Call for contribution to the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians
In the light of recent feedback, I’d like to continue the discussion started in AllCoreDevs, Network Upgrade & EthMagicians Process Improvements - #23 by timbeiko and focus on the forum itself and how we could improve it. Various community members have expressed their interest in enhancing the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians.
I invite people that want to contribute to the curation / moderation effort to use this topic to propose their ideas and volunteer. As @bumblefudge suggested, we need more moderators to take care of the topics. We can also leverage discourse AI plugin, as detailed here, to bring changes with little human effort. IMO, we should strive to make the forum more efficient and adapt it so that it can generate fine-grained newsletter/RSS-feed type information. This way, users can subscribe to categories they want to keep up to date with, reducing the effort needed to follow Ethereum’s progress.
Let’s discuss and experiment, innovative propositions are super welcome. I’m convinced we can do all those things while remaining true to the values and purpose of the Fellowship. This one just dropped :
This call for contribution could be a good opportunity for assets to be designed for the forum. I think we have a great theme and it’s under used. While keeping in mind that the fellowship is a technical forum so design shouldn’t go too extravagant. We could have a small poll over logos and category icons. I propose a 1 month period for everyone to submit assets then we can have a poll starting from 2024-09-14T22:00:00Z. Here is my proposal for the logo you may recognize some ethresear.ch vibe:
Decisions/actions from calls need to be shared soon after they occur (if there are no decisions why bother having the call).
I’ve been experimenting with sharing acd & breakout calls in Eth Magicians as wiki posts and updating them with copies of decision writeups/recaps/summary/notes.
The community can then access these all in the one place, either via Eth Magicians directly or from news sources pointing to them (I have been experimenting with this for Week in Ethereum News). We can also collate additional info (presentations, audio recordings, writeups).
We should close these topics soon after the calls, as they aren’t the venue for protocol discussions (should happen in Eth R&D Discord) or prior to the specific call (ethereum/pm issues for the agenda). Same for the wiki post, to prevent vandalism.
Perhaps topics could be auto magically created from ethereum/pm issues.
I’m also keen for transcripts & chat logs to be made available very quickly after a call (within 24 hours). These are stored in ethereum/pm repo but take weeks/months rather than hours/days.
Templates
I want to see more use of templates.
The EIP template is just starting to be used. We should do similar for ERCs, and encourage authors to update their discussion to use the template.
We should also use templates for Protocol Calls & happenings
Sharing
I’d like to see experiments with social media AI bots sharing individual topics as they are created (similar to @ethresearchbot) on X/Farcaster or weekly summaries.
Volunteer
I volunteer as tribute, either as a trusted member (so I can close call posts I create) or as a mod. Though I have very limited time to contribute. [Update: I am now a mod]
Brand
Eth Magicians (Ethereum + Magicians). We should drop the word Fellowship and discourage the use of the FEM acronym (acronyms are a barrier).
The logo should be a combination of an Ethereum logo (in yellow/gold) and magic (stars/wand)
Introducing a new contender: where magic meets cuteness with a sprinkle of experimental flair!
We all know Ethereum’s magicians aren’t your average wizards—they’re the daring visionaries who make Ethereum magically powerful, continuously shipping EIPs and keeping this billion-dollar ecosystem thriving.
This new logo captures that very spark, representing the enchanting energy they bring to the blockchain.
But that’s not all. Let’s face it—core devs are an undeniably cute bunch. It’s time for the logo to finally reflect that! This new design radiates just the right amount of adorable, showcasing our charm without compromising on credibility:
When examining the triangle representing the logo trilemma, it’s clear the new design lands perfectly between ‘cute’ and ‘taken seriously.’ I’ll admit, I was initially surprised by this balance, but considering how amazing the logo turned out, it totally makes sense!
And in true Ethereum spirit, we want to push boundaries and try something fresh. The logo strikes the perfect balance between “yes, we’re serious pioneers” and “hey, we’re also irresistibly cute!” So, get ready for a logo that embodies the magic, quirkiness, and creativity of Ethereum’s finest.
To follow up on this quote, we tried to drop the word “fellowship” and we actually stopped calling this community “fellowship of ethereum magicians” and called it “ethereum magicians or eth magicians” for quite a while. I tried to find “an official statement” when we dropped the word “fellowship” but the closest I found, is this article that I wrote a while ago:
To respond, generally on this thread, I’m really happy that there are these incentives and initiatives as well as proposals on “bringing magicians back to life”. As someone who has poured a lot of efforts into fostering and growing this wonderful community, alongside many others such as @boris and a few others. FEM started as a community of people who came, contributed and eventually left. Some of us burned out through constant effort of trying to make improvements and eventually ended up hitting the wall. And the only way to save our sanity was to leave this community. I’m speaking from my own experiences here and from the conversations that I had with a couple of FEM members.
I’d like to throw a few references here to remind everyone what FEM, Eth Magicians used to be and I’d love it the continuous efforts of keeping this amazing community enthusiastic would continue in somewhat similar voice, or at least keep some of the spirit. This is how FEM started, how it differentiated from other groups.
Thank you so much to @abcoathup@bumblefudge@matt and others for continuous efforts and contributing to the FEM forum as well as keeping this place magical!
Hello Eth Magicians, I am ninjafire, a ux/ui designer in the space for a few years. I would love to support you with this mission if i can help in any way. For me the first question that pop to my mind is How will you use this logo? Where will you display it?
I am completely new to this forum and I didn’t notice the current logo and where it is already displayed.
I love the logo design-off happening here, and I don’t want to distract from it, but one operational detail I’d like to bang on is that ERC is currently a category of its own and Wallets/Browsers/Dapp-front-ends are currently not a category, nor is it obvious which of the 8 categories that topic would be most welcome in. On desktop, 8 categories displays kinda weird, maybe a 9th would round out the tictactoe table?
I’m not sure if we call it “Wallets” or “Front-end” or “Web” or just lean into the standards-nerd thing and call it “Presentation Layer” or “User-Agents” (which technically includes browsers, DOMs, extension wallets, and mobile wallets if you think about it!). But whatever it is, I would volunteer to moderate it and set up a readme/landing page for it and would recommend @SamWilsn get mod rights to it as well, since AllWalletDevs is his baby and he knows 100X more than I do about wallets and wallet testing!
The main logo is dispayed on top of the page then you have another logo that can be displayed at the same place during the scrolling (reading) of a thread called small logo. And then you have category icons which are displayed on the homepage for each category.
Seems very reasonable indeed the 8 categories doesn’t fit the welcome page on desktop. Also, I’m still trying to find a good way to revive the working group category.
For the category name IMO “Wallets” seems like the natural option however it doesn’t cover everything as we’re seeing more and more wallet abstraction and different flows that are not really “Wallets”. So I have no strong opinion on this one your propositions are good. “Front-end” or “Web” might be my favourites.
As for @SamWilsn I totally agree, we’ll need his confirmation but that would be great to have both of you to take care of this category as we can expect it to be quite active.
I have made some tries recently on the Ethereum Magicians logo. I am not able to post any images or link so it is impossible for me to share the designs. If someone has a solution about this i would be really happy to share my work with you haha
Alright, thank you @abcoathup, now i think i am able to share my logo proposition. I didn’t work on the color palette for now but more on the shape of the logo. Please let me know your thoughts about it.
The Ethereum Magicians poll, will run until 2024-09-30T12:00:00Z. The contender with the most votes will become the main logo and others will become category icons. Each designer will be allowed to chose the category that he wants to represent according to the final rank of his submission (2nd gets to chose first). Everyone can select up to 3 choices, the results votes are public, may the best win !
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and it’s under used. While keeping in mind that the fellowship is a technical forum so design shouldn’t go too extravagant. We could have a small poll over logos and category icons. I propose a 1 month period for everyone to submit assets then we can have a poll starting from 2024-09-14T22:00:00Z. Here is my proposal for the logo you may recognize some ethresear.ch vibe:
I volunteer as tribute, either as a trusted member (so I can close call posts I create) or as a mod. Though I have very limited time to contribute.
