Open Source Community
The Baseline Protocol initiative was announced on March 4, 2020 and launched as an OASIS open source project on March 19, 2020, supported by fourteen founding companies. The number of active companies and individuals contributing to the work and using it in products and enterprise solutions grew quickly through the Summer of 2020 and currently is estimated at over 600.
The initiative is strongly aligned with the Mainnet Working Group, a joint effort of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and the Ethereum Foundation.
This work is active and open to contributors.
All work in the Baseline Protocol public repo is released under the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication. For the full license text, refer to license.
In an openly governed open standards / open source initiative, leadership is organic. One need not be seated to a committee to lead. One need not be the chair to lead the community in a direction. (Indeed, the chair's primary job is to harmonize the interests of others and help the community move to a shared vision, not necessarily to forward their own point of view.)
The way to lead is to start something, help something, fix something...even spellcheck something! The way to lead is to get others to amplify what you are doing (best done by listening deeply to others first). The way to lead is to serve your own (and your company's) enlightened self interest. You should be able to draw a straight line from your time on this work to real impact for your own offerings.
Below are the things you need to know to get informed, get involved and get value out of the work.
Anyone can join the Baseline Protocol communication channels (see below), and anyone with a Github ID can view the roadmap (don't forget to log in with github id), fork the repo, and submit pull requests to contribute to the work.
You can also become a regular Member of the initiative, which will allow you to manage Issues and push directly to most repo branches (other than Master). Members who step up to be accountable for projects can become Specification Steering Committee (SSC) members. Members who take on responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the work and merging contributions to the master branch of the repo can become Maintainers. And finally, contributors can nominate and vote-in members to be on the governing Technical Steering Committee (TSC) annually.
Below are the things to know about how to get involved and work with the team.
There are regular meetings of the TSC, SSC, Maintainers and other groups. These are typically listed here. If the times we have don't work for your timezone, we can do 1-1's or make changes to the schedule.
It's critical that new contributors have a good idea about what the focal points of the community are and where one can make a real impact. It's hard to beat having a real conversation about how to get started in an intimate setting where you can ask questions and get immediate answers.
We will hold Onboarding office hours once a week. Watch the Calendar for details or inquire on one of the communication channels below. Sessions and other learning material will be posted on our YouTube Channel and on Medium.
The TSC meets typically once a month to review progress -- biweekly during the early direction setting period from March to June of 2020. Members of the TSC receive invitations and you can rsvp to join any meeting by sending a message to the TSC Chair.
The SSC meets typically once a month to review roadmaps and set high-level priorities -- biweekly during the early direction setting period from March to June of 2020. Members of the SSC receive invitations, and you can join any meeting by sending a message to the TSC Chair.
The Baseline Protocol initiative maintains a Slack channel that is moderated but public. Sign up here. It's an active group, and you can directly connect with folks doing the work and coordinate with each other to get the work done.
Thanks to an enterprising member of the community, we now also have a shared Matterbridge-enabled channel between Slack, Telegram, and Discord. You can post -- and read what anyone posts -- on the shared channel, regardless of which platform you are using. In Slack, use the #community-chat channel to broadcast to Slack, Discord and Telegram. In Discord, use the #general channel. In Telegram, just use the main /baselineprotocol thread.
You can sign up to the baseline protocol members list and get access to the Directory. This will show you any members who have elected to be displayed publicly. There are others who will choose to be hidden but will receive group emails.
While most communication seems to go through the Slack/Discord/Telegram channel, we do have email. When you sign up in the members directory, you will have the option to get email that's sent to the mailing list or directly from anyone in the group. You can control how that impacts your inbox here.
The Baseline Protocol initiative is launching soon a Discourse forum. Reddit is also likely. We also actively use commenting on Epics and Issues to conduct threaded discussions on key projects and engineering topics. To View the Zenhub Board for these, sign into Github with your ID, or you can install the Zenhub plugin to your Chrome browser and sign in that way. If you are member of the Ethereum-Oasis Org.
The Baseline Protocol initiative maintains the @baselineproto Twitter account, to which members of the TSC, SSC and some maintainers can post. We also use the #baselineprotocol tag.
The Baseline Protocol initiative uses Medium to post blogs. Here is the publication. Reach out on Slack to the TSC Chair, OASIS team or members of the steering committees, if you want to be a writer or editor.
The Baseline Protocol initiative maintains a YouTube Channel. If you have videos that you'd like to add to the Channel or would like to help on Baseline Protocol video assets, use the Slack #comms-and-marketing channel and raise your hand.
