The more I think about the big picture of what we are trying to create, the more I find it essential to also have some basic list (or “registry”) of Ethereum-related people and communities.
The current ecosystem around Ethereum is made up of dozens or hundreds of small initiatives behind the big well-known ones, and this project should help make them more visible.
Ethereum Community Directory (ethcd)
My solution is to create (another) open curated git-based community-focused database, which I’ve called Ethereum Community Directory (ethcd) for now.
The collections I’m thinking about now:
- Collectives - grassroots collectives, meetup groups, etc. example: Department of Decentralization, Ethereum Cat Herders
- Companies - example: Ethereum Foundation
- People - example: Vitalik Buterin
- Projects - Ethereum-related projects, example: EAS
My intention is to create a very minimalistic dataset that contains only the most important data and references. These records would serve as a kind of basis for our other datasets, like ETH events database.
One of the main ideas is to create a kind of unique identifier (eegid?) that would be used to identify an organization or a person.
Thoughts
1. Ethereum.org - Community section
The first reason I started thinking about it was the Community Events page on Ethereum.org. It lists major hackathons and conferences (handled by our events database) - but the second part lists local meetup groups. But it only lists 70 groups, and in my opinion doesn’t reflect reality at all. Our database and the “Collectives” section could replace exactly this - if we put this data together, we can do something like “Find your own local community”. So I would go in the direction of creating a data source that Ethereum.org could use.
2. Pairing of speakers, organizers, etc.
One of the problems we have to solve within our Ethereum event database is the matching of speakers and organizations. It is common for people to speak at multiple events - but there is no way to know if this “Vitalik Buterin” is the same as “Vitalik Buterin” at another event (simplified). By having some sort of list with their references, we can match people more efficiently.
3. A place to aggregate other public data
This database could greatly contribute to greater transparency and clarity of the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole.
-
Organization profiles (collectives, companies, projects)
- Basic data (name, description, logo, founding date…)
- key people (=> person)
- list of projects (=> projects)
- data from the event database (=> events):
- organized events
- list of sponsored events
- list of hackathon bounties
- other aggregated data from other sources (GitHub activity, …)
-
People profiles
- basic data (name, description, photo, …)
- list of EIPs he authored
- data from the event database (=> events):
- what events he/she organized
- list of events where he/she participated (speaker, mentor, judge…)
- list of his lectures/talks (=> ETHTalks)
- other aggregated data from other sources (GitHub activity, …)
(this list is not complete, just what I think of so far)
4. Ethereum “LinkedIn”
In the end, this database and its website should serve as a sort of basic non-interactive Ethereum “LinkedIn”. Such a basic knowledge base and graph of information.
More info
- GitHub: GitHub - ethereumeg/ethcd: Ethereum Community Directory (ethcd)
- Demo: https://cd.ethevents.club/
Again, I’d be super grateful for any comments and feedback. 