Office hour slots are now officially closed. Apologies if we didn’t get to you. We’ll try to provide at least DM feedback.
If you’ve already posted an RFC and started a draft app and you want a spot of live feedback for your app (PIG apps only), post your request and specific points you want feedback on under this thread along with a link to your RFC. Either Venkat or Tim will reach out via DM if we feel we can help strengthen the app. We’ll reach out to as many applicants as we can who we feel can benefit from our feedback, within our own bandwidth constraints.
NOTE: We can only offer feedback if you’ve already posted an RFC, and the earlier you post your RFC and make a request, the more likely it is we’ll be able to make time to provide feedback.
This is a preexisting protocol that we’ve already poured love into it, but could benefit from more. Is that ok?
This RFC goes light on the details of the protocol — in part because that’s what other authors did and also because of the 500 word guideline. Does it offer sufficient detail?
Is the problem that it purports to address: “[better] collective decision-making and resource allocation” a sufficiently defined and important problem?
The field test and evangelization are essentially identical: build the thing and start playing with it and get other people to play with it, tweak it so it’s fun and or adds value, write up the results. Is there another approach that could be better?
Is it clear why “iterate with real users” is a prerequisite (can’t just do the math and ship the standard) or should that be justified further?
Where are your primary doubts, where do you think we’ll fail?
I listened to the Town Hall and have been meaning to go back and update the application, think it’d be helpful to have a little guidance on what to give more focus to. I also have questions about best practices for field testing and how to involve key participants:
Would be grateful for feedback and improvement ideas along the following areas:
Scope and depth: Is it an appropriate width/depth for the given timeline? We have picked an area where we are comfortable and think can achieve something meaningful in the few months of the project. Would consider limiting or expanding scope based on others’ experience.
Publishing and evangelizing: are there better, more effective ways of getting a completed work out there? I decided to adapt the way that standards making is done, but I suspect the project will need to drum up a lot more support before transitioning into a standards making mode.
Are there specific goals that the Ethereum Foundation hopes to achieve, how can we contribute to that through this project?
Do you know of anyone who might have done similar work and would help us reach farther with our work? Could you introduce us?
What are we missing, what should we be thinking about? What challenges do you expect us to face? Alternatively, if you were in our shoes, what would you do?
I’d love some feedback on my RFC. I’m most concerned with:
The proposal and concept rely heavily on thinking through how protocol entrepreneurship could be applied to the systems that govern the art world and references a few texts that seek to explain these things — is there too much detail about these texts in the proposal?
And is the discussion of an app like See Saw necessary as well?
And on the broader end, the proposal is attempting to work towards a protocol for art and cultural production — is the connection of how/why writing about art (& the social elements accompanying that) in turn influences/impacts artistic/cultural production or should this aspect of the project be explicated further?
I would also note that our proposal states that we plan to use the Solana Blockchain for this project (mainly to avoid Ethereum’s gas fee problem) though we are not entirely locked into that yet. Is it necessary for the plan to be set in place strongly or would you advise us to leave things open? Similarly, would wireframes / mock-ups of potential web/mobile interfaces be helpful for the application process?
Lastly, would this proposal fit into the constraints of a software development kit? Or should I choose “other” for the application?
Project Pitch: Envisioning a Blockchain-based Protocol for a Religion (a layer on top of existing religions rather than a new religion)
Introduction: In an era where digital transformation reshapes every aspect of our lives, there exists a pioneering opportunity to rethink humanity’s most ancient and enduring institution: religion. I want to explore if it is possible to construct a non-corruptible system of faith by leveraging the immutable, transparent, and participatory nature of blockchain to foster a digital protocol for faith practices, community governance, and ethical consensus.
Obstacles:
I have two points of confusion. (1) I am not sure whether to pursue a PILL or PIG project. (2) I am unsure how realistic my use-case is.
What I have come up with so far is the following: a blockchain ledger that securely stores original texts and compositions, ensuring their integrity and facilitating their dissemination. This registry could also track and attribute authorship or origin of various works, encouraging the creation and sharing of new spiritual content within various communities.
This has almost no chance of being a good PIG proposal. It may be a good PILL proposal if you think of it as a speculative short story for a protocol-based decentralized religion, or an artistic provocation (such as a fictional modern 10 commandments meme for example).
@Venkat + @timbeiko - thank you both for rebooting and extending SoP. Was a lurker last year and decided to toss the proverbial hat in the ring this year
Hi!
I’m wondering if its possible to discuss the founding team composition vis-a-vis the diagram of the perfect protocol entrepreneur and the extenuating circumstances for a request I have specific to our proposal here:
Feedback on whether the clarity, concreteness, importance and relevance to SoP of the application can be improved.
Suggestions for partnerships for field testing. We have our own networks and are in conversation with Edge City Esmeralda to offer programming. Suggestions and introductions for additional partnerships would also be helpful.
Feedback on output that would be most helpful to the SoP and wider protocol community.
We cut a ton for the RFC to make sure it was brief (as requested!) but I’m worried a few things might have gotten lost:
Is the current protocol clear enough as a Real Protocol? I can add links to some sites that spell out the current protocol, or explain further on the bottom, but the full, current burnout protocol is more than 500 words.
Is the size of problem obvious? I didn’t go into too many hard numbers for many reasons, but the tie-in with innovators and builders is strong. At our fund, we considered burnout a key risk factor for founders we invested in. The wave of quiet quitting, the search trends for the word burnout, etc—is that context helpful?
We placed our topic under the “management and organization design” category as it’s strongly correlated with work. Should we do more to connect those dots, or does that connection feel fully fleshed out?
If possible, we’d love for feedback on how we could make CoPPER: Communities of Practice, Production, Enterprise & Resources a stronger candidate for the Summer of Protocols. While we decided to focus on a concrete deliverable of a reference code, we are also willing to do a research focused study, and deliver design documents, schemas and UX only. Personally I’m not worried, despite the adage “don’t write an ERP system”. The whole point of our Protocol is that this is a universal model begging to be simplified.
Anything that feels missing, or uncompelling would be useful, we had to cut a lot to get down to the 500 word requirement.
We shared a draft of our PIG last week, Hivemind. Update: We got some feedback from peers and are reworking our proposal around care protocols for living memory. We’re wondering if we seem to be trying to cover too much ground (eg governance, archiving and new cultural institutions) and if it would strengthen the application to focus on part of it.
Thanks a ton for the feedback session last week. Taking your input to heart, we have a much more ambitious goal to make MedTech investing democratized and global by providing an on-chain due-diligence as a service.
We hope to pave the road towards a permission-less world in MedTech Innovation and possibly create a template to apply across deep-tech.
Would greatly appreciate your feedback on the scope and possibilities of building blockchain applications based on design specifications that we intend to release.
First of all interested in the right balancing. Whether it’s the right amount of ambition; whether there’s more public interest to be sought; should we skew more conceptual or more practical; does it need a different trade-off between wider interoperable network and more powerful small-scale capabilities.
Another source of worry is whether the explanation makes sense at all.
We would love to get some feedback on our PIG RFC:
We have the following questions:
Is our proposal specific enough, or on the contrary too abstract? We based the current proposal on Venkat’s opening talk for SoP24, where he indicated that you are trying to address the broadest protocols possible and not more narrow proposals.
Our title may be too generic, but the body is specific on human conversation (not interaction or request/response) with TradAI (LLMs, Social Media, recommendation engines). Any suggestion on how to fix it, if needed?
Is it clear what protocol we want to improve and how we plan to do that?
Any other feedback on our proposal’s content and/or format?
What else do we need to do to evolve our current RFC proposal into an actual application (if anything other than take comments on board and evolve the RFC based on comments received)
I would love some feedback on our RFC, specifically regarding clarity. The protocol improvement that we’re focused on - the foundation of how we relate to land - draws from many other disciplines and frameworks that, in their own right, can be considered protocols. I want to make sure that our protocol focus is clear despite drawing from and connecting to these other land-related protocols. Thank you!
