How to Centralize Information Without Centralizing Power

Post-mortem

If you’re reading this, we’re already dead.

Of course we’re not dead, (although one is a dad) we simply ceased working on this project.

Yes, I know it’s unfortunate, that’s what I said too. Here’s why:

It’s ironic, really, but some of the members weren’t willing to give up their power by doing what was the best for our platform. I also suspect some of the members to have been bitterly disappointed by the project not getting them any monetary ROI.

There were some crazy monetization suggestions, and after a while we stopped reaching consensus in regards to the future of the project.

Some of us started getting disinterested, sloppy and missing their reports schedule and the whole thing fell apart.

An Introduction

Hi, I’m PΞther and I’m an Ethereum addict. I started volunteering for The Etherian about two months ago and I’m here to introduce you to our vision and the mission we’ve decided to take on.

The Problem

Given the nature of distributed and decentralized systems, it is near impossible to keep up with an exponential rate of development and expansion of the ecosystem.

Miners are very much successful at keeping the ledger updated, but we, human nodes, have a much harder time keeping each other up to date.

As a consequence, information inside Ethereum ecosystem is asymmetrical and fragmented.

The current process of tracking all this information is difficult:

1. Discover interesting dApps.
2. Follow them on Social Media
3. Lose track of their progress in your endless social feed.

If you’re really excited about it and don’t want to miss out on any of their updates, you go and join their Slack or Gitter channel.

You surely won’t miss the updates this way. If you remember to keep coming back, that is…

But even if you do, as a proper Etherian, you are excited about multiple projects and keeping track of 20+ slack channels is simply unsustainable.

So, you decide to go on Reddit. Sure, every news from the Ethereum ecosystem you need to know eventually ends up posted there, but so does every irrelevant post you absolutely don’t care about.

How do you filter and keep track of the projects and events you care about?

Not to mention the problem will only be getting worse as the Ethereum ecosystem is a fraction of the size it will be in a few years.

Founding of The Etherian

We started The Etherian to solve precisely that problem.

Our team of oracles and miners set out seeking news and updates from various Ethereum projects, submitting it to “The Etherian Weekly” which we used to update the human nodes on the latest news from around the ecosystem on a weekly basis, with the latest issue reporting on over 20 DApps and Ethereum protocols.

We soon realized a simple Wordpress blog just wasn’t gonna cut it.

Launching of a new website has allowed us to greatly broaden the scope of our mission. On top of updates now being organized by dapps and displayed chronologically we are also setting up some big new targets, and that is what this article is all about.

Centralizing information without centralizing power

Currently, we’re using Oraclize and GitHubAPI to track contributions and mint tokens for our contributors (a script kindly developed by 3esmit).

The token as of now represents nothing more than bragging rights, but in the future we see that it will be part of a decentralized governance system that rewards our most active volunteers with a say in how we move forward .

We are currently beta testing Colony and are very excited to see it move forward as it is in all likelihood the platform of choice for all our governance, and progress tracking needs.

Other methods will be implemented for tracking different types of contributions and contributors, such as social media influencers and bearers of exclusive information to be awarded fairly.

Etherian World

With the launch of The Etherian World, our goal is simple:

Create a go-to destination for all things Ethereum and award contributors and content producers for their hard work.

If you visit State of Dapps, you can find the link to our updates feed by clicking on the little newspaper icon.

We will expand on our first module and add new:

DApp Journal

• Links to their channels
• Link to Github
• Updates
• Releases
• Blog posts
• Interviews
• Roadmap/Milestones

Ethereum Calendar

• Releases
• Conference dates
• Meetups
• ICOs

Ethereum Library & Link Treasury

• ELI5
• Getting Started
• Advanced Reading lists
• For programmers & developers
• Infographics
• Educational videos
• Conference streams
• Podcasts
• You name it..

YOUR Idea/project

• We’re open to any and all suggestions

As a hub for all Etherians, our plan is to have etherian.world translated to other languages. While there is a lot of interest in Ethereum across smaller countries of Europe, most all of these people speak English.

That makes our primary goals Russian and Chinese (Mandarin)

A big part of our mission is making it as easy as possible for non-developers to help Ethereum grow. We intend on organizing crowd efforts and brainstorming on problems the Ethereum and it’s ecosystem face:

• Getting more people working on protocol level
• Report on roadblocks projects encounter
• Crowdfund sponsoring development of common modules on Ethlance
• Outreach to people/projects that could benefit from Ethereum
• Outreach to social influencers/educators
• General awareness spreading and education

Etherian World Domination aka Roadmap

• Launch Etherian World
• Migrate host to IPFS (happening as we speak)
• Library & Link Treasury
• Calendar
• Chinese translation
• Russian translation
• ???
• Mars base

The Mission

As you’ve realized by now, what we’re trying to do here is far more than just curate updates and information from the Ethereum ecosystem.

We want to create and nurture a network of non-developer Ethereum contributors.

All people contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem by creating content such as listed above are welcome to come and make their projects a part of Etherian World and get their fair share of stake in the ecosystem of contributors.

If/then Time

If you run a similar project, and our incentives align, consider making your project a part of The Etherian World.

If you write articles or create other type of content, consider getting it published by The Etherian.

If you’re a regular at Slack of one of your favorite projects, why not report their progress to The Etherian?

If you just want to keep getting updated on Ethereum’ ecosystem, subscribe to our mailing list.

You can reach out to us by joining our Slack or just whisper@etherian.world

And lastly, appreciate what we’re doing? Donate.

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A special thank you to Joris Bontje, Evan Van Ness and Joe Urgo