Going forward, it it crucial for the All Core Devs process to be more inclusive of many different stakeholders in the industry. Recent conversations around EOF have revealed the weaknesses of the governance process to include voices outside of the core client teams, Tim’s recent post addresses this and calls for improvements to ACD. To go further in this direction, I believe ACD would benefit from having it’s own platform to serve as an official entry point for anyone in the ecosystem to voice their opinion.
At the moment the primary place for stakeholders in the ecosystem to voice their concerns is to join an ACD call. There are inherent limitations to this: there are only so many people that can be reasonable accommodated in a synchronous call. Such a small set cannot be said to represent the wider community as a whole, but just a tiny segment that happened to show up today. Speaking in an ACD call may also be more difficult for an outsider, who has to follow the ACD process and agenda, and wait through lots of technical discussions that are unrelated to them. There are other ways people in the ecosystem could voice their opinions: sharing async and being represented by someone else on ACD, posting on Ethereum magicians forum or Twitter. Although this can work, it is generally a haphazard approach that does not provide a structured way to judge the opinions of the wider ecosystem - we can build something which is the perfect format for this, tailored to the ACD process.
In light of this I propose creating a new ACD platform. This would be the canonical channel for everyone in the ecosystem to share their opinions on fork scoping and proposals asynchronously. This could include L2s, staking operators, application devs, tooling devs, etc. as well as the client teams themselves. Having a clear place to submit opinions simplifies things for everyone in the ecosystem. This allows us to rely on hard evidence in ACD calls; rather than using whoever shows up in the call as evidence of the community’s will, we can use actual statistics on a much larger set of stakeholders that are able to share their opinions asynchronously. As well as a place to submit opinions on fork scoping this platform could have wider applications as an entry point for ACD: giving opinions on individual EIPs / proposals, sharing important updates, agenda items, summaries.
In summary, if we are serious about bringing more voices into ACD then I believe building a new platform (or building on top of an existing one like Ethereum magicians) would be invaluable. Furthermore, I am not proposing to create this platform, then sit around and wait for people to use it - involving stakeholders will require active outreach from those more heavily involved in governance. The platform itself just acts as a hub, the canonical place that we can use to evidence what is most important to the community.