Proposal: Forking ERCs from EIPs Repository

Cross referencing this post because I think it’s highly relevant to this discussion as well:

One thing that’s clear to many of us here is that we need to find a process to move forward still and from the sounds of @matt we’ve actually tried to land one something similar to what I’ve proposed. As dumb as this sounds, I think part of the issue of why this might not have worked in the past is simply in how we’re using github, FEM, Discord, and Twitter to organize discussions and move work forward. As I’ve heard it put best “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”. In this case, I think because we’ve tried to keep the “EIP process” within a single repository inside github that’s forced a lot of the processes we have today. For example, discussions moved to FEM because it was too hard to find the relevant discussions in the GH issues (I assume - please correct me if I’m wrong @matt). Also, editors ended up being core to the process because they were the ones who had merge rights in the repo. So, I think as we look at these changes we need to also evaluate how we’re using the tools to make this work.

For this reason, I don’t think my proposal in that linked post is best to do this in one large sweeping change. Instead my hope is that it is a “guiding plan” that we can iteratively implement and improve (or ignore in some cases) as we come across problems we need to solve.

For this specific problem (and I think it rings true for core devs and wallet devs alike) I think the first simplest step forward that we take is to form GH orgs for “ethereum-core” and “ethereum-standard-contracts” where we can start to create repos for EIPs to move forward. We could then turn the EIP repo in the “Ethereum” org into a landing page of sorts for finalized EIPs and a way to redirect to the other EIP areas. This way we’re still all within the “EIP brand”, but we’ve also got a bit more space to specialize and cultivate independent communities which we can cross pollinate in due time.

Also, I intentionally didn’t mention “ethereum-wallets” because I’m hesitant what to propose for wallets right now. Many are going multichain (not just EVM based, but also Solana or UTXO) these days so keeping this work only under the Ethereum umbrella could actually harm this area of development. We can figure out what to do for wallets a bit later, but it would be good to see what people think for them specifically once we’ve worked through getting the core/CL community and ERC community sorted first and learned what works and what hasn’t.