Background
Admins & moderators
[From: About - Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians]
Admins
@jpitts - Eth Magicians co-founder, EF DevOps
@anett - independent
@matt - EF Geth core dev
@nicocsgy - EF
@elasticroentgen - EF (assume DevOps)
Mods
@abcoathup - independent (former editor Week in Ethereum News)
Genesis
[From @anett: https://x.com/anettrolikova/status/1858537436378493308]
The Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians started back around Devcon3 where Jamie Pitts who was working as DevOps guy at EF and Greg Colvin who was involved with Core Devs as incentive to provide a place on the internet (and in person via Council meetings) for Core Devs and community to coordinate around EIPs. The logo of FEM was sparkle emoji and the tagline was “Rough consensus and running code”. Jamie wrote An open invitation to participate in a Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians | by James Pitts | Medium blog post describing vision, mission and goal behind the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians. This is when the FEM forum was born.
I was introduced to Jamie who invited me to help out with FEM operations as I was motivated to learn and wanted to help out with whatever I could. Jamie was kind enough that he decided to let me help with forum operations and host the FEM Council in Berlin and Community Room at Devcon Osaka. I designed cute unicorn stickers for this Council and this has become a sticker mascot for the FEM community, which I made multiple versions of for different events. Even nowadays I meet people with this cute sticker on their laptops!
2024
Eth Magicians was used for EIP/ERC discussions (which moved from GitHub issues), @Tim providing a venue for community engagement on future upgrades, and writing on ACD/upgrade process improvements (e.g. AllCoreDevs, Network Upgrade & EthMagicians Process Improvements) and me occasionally asking for naming for upgrades/testnets.
@anett elevated my privileges, as I wanted to hide recovery spam. (I was reading every topic and reply each week day as part of my former job).
I wanted a single location to permanently store ACD (and other protocol call) summaries of actions/decisions. (AllCoreDevs, Network Upgrade & EthMagicians Process Improvements - #3 by abcoathup) and started an experiment to use Eth Magicians. I was manually creating a topic per protocol call, making them wiki posts, adding tags, adding links to recordings and summaries (and chasing call moderators for these).
@nicocsgy (EF) got involved to refresh Eth Magicians (and was made an admin) and made a callout for improvements (Call for contributions - Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians). The categories were updated and a new logo was the result. @nicocsgy also made me a moderator.
2025
Automation
@nicocsgy is in the process of automating creating an Eth Magicians topic for each protocol call in ethereum/pm (I had been doing this manually). My end goal/hope is that this will also include links to call transcripts & chat logs. Also to map GitHub labels to Discourse tags (tags are currently done manually but apologies for any I missed as I’ve been less active since my job ended).
Infrastructure
Historically infra was handled by @jpitts
[From @anett: https://x.com/anettrolikova/status/1858537436378493308]
Jamie Pitts is still working at EF as DevOps but he was running the FEM forum infra
ethmag.org was purchased by @Nixo and pointed at ethereum-magicians.org
There were some recent outages during upgrades (Mar 21, Mar 29 & Apr 3) and as part of this it led to a migration of the forum to EF Discourse infrastructure.
Apologies in advance for any errors, corrections appreciated.