Ethereum Foundation DevCon 6 - Opportunity & Global Impact Track, 13 Oct 2022

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From YouTube: EEA Community Projects: a Home for Open Standards Development Projects, Managed by OASIS

Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/eea-community-projects-a-home-for-open-standards-development-projects-managed-by-oasis/

The EEA Community Projects, formerly known as the Ethereum OASIS Open Project, is a hub for open source-based standards development in the Ethereum industry. We provide support for open source development of code, APIs, standards, and reference implementations. Our goal is to improve the quality of standards in the Ethereum ecosystem and provide a path to formal standards developed within the framework of OASIS, an internationally recognized technical standards body.

Speaker(s): Tas Dienes, Daniel Burnett
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: standards,enterprise

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers.
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

A

A

Thank you so much thanks.

B

Yeah, all right so they're still filling in a little bit here, all right, um I'll start with the clicker. Okay um thanks everyone, um so we're going to be talking, obviously about Community projects and I'll, just I'll just launch right into it, I'm going to talk a little bit about the history and then Tash will get into what we're doing today and and what you can, uh what you can do uh through the community projects going forward?

B

Okay, so um so, when we created the community projects, originally our goal was to increase or improve the quality of standards in the ethereum community and and that's an interesting statement. uh That's actually what was brought to us initially by some folks who were concerned with quality and what they meant by that was eaps are great and eips have moved the entire ecosystem forward. That's for sure, but they often don't meet the quality and completeness level of standards that um that businesses would expect something you would see from traditional standards.

B

Organizations such as ietf or w3c, or Oasis or ISO, or whatever, okay, and so businesses and governments are a lot more comfortable adopting those kinds of Technology standards.

B

um Then the uh then some of the ones that they've seen from uh eips, and so the goal was to was to see, are there projects that could benefit from this additional level of uh of rigor. uh So we have a formal uh but Open Standards development process that includes input from multiple organizations and stakeholders and one of the goals with this, of course, was to reduce the bureaucracy. Okay, so for any of you, who've ever participated in any of these other standards organizations.

B

You know they have a reputation for being very slow uh ponderous, cumbersome, and so our goal is to see if we could put in the minimum amount of your bureaucracy to still allow us to get to a good result.

B

So um this is the the work itself is actually managed and run by Oasis. Open um Oasis is a non-profit technical standards body been around for a long time, they're actually known for a lot of XML standards and many others as well. What they did is they actually started a new Oasis open program specifically for open source software and standards development.

B

So we created an oasis, open project, I say we, um so it was the ethereum foundation consensus and the Enterprise ethereum Alliance in 2019 started this project um and again we focused really heavily on the low bureaucracy piece, so the EA, which of course I obviously represent with my my shirt here- uh was founded in 2017. I, initially focused um for any of you saw my presentation earlier today. You know what I'm going to say.

B

We were focused initially on standards, development for private chains, okay and that's because the public chain wasn't ready for businesses to use it a number of years ago. But we have a broader Mission now at the EA to include much more ecosystem development, work and ethereum advocacy so we're looking at moving well, we've already been moving beyond private chains for a while.

B

Now we're actually looking much much more broadly than that, so in particular, even though Enterprises in our title- and we know that people sometimes hate that Enterprise word, the reality is we are business focused and so you'll hear that more and more from the EA. You can almost think of us. As uh you know, the ethereum business Alliance, you know as far as the way we we operate, um so we actually, we like the way Oasis started the uh the open projects and uh decided that we would work together with them.

B

We particularly like how inclusive it was of the entire ethereum Community. um It's important to point out that EA membership is not required to participate in the community projects and that's why they're called Community projects at this point. I think I'm switching over to Tash to tell you what we're up to.

C

Yeah, so oh thank you. So what do we look for? In an eea, Community project we're going to project circuit, fit uh ethereum first name, ethereum first project says the name implies. Ethereum should be Central to the project, although it doesn't have to be exclusively ethereum, it can support other chains.

C

um We look for projects that want to do Open, Standards development, often from initial Source initial open source software. So there can be a software implementation around which a standard is developed or there can be no implementation. You just developed a standard first uh either one's okay, but it must be open, IE contributors.

C

Most people need to sign a contributor license agreement that ensures that there will be no um all contributions or open sources, no intellectual property, no, no patents associated with the contributions to that standard, so the standard should be completely open source and to start a project. We look for at least three and ideally five organizations to sponsor a project. So one company cannot Define a standard. A standard exists when multiple or entities get together and hash out their differences and agree on something.

C

So we look for at least three and hopefully more than three entities, often that have competing interests to get together and discuss and agree on something which we can call a standard.

C

So um how is it governed? The eea community projects is governed by a project governing board and then each project has a technical steering committee. So there's one project of governing board and there's a TSC for each standards, development project, the pgb meets every two weeks. uh It it manages the tses it authorizes and makes rules for the tscs. It does not make technical decisions. It's just a kind of a middle level of governance between Oasis and the tscs, Dan and I are the co-chairs uh and the TSC also includes members from each sorry.

C

The pgb also includes members from each TSC, so each TSC gets a seat on the pgb and also companies that sponsor the eea community projects by giving us money get a seat on the TSC on the pgb. If they want one yeah, so each project is governed by its own technical steering committee. So the technical steering committee makes assess the governance rules for that project. They can be pretty flexible.

C

The pgpa has to approve the rules, um so there is some degree of customizability for each project to set their own rules and get it approved by the pgb. The members of the ptsc are typically the most active contributors to that project and the tsc's report to the pgb.

C

So what projects do we have, or what have we worked on so far, Baseline protocol is probably the biggest one. Baseline protocol is a standard that enables Enterprises to synchronize complex, multi-party business processes with privacy and without moving data from systems of record using ethereum as a common frame of reference. So basically it enables companies that engage in multi-party business transactions to do so in a way that doesn't leak any confidential information from their databases.

C

It also ensures that all of their assistant, each company's systems, are in sync and that each company is doing the correct thing and proving that with.

A

Zero knowledge proofs.

C

um We also have a layer, two standardized working group. We just talked about that earlier in a different room, so the layer, 2 standards working group, as the name implies, is developing standards for layer twos, which is I, think very important. There's been some work done on uh formalizing. The standards and specifications for the Json, RPC, client, API and we've been talking about a new project called token script, possibly coming in token.

C

Script is a JavaScript, webassembly and XML framework to improve the functionality, security and usability of blockchain tokens, um and if you have an idea for a project, we would love to hear from you. We would love to hear, have more projects coming into the EA Community projects to improve the quality of Standards development within the ethereum ecosystem.

C

So we have sponsors, sponsors have provided money to help us get stuff done. um Some big companies like ey, Accenture and sap, and also a lot of smaller crypto Focus companies. So there's quite a wide variety of sponsors.

C

If you are interested in getting in in starting a new standards, development project or participating in one of the existing ones, please get in touch here's. How uh and thanks for sticking around till the last last Talk of the day.

A

Amazing, thank you so much so yeah Reach Out to us. If you have any idea some ideas to keep improving the ethereum ecosystem, or do you want to join a project with them? So thank you so much and thank you all. This is the the last Talk of the day and a very amazing day for Defcon, which this is the biggest Defcon till now we are more than five five thousand people, so amazing I hope you enjoy it and I'm Anna and thank you so much have a great life see you soon.