Argot Collective: A Credibly Neutral Home for Ethereum Core Infrastructure | Kaan Uzdogan | Grant |

[Music] so I had spoken to A A salana og once and he said that the religion of salana is to ship and ship hard which is something to think about next up we have can usdan from sourcify and Grant worker talking about argot the argot Collective a collect credibly neutral home for ethereum core infrastructure thank you hi everyone um yeah so I'm Grant and this is KH um and we are here on behalf of the Argo Collective which is uh EF spinout in its later stages of formation um we're here to tell you about this new spin out so first of all I'm curious if I get to show hands from the audience just to see how many people are familiar with these EF spinouts it could be Argo it could be be Geo datw work or it could be um powder has anyone heard of these okay not many so this is good to know um yeah so the EF it's following through this with a subtraction philosophy and people from the EF um are kind of spinning out into their own organizations and seeking their own long-term sustainability um so yeah that's what this is about yeah so about Argo um our ethos is uh you know all about um open source software related to ethereum um and Democratic organization so um as mentioned we're an EF spinout so right now it's just EF Personnel um there's 25 of us and we all focus on this specific do of languages and language tooling and formal verification tools um let's see uh we're so right now we're kind of one foot in the EF and one foot in our new organization um and the new organization it's a Swiss Association um and yeah we've got our uh legal entity registered and we're working on setting up our uh bank accounts and multi- signature um and finalizing the you know fundraising terms with the EF or uh Grant ter initial grace period Grant terms with the EF uh so yeah this is better yeah that covers that slide uh so these are the uh projects that we work on um we have the first two are formal verification tools hm and act um and then we've got two smart contract languages fee and solidity I'm sure all of you are familiar with solidity that's uh our most high-profile uh software project and most of the members work on solidity um and yeah then we've also got um eth debug and sourcify sourcify is a um open source and open data source code verification service and eth debug is a new debugging Tool uh for evm so why are we doing this again it's because of the subtraction philosophy uh you've probably heard this a lot if you want to learn more about the subtraction philosophy you can go to ethereum foundation/ philosophy and read about it there also a gave a presentation at Devcon uh where she explained uh subtraction philosophy and then also talked about um Argo and other spin outs um and the goal is to create multiple credible credibly neutral organizations within the ecosystem so yeah now let me tell you about our governance model so in most traditional organizations you have a management structure um where people manage and tell you what you can and can't do um determine how uh funds are spent who gets hired who gets fired uh at Argo we have sort of like a decision framework sort of like an operating system you know maybe you want to think about it that way but we have this formally uh written decision agreement and uh we we make decisions based on this and we'll get we'll get into more details on how that works it's a consent-based decision uh framework so it's not like majority rules it's a little bit more nuanced um and uh by being consent-based uh there's there's less fatigue from the members uh when it comes to uh participating in the governance uh ructure yeah and uh also just to note uh we're trying to keep the small SI the size small uh right now it's 25 of us and we're probably not going to grow too quickly we have the projects that we've been working on and we're going to continue working on them and uh we'll create more projects gradually over time and change things but um as of right now we just want to keep it small and make sure that uh we can work at this scale so yeah a little bit more about our our government's model um we have five decision types and these were uh we we learned a lot from the inspiral foundation if any of you have heard of them uh they wrote a handbook that describes how you uh create an organization like this that has this Democratic governance model um yeah we looked at their decision agreement and you know initially copy and pasted but we've made a lot of modifications to it um and we'll continue making modifications to it you know you can you can modify the governance model using the governance model uh yeah so a couple examples we have a standard decision you know which could be starting a contract with someone uh maybe giving a grant to someone um and yeah this is this is kind of an example of the consent-based uh voting system because doesn't require majority it just requires um that not so many like it's not like disagreed with so much and no one's blocking it like that's all that matters if someone if someone if a few people say no on it um you know it's really not a big deal they still uh by not blocking it they're giving consent uh to the decision uh and so far it's it's worked pretty well um another example Quorum this is something that would be like a um something that has very serious qu consequences um yeah and that requires a lot more participation uh yeah we will be publishing these um at some point soon uh the decision agreement that is and then also um you know other details about our operations uh yeah so why this governance model uh is just it's just aligned with our core values um I think on an individual basis um and also it's in line with our uh organizational ethos of being Democratic uh ultimately you just have to decide on a governance model like decisions need to be be made and you need to have a way of making decisions and we started from uh this uh clean slate and we were able to do whatever we wanted and this is just what we came up with another nice thing about this is that everyone could make their voice heard you know having participated in you know the corporate world um and you know being at the ethereum foundation decisions are just kind of made in these environments um whether you like it or not and and I think it's really cool that there's the set time for decisions to go through and people can voice can voice their opinions and you know a lot of times you get things that people just say everyone says yes on it and then one person comes through and you know they block it and they're like hold on guys there's something that we need to consider here um you know I think that's really cool and that sort of feedback doesn't doesn't really make it into the minds of like managers typically uh yeah so now uh talking about funding and sustainability uh so we're working out the terms of an initial Grant with the EF um that will get us through for a few years and uh yeah we've also uh be we've also been working on uh fundraising ourselves um the biggest example of this is the op rgf um rounds yeah we've we've raised uh over a million op so far and we do it on on a project basis you know just to talk a little bit about this quickly um with with the way that these um fundraising uh things whatever you call them rpgfunny which you know it's kind of cool because it gives it gives feedback on how much the Community Values your projects you know so yeah and if if uh this if our no strings attached fundraising doesn't work out um we can look into uh Consulting things that won't affect our credibly our credible neutral stance um and there are certain things that we will not do like a token or Equity sales um or closed Source data monetization um yeah hand it over yeah so I'll I'll be taking over the the rest of the slides and giving you an overview how uh our day-to-day look like currently in Argo uh before that again introducing myself my name is Khan I'm working on the project called sourcify open source and open data source code verification going back to Argo so um we organize ourselves within Argo and we form working groups and and most of the administrative taas tasks and the processes are conducted by these working groups and where necessary we will be Outsourcing most of the operations for example payments expenses travel organization when these align with our core Valu so we of course our main focuses are our technical projects and we want to keep our overhead minimal and besides the software we'll be using and we want to use the software that are more aligned with our values in in that sense we won't be using Gmail we will be using FastMail instead not no no Google Drive instead crit pad and hmd and for the chat we are using currently Matrix and for calls we are using GC instances we are having weekly and bi-weekly All Hands meetings where we discuss the matters um and also gather and see everyone uh in one place but in general all of the processes are not so much involved with the rest of the uh Collective working groups and projects themselves self-organized and handle the tasks um we will be doing a 4-day work week currently we're not doing that but in a four we 4 day work week schedule uh we'll be doing a maximum of 140 hours and everyone will be having full flexibility in invoicing hour so that means if you want to work less or if you have other stuff to do you can inv voice less and you getting a less salary that week that month uh but it's capped at 140 and above all we have an equal hourly pay for all so regardless every 25 members will be having uh an equal pay and being a global global organization it's quite important to have iners meetings we will be having at least one offsite per year the last one we had in puket during uh Deon Bangkok the other one uh will be happening in a couple months probably in Europe uh and we will try to keep close ties within this organization because we believe having a close um close group that knows each other well is really important to this whole Democratic process to work uh and as Grant uh also mentioned we will be doing our decisions and voting on lumio so talking about lumio I'll be giving a couple visual examples of how decisions and processes look like for example you can see here in our lumio instance we have a infrastructure policy and mandate this is a fairly easy task put forward by the infrastructure working group mainly outlining what software we want to use what values we want to look for when deciding on software and the rest of the execution is left to the infrastructure working group as you can see out of 25 uh we have 16 people uh saying yes and this vote passes anonymously and this is a standard decision here uh the next one is regarding a contractor for the solidity language Sol project in that case this this um Waring is put forward by Daniel and as you can see here most of the people abstains because they just leave the decision to the solidity team and the rest of the solity team says yes and this this decision passes with with a with this certain amount of votes and here you can see the graph of how many decisions uh and votings we have made the spike here is the biggest problem in the computer science is naming trying to decide on the name of Argo we had a lot of votings and had some fun let's say but over time you can see we have a good number of votings and have a good number of decisions without uh causing water fatigue so we also don't want to do so much votings and vot and discuss every single stuff and uh get tired over time this is how our chat looks like and also an overview of some working groups uh you can see there's a working group and chat for offsite offsite planning Communications legal risks infrastructure even for the Devcon talk that we had with Grant uh and yeah other stuff that you can see uh we also take the transparency really serious and it's one of our core values and with that regard we want to publish our governance framework and our handbook to explain how we are making decisions and also how we are running Argo day to-day and also for the others to benefit from that as we benefited from inspiral foundation and other other institutions we want to also uh publish reports on financials budgets our road maps and our funding terms and of course all of the work we are putting as Argo is always and will be fully open source and in general we think there's a lack of transparency in the ecosystem and as Argo we really want to uh be a leading example in that front finally about the future of the collective our goal is to spin out uh by the by the first half of 2025 things are taking time of course but uh we want to um meet these goal meet this goal and in general the existing projects are secondary uh but the overall goal of the collective is become a credible neutral home for the core infrastructure and languages and research research of uh ethereum ecosystem over time we'll be possibly giving away grants we'll be supporting other projects where we think uh it's necessary especially this is a highly technical group of group of people and they will be able to see what specific needs are are required in the ecosystem in the technical terms and we we want to give away grants and support projects and people that should be supported uh but of course over time we'll be starting new projects we'll be retiring new projects but in general we will be uh we want to emphasize that we'll continue maintaining solidity until uh as long as it's uh considered useful and an important project in the ecosystem and lastly uh we want to become an example of democratic governance for the community and to be able to show uh how can such an organization be run and that this is indeed possible to do so uh thank you everyone for listening if you want to learn more uh visit our website you can read our man uh manifest Manifesto and our announcement post for a detailed explanation and feel free to follow us on GitHub and Twitter and farcaster um we have two and a half minutes so we can take a quick question I guess if there's any I guess we don't have a audience mic but if you can shout we can have one question if there is none feel free to find us after the talk and thank you for your attention