Session: Building in public: The EIP process
How do communities build open source software together? The IETF has RFCs. Linux has mailing lists. Python has PEPs. React has…Facebook. When open source projects grow beyond personal projects, they need some sort of process by which to manage changes and enhancements. It can be a simple Github issue list where changes are debated in the comments and decisions ultimately made by a group of benevolent maintainers, a steering committee that holds regular meetings and feedback sessions with a whole host of teams contributing designs, code, tests, and feeedback, or anything in between. Ethereum is one such project that has developed a process for managing its own evolution, emphasizing diversity and community involvement. The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP for short) process has evolved into a relatively well defined set of guidelines for how changes to the Ethereum specification are developed and deployed. In this session, we will look at the lifecycle of an EIP (specifically EIP-4844), from when the idea is born in the ethresear.ch forums to design, development, testing, and ultimately deployment in code on the Ethereum mainnet.
