The foundation is currently in the phase of restructuring its communications activities. Several members of our current communications team in London are soon leaving or reducing their involvement in the Foundation in order to pursue for-profit ventures on top of the Ethereum ecosystem; we wish them the best of luck. And so, we have both the necessity and a unique opportunity to “reboot” that side of the organization and take another look at how the Ethereum foundation interacts with the community.
As some initial steps, we are going to do the following:
- We will make an effort to de-emphasize Skype, and emphasize Gitter as a means of real-time communication for developers. Gitter has the advantages that (i) it’s easier to quickly jump in and participate, and (ii) chat rooms are public and visible to everyone by default. Currently, the primary active Gitter rooms are:
- We will continue our general direction of increasing permissiveness that we began with our recent changes to branding guidelines, and emphasis on maintaining norms of common sense and civility over strict rules. We are not following in the footsteps of /r/bitcoin‘s theymos. Discussion of EthereumXT (I suppose the closest equivalent we have is Expanse, with its 10x higher gas limit) is NOT banned.
- We will de-emphasize the “ETH DEV” brand (with the exception of “DEVcon”) and focus attention on “Ethereum” going forward
In the medium term, we are in the process of substantially re-examining our strategy internally including meetups, general community outreach, trademark policy, developer documentation, and communicating information on protocol updates (e.g the most pressing short-term updates will be at the networking level to faciliate support of light clients, and larger future changes will be for proof of stake, scalability, etc), as well as interacting with the rapidly growing number of both individual and organizational/corporate Ethereum developers outside of the foundation proper. We will continue releasing more concrete info on both this and other topics as it becomes ready, and welcome community input on any of these issues.
