Meanwhile at Cryptium Labs #1 Part I
It has been a month since we published From Bakers to Makers, a prelude to our journey as Tezos core developers together with a roadmap or bucket of ideas on how to improve Tezos. Shortly after, with Introducing the Burebrot Protocol Upgrade, we shared the background and explored some potential colours and flavours that one of the ideas could have.
Needless to say, April has been a packed month for our team, not only due to exciting events, such as Tocqueville Group’s TQuorum or our first Reddit AMA, but also due to the continuous work on the Tezos state machine and the implementation of our first ideas for improving Tezos, which will be described in this article. This marks the beginning of the meanwhile series, named as a tribute to Nomadic Labs, the first core development team of the protocol. From now on, we will describe interesting features that our team has been working on in the meanwhile series.
Getting Ready for the Second Proposal Period
Bootstrapping a Collaborative Core Development Community
Every Tezos On-chain Governance process lasts 32 cycles or about 80 to 90 days. Taking this into consideration, to avoid the result of a live protocol amending itself in a dangerously slow pace, it is desirable for the current core development teams to not only collaborate, but also to coordinate with the aim of leveraging every amendment slot as much as possible.
Our team is working closely with Nomadic Labs and other contributors to the Tezos codebase. As a result, in the next proposal period (end of May 2019), the community will be able to vote on multiple features that come in different flavours, developed by different teams, bundled or combined into multiple proposals.
Code is Not Enough in Tezos On-chain Governance
Unlike governance in other networks, Tezos On-chain Governance is characterised by proposals including the source code or implementation of the feature — and stakeholders vote on source code proposals. Although developing code is crucial, the choice of which specific proposal passes is entirely on the stakeholders’ hands. Thus, describing and communicating about the features and the options is as important as the code itself.
While a dedicated discussion platform for current and future protocol proposals is yet to be seen, we will continue releasing blogposts and Reddit AMAs, and will experiment with different formats and platforms, such as Tocqueville Group and Tezos Commons’s Agora. The goal is to establish a communication bridge between the community and development teams, in order to avoid siloed development efforts.
What Next?
- Meanwhile at Cryptium Labs #1 Part II (on a feature we’re working on)
- Reddit written AMA or Twitter Q&A (~mid May 2019)
