Education as a Public Good: Past, Present & Future of ethereum.org by Sam Richards

foreign [Music] grateful to be here with you on Bogota or streaming to you somewhere on the internet happy to be here um yeah like Evan said today we're talking at theorem.org my favorite subject let's see if I can figure out this thing Good Start okay there we go all right um I guess quick participation gets you guys moving raise your hand if you've ever visited ethereum.org before excellent keep your hand up if you've contributed to ethereum.org awesome if you haven't yet you should come by our booth pick up some swag maybe raise your hand if you're interested in maybe contributing to ethereum.org cool all right I'll try to increase that hand count with this talk so quick agenda that's me Shilling ethereum.

org to you and then maybe some time for questions at the end but probably not because I tend to talk too much so really the goals of this talk um like ethereum.org as a project has evolved over the years and I think it's helpful context both for potential contributors existing contributors but also just other projects in the space that often have to create you know like educational content trying to be you know credible and trustworthy so I'm I'm hoping that kind of going through some of the history some of the direction of where I think we're heading with ethereum.org yeah hopefully that'll provide some useful insight for the folks here so the way I at least think about ethereum.org and this is just my opinion this isn't any official stance of the ethereum foundation but I kind of look at at early history um up until 2018 kind of present day really the last three years that I've been working on it at least somewhat shifting into a new Direction and then you know from where we are today until you know decades Millennia from now where does ethereum.org go in the future so let's start with the past and as often as useful with the past we can check out the good old Wayback machine yeah shout out to Brewster kale over here of the internet internet archive and crew I actually saw Brewster at breakfast today but I was too embarrassed to come say hi so I love you Brewster though you're you're a good man so you can check out you know early days of ethereum.

org from a placeholder website in early 2014 to you know like Alpha client release ether sale Network launch and even as you know if you saw Aya's talk in the opening ceremonies you know coming as like current day to like 2018 um interesting to kind of check out the website and just like see what it's about see what's mentioned um as she kind of brought up I think a big theme and not that this was wrong at all I think it was perfectly adequate for the time and you know where ethereum as a project was and where the community was um you know the website was open source but it was pretty much driven by the ethereum foundation um tens of contributors a few pages of content um pretty much all the projects mentioned on the website were built by folks primarily within the foundation You Know download a client download a wallet run said client write smart contracts with a programming language deploy it using tooling read content and documentation pretty much all largely built by the ethereum foundation and again not a bad thing just kind of a reflection of where things were at that point in time um and I think like the short gist is like ethereum.org basically was the ethereum foundation um which you know kind of moving to the present day over the past three years where we've tried to kind of shift this um is really to more of a Community Driven initiative and you know here's a a blog post launch from April 2019 um and I think that you know a little tagline built by the community for the community I think really tries to capture that ethos well and what you know folks did even before I joined was start a new website basically a blank slate there's five pages of content pretty sparse but started with like a new Mission and a set of principles that you know what like we want to create this as a community project it's a public educational good it's built in the open with the community's help like ethereum the ecosystem the goal was to iterate evolve experiment over time and and grow and evolve with ethereum so kind of looking at how that manifests today you know whether you're looking to get eth in Colombia buy some lunch with it maybe who knows find a wallet compare different options explore applications built on ethereum that you can use today you can tell the kind of General theme Here is like different from those 2018 screenshots like we list all ecosystem built projects right like basically not much is built by the foundation these days and I think that's a testament just to like the incredible growth strength of this ecosystem very exciting to be a part of um yeah hundreds of pages thousands of contributors at this point millions of people visit the website each month again largely thanks to you folks in this room for just making ethereum a sweet place to be um and I think yeah the main gist again of of this second present-day era is really ethereum.org is separate from ethereum Foundation um it's yes there is a core team I am one of them I'm one of the fortunate few who gets to you know get paid to work on this full-time um but it's a very small core team currently 10 of us um and again compare that to the nearly 1 000 contributors from code to content on GitHub four thousand plus translators all volunteers who are helping you know spread the gospel educate the people on on the good stuff that is ethereum um so here kind of wanted to spend some time of just like the nuances of how do you try to create this credible platform um largely content and education I think in some ways it's fair to compare us to like a a web 2 Marketplace of sorts you know I showed screenshots where we show different products show different wallets um but you know we don't make money we don't run affiliate marketing campaigns um we don't get kickbacks from clients for downloading a specific one um and I think a lot of Open Source projects a lot of ecosystems within the ethereum space kind of wrestle with these similar tensions or considerations and yeah just figured it'd be worth uh hopefully generating some discussion on so first I wanted to talk about credible neutrality maybe something you've heard about before some guy named vitalik wrote a good post about it in early 2020 um it's about mechanism design and you know he's largely talking about blockchain protocols in this article but I think it does apply pretty well to a website like ethereum.org where we're trying to build you know this trustworthy neutral platform in that post he mentions you know like four steps to to go through basically don't discriminate uh make it transparent and and auditable uh keep it simple and try not to change it um for us in practice I think we do this pretty well I would say like the one kind of nuance here is like in reality we do want specific outcomes um vitalik even mentions in the post you know like a mechanism can be totally credibly neutral and it can also still be horrible so like we don't want to create a horrible website we do want to avoid discrimination we don't want to be king makers we don't want to send all traffic to one wallet or one client we do want certain outcomes I think at a very hand wavy level you know we want to spread ethereum values um such as promoting decentralization and creating a decent ux right like we could be totally neutral again but if it's a super shitty website that everyone bounces from and no one starts learning about ethereum I think we're kind of failing in what we're trying to do here so again examples of how that manifests you know like we do encourage people to run their own node um we talk about the benefits of doing that we we do explain the benefits of staking on ethereum and we do show somewhat of a hierarchy of like different ways you can do that um you know ranking things from most trust assumptions or least trust assumptions to most um so there are some opinions we kind of put into the product and I think just recognizing that we aren't 100 neutral and we have no opinions of our own I think that's just not really fair to say I think the importance is just being transparent about it going further just showing some pooled staking products for instance you can see we do try to guide the user on like considerations involved with some of these some of these products so the approach we basically take we think it's okay to you know be opinionated about for instance the listing criterias we make how a product gets added and listed on ethereum.org but as much as we can be neutral and objectively evaluate those projects against that listing criteria we create and again make the make the process transparent so going back to here again you can see we choose what projects are being evaluated on based on input from the community and then try to objectively assess those those projects and we make it transparent anyone can see our listing policies anyone can propose changes anyone can submit an issue suggest additions or edits and we think that's kind of a healthy way to to nurture that content second up subtraction Aya and others have also touched on this I think it's a good General ethos of the ethereum foundation as a whole ethereum.

org very much inherits that of like we're not trying to be the end-all be-all only place you go to monolithic website to do all your ethereum stuff right we see ourselves as like a limited product focused on specific areas you know where do we uniquely add value this is largely areas that companies aren't incentivized to actually do often you know public goods falls into this bucket there's just maybe not enough incentives not enough resources to uh to tackle this thinking through you know where does it make sense for us to focus our efforts where can we make the best impact um and how do we kind of over time slowly reduce our relevance you know again I mentioned we have a core team of 10 right now um sometimes there's considerations of like are we trying to go far are we trying to go fast right like we could ship this feature we could write this content immediately or very quickly if we just did it ourselves but if we do want to build a growing Community a sustainable Community reduce the Reliance of core contributors over time these are some like questions questions we think through so examples of yeah where we see ourselves in a unique position to add value I think you know 2019 it was very simple like there was a lot of low-hanging fruit there just wasn't a lot of great content out there covering some of the basics of ethereum I mean shout out to the ethub guys who like very much carried that weight in a big way I think like 2018 2019 and Beyond um but to create content that just explains some of the basics to to get over the obstacles and the fears of like how do I break into this magic internet money crazy landscape um developer documentation was another big one I don't know if there's any other devs who were super frustrated back in 2018 of just outdated medium posts libraries that completely broke their apis no way to keep stuff up to date no way to translate that updated information so that was like really the base Foundation of like where it made sense in our eyes of like okay there's some basic neutral simple information that we can provide we can translate where to focus our efforts this is something we think about right there's tons of projects in the space at this point where does it make sense for us to focus I think Layer Two is one good example you know over the past year or so fees getting crazy high people couldn't even use the network educating users encouraging them to like hey these are you know early days for these projects but maybe worth checking out as a way to um you know to to use use the protocol similarly you know I think a good example of fear is like we have a listing criteria what layer twos we show um and as part of that we basically just say like hey if you're listed on l2beat.com that's one of the criteria for getting included on ethereum.org and I think that's a good example of subtraction and in the sense of like recognizing hey there's another cool project that has a team of experts that have a fairly robust framework analyzing the risks of different Layer Two protocols we don't have that expertise in-house we could hire for that but maybe we could just collaborate with teams in the space where it makes sense and I think that's a good example of such a collaboration and lastly just an example of yeah again how do we think about going far versus going fast we publish you know our product roadmaps every quarter on GitHub we try to do our best to like where it makes sense um engage the community you know recently we chose to migrate to a new UI Library trying to like increase accessibility on the website um and we like called out to the community of developers of like hey you want to help us migrate a bunch of components people could sign up on GitHub we created documentation around how to do this we answered questions in Discord from people looking to learn how to do this this took a lot of time Pablo our developer leading this project could have just cranked out all of this on his own probably a lot faster than it took otherwise but through this process you know we got tens of contributors who are now regularly coming back looking to continue their typescript chops you know looking to improve as a react developer some of the core team from Chakra has now gotten involved in like collaborating with us in this front so I think this is another good example of just like it sucks up front to just like invest in the education the Outreach to really bring in people who who want to contribute um but if you're thinking about the long run this can be a very effective way to grow that community over time third Reinventing the wheel real quickly I think like cryptos Reinventing many Industries education doesn't necessarily need to be one of them there's a lot of great resources out there of like hey crowdsourced educational public good content Mozilla developer Network in particular was a huge source of inspiration for us they've just done an awesome job for almost multiple decades at this point in terms of just like volunteer driven Community documenting web standards um Translating that content doing a kick-ass job of just like providing excellent resources here you can see an mdn page here you can see in ethereum.org page looks pretty similar shout out to Ryan Cordell if he's here who designed this page for us also Carl Faircloth and Alex sing helped us with a lot of designs in the early days and just kind of like basic techniques again learning from other projects not Reinventing the wheel hey make a big edit button on your page right make it one two three clicks to open a pull request wow look at that um and you know that's not the only reason that we've seen growth and contributions from the community over time obviously bull markets help you know hype around the protocol helps um but from you know just like open issues and PR's even by individual contributors you can see here like it helps to proactively engage people and get them involved get them empowered very much along those lines Community engagement here's some ways that you can contribute to ethereum.org you can learn more there hundreds of pages of content again thousands of contributors 50 languages supported we're pretty active in Discord and Twitter and basically given as many Avenues as possible to like potentially recruit people who who want to who want to get involved I think a big one is just recognizing that different people are motivated in different ways right like it's sweet to get paid sure some people want rewards but others want just recognition um some people just want access some people want to learn some people want to teach some people just want to feel heard and Heckle us on Twitter you know that's okay that's contributing in your own way so I guess my tip on this would just be experiment with different approaches along those lines and we have in the past you know whether it's bug bounties similar to the the protocol bug bounties themselves um you know just recognition of contributions through leaderboards on the website offering certificates to translators who can then put that on their LinkedIn or on their resume simple shout outs to people on the website for helping out open Community calls I think again pretty basic stuff for a lot of Open Source web3 projects these days but just being available having an open Discord I think can go a long way pull-ups who here likes pops love those bobs um get po Ops all sorts of Pops jobs yeah I mean I mentioned we have a core group of 10 people I'm super proud that you know half of us started as open source contributors just helping out on the website um the ethereum foundation does hire our team's not actively hiring right now but I think the general rule of thumb is like we do view ethereum.

org contributions as like a great talent funnel and we do try to empower regular contributors and if they're looking for work full-time in the space like that stuff we do try to try to help out with so I think sure it is tough and I recognize not everyone can always work for free and open source it's a lot to ask but if if you're looking to get full time in the space I think a great way can just be getting your hands dirty contributing to projects even if it's just you know content translations design code what have you last piece to touch on here translations um big kudos to Tayon Kim a good friend who really advocated for this translation program on ethereum.org in the early days when I think like myself included just didn't recognize the importance of it I mean it seemed simple now and obvious now of like okay hey there's six billion humans on the on the earth that don't speak English and even the ones who do actually prefer reading and learning in their native language um so it takes work right but like putting in that effort up front early recruiting people getting excited volunteers who maybe want to learn by translating um has definitely paid big dividends and just a quick look at just kind of visits to ethereum.org over time I mean there's a lot of fascinating stories in this data that I don't have time to go into um bull markets nfts the merge all that fun stuff um but I think one narrative in particular that's really exciting is translations and like consumption of translated content over time so this is excluding English and looking at the same chart just taking out English it's breaking down by a bunch of different languages but you can see overall where the trend is going we just had a you know another record month for translated content last month very much a manatee a vanity metric but you can see the progression over time this is looking at like percent of total page views to the website um we've had record on record months for the past year plus we just passed like over 25 of content on ethereum.org is viewed um in languages other than English which I think is not too surprising but definitely exciting here's a quick breakdown I'm running out of time but I think the short gist on this is like if you don't have a localization strategy like you're not gonna make it it is super important for the future of your project my teammate Luca who runs our translation program has a talk on this tomorrow highly encourage you to check that out real quick because I think I'm almost out of time but talking about the future where could this go I mean the lame and wavy answer here is like ultimately it's up to you like again we publish our roadmap as a team on GitHub we try to solicit as much input from possible from the community what should we we be working on where should we be going not just the content not just the features on the website but really anything you want to get involved with whether it's General feedback you know joining Community calls all that good stuff I mean a few main areas like we'll definitely be thinking about and would love input from you folks on is just like how do we continue to progressively push and empower the community to like take over more and more of this project you know we've been experimenting with bringing new roles in such as language leads you know power contributors of sorts who who operate certain areas giving them more Authority more power same thing with GitHub and content contributions um third party Educators is one I'd like love to explore I think translating content from English to other languages is great but I I don't think we can pretend like that misses a lot of just like the cultural nuance and understanding of like what is the best way to communicate to this region to this language it's probably not just taking English content and translating it into that language it probably deserves dedicated teams thinking through who understand how to communicate to a particular group of people um so yeah how do we get there hopefully with your help um would love to get you involved again we have a booth third floor come chat with us tomorrow we'd love to would love to hear from you but if we have time for questions maybe we do maybe we don't would love to chat we don't okay I'm done I'll go now thank you [Applause]