The foundation is currently in the restructuring phase of its communication activities. Several members of our current communications team in London will soon be leaving or reducing their involvement with the Foundation to start for-profit ventures in addition to the Ethereum ecosystem; We wish them the best of luck. And so, we have both a need 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 jump in and participate quickly, and (ii) chat rooms are public and visible to everyone by default. Currently, the main active Gitter rooms are:
- We will continue our general direction of increasing permissiveness that we began with our recent changes to brand guidelines, and emphasis on maintaining common sense standards and civility over hard rules. We are not following in the footsteps of /r/bitcoin‘s themos. EthereumXT discussion (I guess the closest equivalent we have is Extensionwith your 10 times higher gas limit) is NOT prohibited.
- We will de-emphasize the “ETH DEV” brand (with the exception of “DEVcon”) and focus attention on “Ethereum” in the future.
In the medium term, we are in the process of substantially re-examining our strategy internally, including meetings, general community outreach, trademark policy, developer documentation, and communication of information about protocol updates (for example , the most urgent near-term updates will be at the network level to ease support of thin clients, and the biggest future changes will be for proof-of-stake, scalability, etc.), as well as interaction with the number every growing number of both individual and organizational/corporate Ethereum developers outside of the foundation itself. We will continue to post more specific information on this and other topics as it becomes available, and we welcome community input on any of these topics.
