EF Progress and Priorities by Albert Ni (Devcon5)

[Applause] I think the metallics talk is called crypto economics in 30 minutes so I was like ah maybe actually call this talk if you're in foundation prioritization framework allocation philosophy and decision-making guidance in 30 minutes but just didn't quite have the same ring to it so welcome to subtraction in action but really it's a very vivacious privatization framework allocation philosophy in decision-making guys in 30 minutes so like I said I'm Albert I spend most of my time these days helping the EF wherever I can I've been a fan of ethereum since way back before even the dow fork but needless to say a lot has changed and one of the most important things is changes that the EF has become one small part of a big vibrating theory of ecosystem and that's not just good it's I think it's central for a game to thrive long term one reason is because you know when it comes to the future we are all like this parallel that I love and I just using every time which is the blind man and the elephant and so most of you probably heard this parable you have fine men they're feeling different parts of an elephant for whatever reason and they each get an incomplete picture out of this you know they make it different and incorrect assumptions about what they're touching I've had this to be a really like even though I have no idea why why men are doing this I find this to be really valuable because in the real world there's a lot of situations that are now into this in the real world there's a lot of situations where we don't see the whole picture of something including it do anything and even right now you know it was like new critique that no one can say what if Damien man is you know as there is it that and so we're having this much trouble describing what a theorem is today oh you know what can only imagine how hard it is to see the picture of what Athenian is going to be in five years so you know since I went through all the trouble making this this animation you're gonna use it twice in 2019 and then pairing them up in 2024 and this is not a price prediction it might be a state size prediction I'm just kidding it is an impact goal right for a theory you know for everybody who is in one of the very communities today there are a lot of people hundred probably more than that still to join them and something that I had talked about in her talk was how this independent flourishing that we have this vast vibrant ecosystem this makes Athenian special this is key to us growing into this 2024 potential so one of my favorite books from this book or fun one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books titled good strategy bad strategy I you can read the quote but it essentially says that you know life doesn't work like the movies in the movies the hero has this like crazy elaborate plan you know sometimes they manage to dodge a bullet by like a few inches and they never share what happens in movies they didn't manage to dodge the bullet and the real world doesn't work that way in the real world is more important to have create options and to have flexibility than have this like master 12-step plan and so when I think about the ability to create options I'll take what was said by I on a step further I think what we have here in an ecosystem isn't just what makes it special I think it's an outright superpower and so one of the things that we've been trying to explain better because that this like subtraction mindset you know it's about creating options it's about leveraging unfair advantages and it also recognizes and embraces that there's this unique opportunity and responsibility in it there anymore one thing that I think is important to note is it's not even like everyone I think can effectively apply the the subtraction mindset and another thing that I want to know is that this is not the EF claiming everyone has to operate this way but we do think that it's crucial to the EF future operations so that it can like fulfill its responsibilities and its potential as a steward and supporter of experiments so some of you a lot of you probably seen it now especially after I is talk but I'll just do a really quick speed review of some of the aspects of the subtraction mindset you know you have this like hole in an addition mindset you're trying to capture opportunity the subtraction of mind say you're trying to distribute them I think this contrast between trying to increase prestige and increase effectiveness is very interesting for instance universities don't seek to grow you know the terms of number of personnel or things like that necessarily but every University cares about its prestige and one could argue that it has come at the cost of the effectiveness over time and the basic one that I really like is just what do you think with other people other organizations and create value and I honestly I I really just did just be reviewed just so I could reuse this like because I love it so much it's from this day it's a fictional quote but I think exactly says you know like many kind of it says something really crisp about the real world and so you know this is obviously not the mindset that we are taking and so ultimately it's not that the point is that the efvs like he's trying to avoid responsibility or you know do all this other stuff it's just knowing that what matters most here's a theorem and how much the internal foundation matters that's kind of secondary or hopefully in service to the theory so that's nice but why is this so tricky because you know every organization cares about just doing the right things or being impactful / or whatever any tip I think at least for me it took a while to better understand and articulate the challenge so on the one hand obviously you know what we do matters right there's like and there's all these direct consequences to what we do but how we do things also really matters this is true everywhere but I think when you have an organization with the history of the entire nation and you have something like aetherium that is itself unprecedented then this like how things are done that and the second-order effect or the indirect consequences of what is done that also really matters it it often matters more and so when we talk about doing what's best for aetherium it's like okay of course we want to do that then the tensions arise for example some short-term versus long-term listen there's a very specific Daini of all kinds of organizations face challenges or hominis they're setting direction but then on the other hand you have this like huge ecosystem and does that curtail creativity similarly you know coordination is often extremely valuable to do something but of course decentralization is this hedge against a lot of the bad things that can happen how do those play off each other and even something like I think that is often overlooked which is you know when you endorse something it also might come with a chilling effect because if for example TF says hey look this project we're supporting them and someone else but I feel like well I'm not gonna work on something that does something similar because you know this other project already being endorsed by the yeah so that's not saying there's no no way around that but how you go about doing an endorsement how you go about doing those things also matters so to try to like at least be a little simpler I had a very hollowing BEF today's focus on two complementary goals there's there's working towards this world where aetherium is widely used and hopefully for good and also trying to build towards a world where aetherium values are widely family and like in this talk i won't have enough time to say like what is used for good necessarily mean or what the atheneum values are and those already exist ordinarily important and i'm not trying to like sweep it aside but it's really also not my place to say or our place to say but I do think that like it's obviously merits discussion and then we can also agree that in theory there is subversion of widespread good use of the dam and subversion of you know widespread Athenian values that would be desirable so figuring that out if there's one complicated enough figuring that out is also something that we want to work on to like me a little shorter we've got Gro etherium usage and you know spread at the end values and to dive into these a little bit for me at least grow usage is really this like shorthand way of talking about measurables it's not just about like transactions on chain or unique addresses or things like that but not you know everything can be quantified that easily but some measurements can still help us calibrate and I think another thing to note is that is we can be a lot more systematic about this at times you don't have to be like extremely precise like I I don't know the exact number is but I think it's it's got to be like 99.5% of software developers either have not done anything with ethereum or not like actively you know working on a theory I don't need to know what that exact number is I can tell you that anything that can plausibly increase the rate at which we can penetrate that market is probably worth exploring [Music] similarly you know spread values is a shorthand way of saying that there are things that matter that cannot be easily quantified and as I alluded to earlier I expect and seek enormous debate over what the quote value should be like I said it's not for that you have to decide alone and I think it's actually one of the reasons why subtraction mindset is so important because you know maybe two folks in this room you it's obvious that you wouldn't want to do this but we have people all the time they were like telling us you just say exactly what your values aren't until I wrote how they should be operating in your ecosystem um but yeah really the most important part here is that this is like hard to quantify stuff is just as important I think it might even be more important than the quantifiable stuff and it just have a quick example I think just even just the example that aetherium sets for others you know being an inspiration I know that for me personally seeing a different way of operating as a community than say like that the Bitcoin community was operating several years ago was was very attractive to me and then things like this are not going to be adequately captured by stats there's also things that we have to be wary of compromising right like if Tyrion becomes more centralized you know let's say partners with project or companies or governments to get quote more usage then maybe it's still called atheria but I'm not sure that it's the etherium that's being used and so the tie back to I was talking about earlier you can look at it as usage being primarily about first order you know direct consequences and values being about like second-order effects or indirect consequences and so as I noted earlier some action lines that creates options if leverages on three advantages and it embraces this like unique opportunity and responsibility another thing that I think has really shaped the way we think about things that the EPF is observing that this amazing ecosystem is now at a point where it seems like 90% of what if they're Indians happens organically and a lot of it happens better than quote central planning alone would lead to but there still definitely at least a 10% I could benefit from additional coordination or direction more accountability and so we take this like first-order effect lines naturally you'd want to identify this is ten percent you know a theorem is a normal company but I think I mean said this to me and I really liked it you also don't want it to fail in ways that like any normal company that were woollen now on the second-order effect lens there's how you go about approaching this right so we prefer approaches that would move things in this like ten percent bucket to the ninety percent move it from insufficient coordination for instance to like organic flourishing cuz I've been calling this the ten to nineteen philosophy so mapping back to a slide from ayahs talk you know sheer act for a density of incubation community support and going beyond aetherium it's like three of the main classes of support we're trying to provide and I think looking more closely especially at these particular examples almost all of them are examples of is 10 to 90 philosophy in action some other examples include just this general increased emphasis on the ecosystem support that some of you heard about and will be continuing to communicate more about something I mentioned a bit earlier but there's a chilling effect when you have a quote official project or even just when you give a grant something or when you've hardened something and so that doesn't mean you never do that but I think recognizing that this effect exists is important to determine the best ways to really support the outcomes we're trying to achieve another one is just biasing towards being commonly collaborative you know I'm not gonna and if the EF is a very decentralized organization in spite of what some might say we're not gonna sit here and say that when I first saw for instance some of the sponsors for DEFCON I was like oh that makes perfect sense like anybody's competitors you've all these other things but I think what's what's really interesting is for me one of these I threw me into atheneum is well if you operate in a way that everyone operated that way like you know does that make the world a better place and ethereum seem to be in this environment that kind of most gave the opportunity to express that and I think being uncommon II collaborative not blind later naively but at least I'm commonly collaborative is a really important part of making it possible for things to you know move 10 to 90 so all this you know ties into the support stuff that I has been talking about and improving our support capabilities is like obviously how well we allocate is a huge part of that and so sometimes I think about is like yeah you just figure out what to allocate or how hard can there be and then when I sit down and I try to think about it more and I talk with all the people throughout the ecosystem well you're just like an incomplete list of needs when we talk about a dam over the next five years right like obviously we'd like to see em usage grow with that there's community growth that's important to cultivate developer base needs to grow and then develop our output you know it's just not just quantity but like what each diver is capable of doing which is which is very different and very important course researcher base is still going to be important researchers often produce things that you know enable developers to be much much more effective and broadly speaking we also just need to support the research you can't just grow the researcher base we also need to find ways to support these researchers that are towards addendum tomorrow similarly there's a ton of development going into the future of this area and while we're talking about future we can't forget that there's also an apparent today and the security and upkeep of Atheneum today which I think does get a little bit overlooked at times is equally as important an extension of security notes but it's just this notion of downside protection right like there there are still many things that can happen that can single-handedly setback or destroy it all that we've building weren't towards but then the flipside of downside protection is this general notion of out-of-the-box ideas but I think if we get too locked into precisely defined categories we're going to lose a lot of the essence I mean if do you know the game itself was an out-of-the-box idea in the first place and of course you know I haven't even I don't think I covered everything but but before I forget there's also it's important to support everything in homemade that's consistent or whatever that's even going to mean with the theorems values so yeah take a look at all that and also tell me what I missed because I'm sure I have or tell me how you would break these things down further and this is a big part of what not just we have the EF but we you know it's an ethereal ecosystem we have to do together so my response to this is well we're not ready choice so challenge accepted and so in order to do all these things like what is it going to take well first I'll talk a little bit about what mediator decision-making looks like because I think like sometimes making less mistakes is just as important as having more hits often it's much easier to prevent than to fix you know fixing gets you glory and prevention doesn't and one of the reasons we know and maybe notice it as much but prevention is also extremely important and someone might have that we'll start with some common pattern that we try to employ there's a wishful thinking confirmation or narrative bias there's like a general lack of nuance like sometimes when you just infinitely create one thing in lieu of everything else and of course just pattern matching in general especially since like if you don't really know why the pattern that you're matching like maybe it makes sense to be matched then it might very well be coincidental so these are just some you know basic things to keep in mind easier said than done but something that we try to keep in mind with everything so I'm going to talk a little bit about how your for instance evaluate an allocation proposal there's a few big components here one is to precisely identify the goals another is to think holistically you know independent of the proposal about what are the best ways to achieve the goals and then there's no evaluating the proposal itself so got the steps here so coming back briefly to is presentation in it she showed some of the things that the examination has been supporting and just quickly went through them again we had grantees you know we had these other support designations and then these additional areas which I also showed earlier when I was talking about the tenten ID and obviously wasn't time to go at each and every one of them but I did think that what might be helpful is to kind of do a case study of what allocation looks like in practice because what's important is not like to be able to justify a mediocre decision is just to make a good decision and so we can talk about theory and framework all day but let's see what happens when you really put into practice and to illustrate this I chose a particularly interesting allocation story from this past year this was Emily like way more elaborate than most I can't emphasize it's about like everything needs to go through all the stuff that happened here because again the goal is not to produce better justifications it's actually just going to make better decisions as often as possible that often requires incomplete information well yeah operating with incomplete information but I chose the story because I think it just illustrates so many of the things that I've been talking about in the way that hopefully makes it more tangible so what was the catalyst we wanted that a popular thing developer is doing great work and it's looking for funding support this wasn't even a direct application by the way it wasn't like this there was an application of the grants program really yeah it's just something that we were paying noticing the attention to and I should be clear that this actually happens quite a bit this is a very dynamic space there's people moving around all the time doing lots of people doing great work from the EF is often making introductions exploring grant opportunities and so on with such people at the same time that you have it Canton and probably shouldn't react every single time something like this comes up but this particular situation caught our eye the work that has personally been doing it in contributing to onboarding more people to km and an effect on improving a new name UX and so we thought it may be it does make sense to give them more freedom let's break this down now remember I mentioned precisely identifying the laws and what I said here about onboarding or improving UX or giving more freedom I don't think that's precise enough so let's try to go deeper when we talk about onboarding more people to aetherium you know why do we want to do it and one obvious reason is we think this is going to lead to more ethereum usage but of course an important implication of that is that people will continue finding it am useful and not just what it done so you're not looking for like a gimmick on board something right you're actually looking for a sustainable like outcome about the reason might just be that like when you want more people to dam the people themselves might be developers and you know maybe those developer they become an ethereal developer and then maybe you never developer then creates new cases and you know the cycle kind of starts where it begins and there's many other possible reasons similarly with theorem UX right like when we talk about etherium improving at the end user experience you know for what impact is it may be increased accessibility may be successfully used to increase user growth may be increased as security like less user error and just in general like I think products are more useful when the UX is better and of course had so many other reasons like creamy goo accent would be good lastly forgiving is give more freedom well there was this hypothesis that would lead them to be more impactful and aetherium by an increased contributions to the onboarding that I mentioned UX stuff I mentioned and perhaps also other stuff we shouldn't restrict sale like what their work had been doing so far when there was evidence that they were doing lots of good work one thing I think is really cool is not any obvious at all who the sisters are so many people in the ecosystem that fit a lot of these attributes so moving forward step to holistically like how can we best achieve these goals and I think this is a really important step that often gets skipped I think oftentimes we jump too quickly to like providing an answer when instead we should be improving the question that's being actually out-of-the-box ideas often come from the question prompted by the federal questions not just directly answering a question so what is onboarding for onboarding more people to dinner um right like these are all these reasons I was saying earlier but breaking it down I think more questions that we want what are the best ways to grow a theorem usage or one of the best ways to go to the developer base there what are the best ways to create more use cases and similarly with UX you know we talked about these things increasing accessibility security usefulness but breaking that down where do we need to most increase accessibility what are the best ways again to grow the usage in what ways do we most need to improve security or just decrease user error which might not be strictly a security thing how can we improve it dreams usefulness in general and of course how can we make tinium products whatever that even might mean easier to use and then finally a way to give this person more freedom well like we thought it might increase their impact so what would the best ways to improve the onboarding like in general will be whether it's involves this person or not and same with UX but then also with the first thing you know what type of environment would help them be most impactful like is there guidance or mentorship and obviously financial support that would enable them to do their best work and so off of one situation easily come up with 20 goals that are potentially worth pursuing and at a meta level it's clear that increasing yes ability to provide support is going to be necessary to be able to be able to just work on one of these goals and and then another thing that's really important is that if you want to improve your allocations a big part of that is actually improving what opportunities you have to allocate right if sometimes a Belize options in front of you but you can create more options that's often the best way to like you know be able to make a better decision so earlier we talked about evaluating an allocation proposal but there's kind of miss Lang analog which is to create an allocation opportunity and then you do that like it's still very similar to evaluating our proposal but for instance inviting and seeking out proposals is obviously a very different staff than evaluating them now remember I had showed this slide just a moment ago about how to chumpy too quickly and I actually skipped over one extremely important question that should be asked remember we started with this we have a clear Athenian developer doing great work and so another question they should be asked is how do we increase the amount of great work being done in the space and that's already such a huge question so just to keep this a like a little bit simpler I'm gonna focus on how do we increase the great work being done by developers even though you know by no means is that the only category of work that's important so there's some dimensions here be nice to increase the number of developers you know by improving evangelism onboarding and retention there's also it'd be nice to improve productivity per developer Alya like tooling education or even just like this market like implicit market that exists for mentorship and collaboration opportunities rightly like sometimes you drive in the right company but if you can't discover that company then you know you're never gonna have a chance to thrive so what we did to work on this was we formed the working groups and these working groups did the following things in parallel they identified potential goals that we should focus on ASAP and they also performed deeper investigation of the topics you know just general research and interviewing people and even asking experts outside of the etherium ecosystem so when it came to goal is to focus on ASAP among other things for developer onboarding we worked on studio data theory on gorica thank you to the superblocks team and health out then you know I think in less than a couple of weeks now that's going to be alive and the developer experience side there were so many things but letting one of the most notable ones that came out very recently was was Bigler stack traces by the building collapse team furthermore you know this deeper research on developer experience it led us to seek out like developers who themselves are experienced with material are passionate about def X and have the bandwidth to help or you know maybe can we can help them create the bandwidth to help and so for instance as I but the bitter stacktrace is you know we've been collaborating a lot more with anomic labs teamed nomic labs team and with them and with a lot of other folks throughout the EF have been identifying a whole suite of developer experience improvement opportunities that maybe we can go 10 to 19 in terms of improving so also from an ethereal value standpoint this is cool because we're continuing to support in the ecosystem rather than trying to do things entirely in-house and I think that is a huge part of everything here another interesting aspect was this developer evangelism research right yeah I got I wrote it all up there but we connected a lot of the best developer evangelist in the world and these conversations confirmed like the value of having great developer evangelism and it also taught us a lot about what that might mean but we in addition learn how hard it might be to hire people for this so what's interesting here is like you know the best not only the best developer evangelist extremely hard to poach because they're often extremely valued but they also may not be great at being aetherium evangelists anyway right because it didn't is quite different than a lot of the other development stacks out there so that's all like tie together remember this all started with the Popular's developer doing great work and you know we were thinking about what it might like we were trying to assess the different goals and one question he asked was is there an environment that they could be more impactful and what type of guidance mentorship would enable them to do their best work that also led to us thinking about how do we increase the amount of great work being done which you know this is whole value of developer evangelism in addition finding out how hard it is to hire for that so you might even notice earlier if you're eagle-eyed developer evangelism program was kind of buried in this like incubation section and and I had showed and I've showed a few times here so putting on together we are now working on starting up developer evangelism program you know and on the back end we have you know Robbie banned myself from the earth other folks from this developer evangelism working group and on the front end popular Canadian developer doing great work you know well and this particular person here was awesome graphically many of you that worked on the burner wallet and all kinds of other things and this was really cool I think too when I think about all how this came together I think it's really like we're gonna work in with Austin develop this program we're gonna be able to leverage his passion and enthusiasm for evangelizing doing and I think it's just really fitting that we start with one of the most kind of--the entik passionate and prolific builders in etherium you know when we're talking to these various devam angeles a lot of them weren't really builders at heart they were actually more like evangelists at heart who happen to be able to build and then for if it didn't feel right to have anyone other than the likes home who's just first and foremost a builder and if anyone here knows austin you know that's like all he can do anything like the birth of his child is literally do anything that ever stops them and even then it's probably 36 hours in company anyway to wrap everything up here we've gone you know from the top kind of all the way down and I'll close by zooming back out right in theory was gonna have enormous direct consequences and perhaps even more enormous indirect consequences so we have a long way to go and because of that one of my favorite quotes is to hold tightly to the problems but loosely to the solutions for us because right now it seems that becoming more flexible dynamic and capable at providing support that's the best way that DF can you know practice the subtraction disappointing but as I said I'll hold loosely to the solutions like hopefully as a result of this talk you'll both better understand our reasoning and more importantly be able to give us feedback so thank you velvet I hope you're gonna enjoy [Applause]