forward to organizing events to promote inclusion & diversity in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Recap (2019–2021)
2019
Since 2019, the Cat Herders received tremendous appreciation for its transcripts and meeting notes that are publicly available and which allow greater community engagement of ongoing protocol development. With the Constantinople Ethereum Hard Fork Postmortem Report, ProgPOW audit and funding engagement, Cat Herders extended support to the Ethereum project management. Charles St.Louis, Tim Beiko are key contributors of the group who opened direct channels of communication with major stakeholders (e.g. mining pools, exchanges, wallets, and other infrastructure providers).
Pooja Ranjan, the Herder in Chief, is one of the persistent contributors since the early stages of Cat Herders, has started and led many initiatives to shape up the group and streamline its functioning. She brought in a fresh perspective and diversity to the ecosystem.
The 2019 Osaka annual developer conference was a turning point for the group where it progressed towards the vision to be a much-needed Ethereum support desk and increase support with more community involvement.
2020
In 2020, Ethereum Cat Herders played an expanded role in the community. It participates in conferences, organizes workshops, partners at hackathons, and other events to raise awareness of Ethereum, share progress of tasks, and onboard people to the Ethereum community. As an Ethereum support desk with the aim to improve engagement, it has become one of the first points of contact for an individual interested in the Ethereum community.
ECH contributed in the network upgrade process improvement, raised awareness of upgrades (Istanbul and Muir Glacier), and communicated with the major stakeholders allowing the transitions to happen smoothly. ECH also publishes a biweekly newsletter on Medium, with useful information and updates on ongoing processes and upcoming changes.
Besides these, through EIPIP meetings, the EIP standardization process is improved and the Execution specs (formerly known as Eth 1.0 spec) repository is created. ECH conducted surveys with on-chain projects & infrastructure providers to get feedback on the state of client diversity in Ethereum, and network upgrade frequency.
2021
In 2021, the group continued on its growth trajectory with milestones in the areas of Ethereum network upgrades, process improvement, community outreach & stakeholders meeting for EIP-1559, PEEPanEIP, Cat Blazers, ECH engineering, meeting notes and new initiatives.
Critical communication, including the network upgrade block ETA, client specs of the Berlin, London, Altair, and Arrow Glacier upgrades were shared via Medium posts, Twitter, and Discord for developers to upgrade their nodes on time. The ECH newsletter included such communication as well as summaries of various meetings in the Ethereum developers community.
The group has also raised public awareness of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) via educational video series PEEPanEIP, on ECH YouTube channel. With 60 episodes already recorded, it has become a valuable resource for in-depth technical dive into EIPs, and contains multiple episodes featuring Vitalik Buterin. The series encompasses talks on network upgrades, metrics, testnets and other important research topics of Ethereum blockchain.
ECH continued its core task of documenting various meetings in the Ethereum community and making them publicly available. Besides Ethereum All Core Dev meetings, Consensus layer meetings, EIPIP meetings, and Ethereum Cat Herders meetings, ECH also documented meeting notes for EIP-1559 implementers meetings, Merge implementers meetings as well as breakout room meetings like the Post-Merge MEV. Brent Allsop and Edson A. are long time contributors to the group.
The Ethereum cat Herders expanded its focus on process improvement through EIPIP meetings, the EIP editor apprenticeship program, EIPs Insight, as well as EIP bot support. Community building included participation in blockchain events and podcasts, hackathon organizing, collaborating with universities, and onboarding more than eighty new contributors to the group.
ECH engineering focused on automating tedious tasks normally given to editors as a way to streamline the EIP improvement process. Alita Moore worked on the bots’ reliability, extensibility, usefulness in the EIP editing process, including numerous bug fixes.
William Schwab created a new position, Cat Blazer, to explore new paths for external coordination & engagement. From helping onboard new participants, to working with organizations like Gitcoin KERNEL and EthernautDAO, Cat Blazer helped contribute to the EIP editing process, through shepherding EIPs that have already gained traction in the community. It also contributed to the EIP process by reaching out to potential proposal authors from various organizations and platforms, like Uniswap and privacy pools in Tornado.
The Ethereum blockchain is expecting one of the biggest upgrades, The Merge, and the Ethereum Cat Herders hopes to support the client developers and the community at large by coordinating & communicating the progress.
Acknowledgement
Our sincere thanks to MolochDAO, Ecosystem Support Program, Gitcoin, CLR Funds and everyone for encouragement provided to the Ethereum Cat Herders community.
The anniversary video and the blog is co-authored by Kenneth Luster, Pooja Ranjan, Shubhangi Gokhale and the contributors of the Ethereum Cat Herders.
Join the decentralized project management team by submitting the ECH onboarding form and at ECH Discord. Follow the Ethereum Cat Herders on Website, GitHub, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube.
