Announcing the Argot Collective | Devcon SEA

[Music] [Music] uh Zoe is not here it's just Khan and I um yeah so um slides there we go um yeah so con and I are here to introduce a new EF spinout called the Argo Collective we'll be talking about our governance model we'll be talking about um some details relating to our operations we'll be talking about funding um and a few other things but but we'll get to them so who are we uh we are a nonprofit democratically organized research and development group focused on maintaining free independent and open source software related to ethereum uh so it's pretty similar to uh what the EF does but we have um a more concentrated focus on languages tooling research and verification so that means well we'll get into the exact projects but it's it's a specific domain and we're kind of concentrating our efforts together within this spin out um so uh one of the things that you know attracted me to the ethereum foundation was um you know the the fact that you could work on these open- Source tools um outside of like um a commercial environment that's important that's important to me and it's important to everyone else and it's something that you know I think brings a lot of people at the EF together and it's something that brings us together at Argo um so yeah we're we're definitely you know going to be like that um the organization itself um will be a Swiss Association um this lens itself to the Democratic governance model um and also since we are an international group of people you know there's just there's no like default um jurisdiction that you create the organization with so there was a long process of exploring you know Dow model um various various legal models around the world and we landed on a Swiss Association so these are um the projects that the members of the group um maintain you may be familiar with some of them um we have act which is a formal specification language for smart contracts we have eth debug um which is a newer project and it's an effort around standardization of uh debugging uh on the evm uh Nick's working on it if if you met him before he he did some work with truffle and debugging there um um we also have people that are working on fee which is a smart contract uh language that's what I work on um we have hm which is a symbolic execution engine for the evm so that's useful if you want to do some thorough validation of smart contracts anything that's going to run on the evm we have solidity which is the Smart contract language that pretty much everyone uses and I'm sure everyone has heard of that and we also have sourcify which is what con here works on and is a tool that can be used to verify the source code of um a uh evm program that sits on ethereum so why are we doing this um well if you caught a as talk or you know you've been paying attention um the EF is following through with this uh subtraction philosophy which is to um you know uh separate out and create credibly neutral organizations um within the ethereum ecosystem to um improve the overall strength of the ecosystem and uh you know uh improve the credible neutrality of it entirely so uh now I'm going to tell you a little bit about our governance model uh so if you come from uh a traditional organization um you have some management structure and you have uh top down orders coming to you um saying what you can and can't work on um all these sorts of things um whereas we have set up a democratic governance model um and yeah so it's a consent-based democratic governance model so that means that um it's not it's not something like a majority based model where you just have majority rules um in the next slide I'm going to get into details but um it's just it's an easier way of going about making decisions on a day-to-day basis because um you know it requires less effort from the people participating in it um the the the body of people who um uh constitute this um uh this governance structure are called members uh the members are the people that uh vote and they all have equal voting power uh uh and we don't uh restrict ourselves to working with just members we also have this notion of contributors which is people that we may work with regularly but um they're not members for one reason or the other um there's a commitment if you want to be part of the governance and we don't want to put that on anyone if uh it's not something that they want to do so here are some more details on our governance model um we have five decision types and these decision types were inspired by the inspiral foundation handbook has anyone heard of that organization okay not many but there is one that's not part of the Argo Collective um yeah so we have five decision types and these decisions um are assigned to like you know different levels of importance or you know like you have things that are pretty trivial and then you have things that have like impact on budget um so like there's just this flat categorization um they're like advice decision sense check standard decision Quorum decision and um emergency decision uh and we have two examples on this slide a standard decision these are the these are the thresholds that need to be passed in order for it to uh go through these can be things like short-term contracts with people or hiring someone um and then you have decisions which um you know could be larger budgeting decisions um that's why that's why there's higher thresholds um and yeah since it's a consent-based uh model you can have decisions pass um you know without without like you know more than or like without a ton of yeses just as long as no one's blocking it or there aren't a bunch of NOS um things things can still pass so that's consent based decision making um this this process of making decisions um is facilitated by a platform called lumio um in future slides you'll see what this lumio platform looks like it's pretty neat um yeah like we've we've been using it for the last year to make decisions um within the ethereum foundation and yeah it works really nicely uh the details on our decision framework will be published um we'll talk about that more later too yeah and so why are we going with this well it's just aligned with our core values um it it prevents centralization within the organization minimizes points of failure and um everyone is able to make their voice heard um and is considered equal in in this process um so yeah that's why we're going with it um ultimately we had to come up with some model and we didn't want to go with the traditional management structure and this is the best we could come up with it's something that we will probably amend over time but we've been using it for a year and it works pretty nicely um yeah so now I'm going to talk a little a little bit about funding and sustainability um so the EF has been uh uh generous enough to support us uh for some period of time uh we don't know exactly how long yet and we don't know exactly what the terms of it will look like um you know it could be like on a year-to-year basis it could be a commitment for some longer period of time U we don't really want to be putting any putting too much pressure on them right now um in this talk but uh yeah at some point uh we'll have a clear idea of what that will look like and and they've been clear to us that they're going to support us long term we don't want to be reliant on them um so we need to find other funding sources um um we will stake the treasury to maximize Runway um and we've already received funding from another source notably uh optimism uh retr pgf um yeah you can do the math on that it's a little over a million tokens um thank you to everyone that supported us um in those rounds um and yeah we we need to find more avenues for funding like that and they need to be no strings attached that's important um and yeah that's something that we're going to be working on if we can't get enough money from uh sources like that then we can consider uh Consulting using our expertise um we also need to be responsible with our uh spending and growth sorry I'm rushing um and we are not going to do any token or Equity sales um or close sourced or closed data man Monti ization all right now I'm going to hand it over to Khan there we go check thanks Grant um I'll be continuing with the rest of the information in the meantime you can actually um scan the QR code and you can also use marcat to ask any questions that you have we will be answering those at the end of the slides um I wanted to continue with the to give a picture of how the data they operations look like within the organization um yeah as we also mentioned most of the work is done by individuals or the working groups so it won't be that the whole Collective works on something and rather we delegate task to individuals to do the research do the execution or a working group uh in that matter uh I'll be giving some examples about those in the upcoming slides also being a purely technical organization we want to minimize our workload in operations such as payments um travel all other um operations as long as it fits our values and working style so we don't want um we we have to find a balance between what we can do because our main focus will be the technical projects that's where our expertise is in but also we don't want to leave out everything to other organizations external organizations so we are trying to explore a balance we will be trying to explore a balance in that sense and an example to those is the tool software and tooling we are using over the last year we experimented with and considered several um tools and software that we are using for that matter we have for example a working group that works on this the infrastructure working group um in that case we opted in for alternative tooling than let's say more common ones such as Gmail we don't we don't use Gmail instead we use FastMail instead of drive we use thank you we use cryp pad and hcmd uh these are more cryp pad if you're not familiar with it is an end to end encrypted uh working tool similar to drive hcmd is a markdown collaboration software we wanted to continue we wanted to support and use open source and encrypted applications there for our chat and asynchronous Communications we are using metric we are not opting in slack Discord or telegram at least for our uh internal Communications um and for our video calls we uh we are using jitsy and not zoom or other uh tools such as Google meet we have and have been having uh weekly or bi-weekly All Hands meeting so this is the town hall where the whole at least the majority of the organization meets up talks about the issues sees each other face uh and have a chat and the rest is mostly self-organized within the projects so like sourcify so T the specific tasks regarding those projects are self-organized within the project teams um we are opting in a opting for a 4-day work week uh we will be uh working four days maximum 140 hours and we we we want to give the members or contributors contributors full flexibility in invoicing hours meaning if you feel like or if you have reasons to work less that month or that week you can invoice less uh and you don't have to force yourself through working that or um yeah then you have to full flexibility uh additionally we have equal hourly pay for all members and contributors and we will be having at least one offsite per year we believe offsites are crucial in a globally distributed organization uh and also as Grant mentioned the Waring will be on lumio so in the following slides I want to give some visual examples of what our decision making looks like of course I can't give every detail but I think a visual example is a better picture for everyone to understand what's going on in this specific example we have the infrastructure policy and mandate and this one is for example put together by the infrastructure working group they done the research they considered the options and they come up with a general policy what how to decide on what tools and software to use this be this become this this getss presented to the whole Collective and as you can see from at top right it's a standard decision this time so that means this will pass unless anyone blocks and this is a lower participation requirement and you can see in this case this is uh 16 people out of 23 have participated and everyone said yes this is an easier vote uh this one is a more specific example in this case um the name is the name of the person is reducted here but the question here is if the contract with this person should be extended or not um a longer text is is shown to explain to to explain why this is needed to the collective and in this case you can say you can see a participation is lower it's 50% and most of the people not most but at least 40% abstains because they want to leave this decision to the project itself so they don't have an opinion so they say it can pass uh yeah we this is an example of how our working group looks like we have communication working group legal risks um offside planning yeah this is just to give a picture of it transparency is the one of the core values I would say we have in the collective and one of the reasons we are going this on in this route and for that matter we'll be we'll be publishing our governance framework how we make decisions um additionally we will have detailed reports on financials and budgets road maps funding terms we believe these are essential for a public organization uh that is funded by um funded by public money uh and of course all all the output of the collective technical output especially will be fully open source and in general we think there's a lack of transparency in the ecosystem and we really want to be a leading example uh a good example in terms of transparency and the future of the collective uh so we as we said we are in the process of spinning out right now and we aim to spin out in the first half of the 2025 our higher goal is for um improving the languages and tooling uh ecosystem that means we might be starting projects retiring projects but we also want to emphasize we will continue maintaining solidity as long as it's considered useful by the community for that matter we we might also give out grants uh technical grants or yeah start projects within ourselves and we also at the end want to be a good example of them Democratic governance and transparent Organization for the community so thank you for your attention and we'll be happy to take questions thank you very much um so do you think solidity dominance is a problem and in that case how do you think we can overcome it um yeah if I understand understand this question correctly um I think a big part of like working on compilers is like the compiler pipeline working on backends and making it easier for other people to create compilers so not only will we be working on our own compilers we'll be working on tooling for building other compilers and hopefully other people can create great compilers for the language using our tools um and hopefully uh yeah more people use those use those languages and compilers are you going to use GitHub in the long term um I can take that uh longterm is difficult to predict right now um but also at least this this would be my personal opinion not the collectives but I think it's there's there's a balance between as I said using tools out there that everyone's uses and going for more tools that aligns with our values GitHub in in that case in my personal opinion is a trickier one because the it's the main source of collaboration with the whole ecosystem and um it would be trickier shortterm longterm maybe if the there will be more Alternatives we might use that but we are definitely looking into options to Ming or um using alternative uh version systems virging platforms let's say but ultimately personally I find it a bit trickier to move away from GitHub at this point uh how timec consuming is the governance and how satisfied have you been with the added value uh it hasn't been terribly timec consuming um yeah I mean you read a proposal you uh submit your response um and yeah I think that like you know my my role in the EF I have to like submit things for approval um you know within the within the EF and you have to write like a description of what it is and then ultimately that goes to someone and then it gets approved it's the same process I just think that because everything is so public you need to be more thorough with you know what you're asking of people or what you're asking of the organization and I think that's I think that's good um but you know there there the requirement that everyone participate in decision making um so I would say across the organization more time is you know taken away from people but I I think it's valuable because it keeps people in touch uh more intimately with what's happening in the organization uh what parts of the collective need more help design testing optimization verification uh I mean The Branding and design is TBD so we wanted to move forward without a um brand and final design um in terms of technical things from what I read from this question um I actually don't know I think it's those are more Project Specific needs like do we need more testing do we need more optimization I don't really know how they answer that you always do yeah that's that's the right answer what's been the biggest challenge so far naming uh naming the whole organization and Collective was really really difficult because it's such a important decision and it you carry that along a long time and you really don't want to have a name that people want to carry on that they don't like um yeah we have to go through this in a difficult way but um we are quite happy with the final name how do you differentiate between a less than 25% no and a greater than 75% yes decision is there an escalation process uh so we're going to be publishing our decision framework um and you can also look at the inspiral um uh handbook to get a better idea of how our uh decision model works but you know it's not it's not really like that it's not like if you have 25% no then you have 75% yes there's um also like abstaining and there's also blocking of decisions and since it's a consent-based uh model um you know you can as long as it's as long as it's uh not like um you know a ton of nose or a block generally things will pass um because people can always abstain and uh yeah they can still pass that way and finally in less than a minute I but not I love solidity why would I want to try