Announcing the formation of a Working Group / Ring for token standards.
I’m putting this as a place holder while we gather interest and go through the steps of ring formation (forging?). Let me know if you want to contribute!
@mattlock can I count you in?
Hey @Recmo I’m interested. I have a certain dual-token/non-global-currency-pegged token standard I’ve been developing that may be useful to move through this group. What are your thoughts on how this Ring will form/create direction?
Also as your designing your Ring, might be useful to have your feedback on the FEM-Ring definition/criteria we’re designing in Process for Ring Formation if you’re interested in putting forth your thoughts.
@Recmo definitely in!
Been gathering my thoughts as well as reaching out to some people. Hard while on the road!
Will follow up soon! Thanks for setting this placeholder!
Would love to be part of this! Been following token standards pretty closely for sometime ; https://github.com/PhABC/ethereum-token-standards-list.
Philippe Castonguay (Horizon Games) @PhABC
I’d love to be part of this too. Working mostly on how to standardize tokenized securities and exploring different avenues for doing so.
Initial Thoughts on Token Ring Formation:
@Recmo thanks for placeholding this topic. Thank you everyone for an amazing time at FEM Council of Berlin, notably @jpitts and @boris for organizing, keeping things on track, identifying areas of forward momentum and following up with action and content.
Token Ring
A working group for EIPs focused on standards and best practices related to tokens.
Goals
Early Process Thoughts
I’m seeking feedback here as I’m admittedly new to OSS development with this wide of a community and far reaching impact.
I have a rough concept that there would be a guiding “fellowship” of 9 members who would oversee the process and move tokens standards along their respective milestones, to be established in a formal process.
The fellowship would be responsible for educating the wider public through means of blog posts and other activity, branding themselves as an authority for moving token standards forward.
The fellowship would also identify strong community members who contribute frequently to token standards discussions and potentially “resign” and switch their membership. This could also be gracefully forced by other fellowship members, due to a lack of bandwidth and / or contributions from the member in question and seeing a more active participant in the community.
The fellowship would manage funds contributed by projects in the space and these would be allocated toward bounties and documentation for specific standards.
HOWEVER, all of these decisions would also be FIRST put to a public poll using some off the shelf polling software, e.g. Google Forms and time boxed for efficiency, e.g. 24 hours to vote. Basically, show up, vote on the action item and the fellowship will likely follow the wisdom of the crowd unless something is suspicious, harmful to the community or dangerous.
Potential Standards to Workshop Process
Hey Matt, what do you mean by “Potential Standards to Workshop Process”?
These are already proposed standards with a strong use case and community groundswell. We should establish the ring around promoting the development and adoption of these standards, with community input and formalizing our process over the course of moving these standards through that process. A “two birds” idea.
As @PhABC has mentioned on the NFTy Magicians Discord Channel #standards
There is now 1155, 1178 & 1203 that have the almost same goal and I feel like more will be coming
. I think we should set a call with everyone so we can find a comon ground somewhere, otherwise we will have like 10 different interfaces that all try to achieve the same thing. Perhaps on the long term it won’t matter (most popular will “win”), but I think we can avoid this by having a group of people comply to the same standard from the get-go. What do you think?
This is how we can start within sub-working groups to settle differences and establish the abstract generalizable patterns that are higher level and work on them together.
The token ring would provide these groups with guidance, funding, social signalling support and a somewhat “official” seal of progress and approval over time.
STRESSING the fellowship members are not king makers and ultimately everything is open to the community to vote. The idea of the ring is that it includes everyone from the community in the process, the fellowship members would simply enact the interests of the ring.
Edit that into the wiki here that @Recmo started --> https://github.com/ethereum-magicians/scrolls/wiki/Token-Ring
Standards can grow like weeds, duplicating themselves and becoming incompatible. I think a ring could help coordinate and channel things to make standards better and provide a way for funding. Sounds good.
The EIP / ERC process already exists. I would suggest starting there – converging on process especially with interconnected standards will be most useful.
The 9 members in particular doesn’t make a lot of sense / isn’t open. Anyone is welcome to submit an ERC, and if it is token standards related, they’ll want to get involved with the Token Ring.
Funds, education, etc – up to the Ring, but I’d suggest staying outside the funds thing for now. For starters, you might want to organize a Token Ring Meetup, which will likely need some sponsorship.
Public poll: you probably don’t want this 
I agree the EIP / ERC standards is a great place to start but I think the process that the token ring would establish is an education, support, social signalling and yes eventually community funding layer on top. I don’t want to re-invent the wheel but I think some “gas” could be spent to help the community:
I love this list, thanks so much @PhABC for all the hard work.
We should link this up to @Recmo 's token ring github here: https://github.com/ethereum-magicians/scrolls/wiki/Token-Ring
Already done I see… lol
Everything that you mention here is ideally what the Rings can take on over time, and can share with each other, especially through templates and other materials through meta Rings like Education.
Want to get some grants to do those things as Token Ring activities? Great! Just that neither FEM nor Rings are formal entities, so would need to flow through an individual or company.
I like the idea of formalizing leadership to ensure longevity, continuity & keep things organized.
Was there a particular reason for fixing on 9 members? Did you have particular roles in mind that you wanted filled that make up these 9? (e.g. treasurer, outreach/marketing, education, code maintainers, etc.) Or, did you want to keep it more flexible with a range of min size (to survive) and max size (beyond which decision-making & communication gets overly complex)?
It was more of a odd numbers council and Fellowship of the Ring reference. Definitely flexible!
Good point on perhaps having a grant to establish Ring activities.
The education part is also great. The more the wider community understands what goes on the better. Open source blogging, reporting and documentation of these processes will help with all of that.
I understand the need for a formal body if there’s banking involved. However, as I discussed with James from EF Grants and @GriffGreen there could be a multi-sig wallet that is controlled by the members of a ring in order to place ETH / DAI bounties. That was more what I had in mind RE: funding.
The token ring would do this once a month to keep a modest flow of activity on the aforementioned blogging and documentation, in addition to the spec and implementation work.