November 30, 2018 11:59 PM
The latest Ethereum 1x meeting, which was conducted under the Chatham House Rule, has some folks in the Ethereum community thinking about the nature of transparency.
As human beings, we must decide how to govern ourselves, from the leadership models we choose to guide our actions to the information we are tasked with disseminating (or not disseminating, as it may be). The latter consideration, information-sharing, has emerged recently as Ethereum stakeholders consider the balance of transparency and privacy within the development space.
Namely, the November 30 meeting[1] to discuss Ethereum 1x, a proposed upgrade for the network, adhered to the Chatham House Rule[2], which eschews the identities and affiliations of meeting participants. This was reportedly the first[3] call intentionally guided by this rule.
During last week's recorded session[4], various core developers expressed differing opinions about the openness of meetings – some thought it unnecessary to make all discussions public, whereas others were simply ambivalent about the nature of meeting transparency. This discussion was broached primarily in response to the private meetings that had occurred at Devcon4 in Prague and the reactions such gatherings elicited from community members.
Lane Rettig, an Ethereum core dev who has publicly published his thoughts[5] about governance, noted during the November 23 call that the line between transparency and privacy is subjective and can be confusing. For one, conversations, especially regarding technical matters, can be misinterpreted or misrepresented by media outlets, as fellow developer Péter Szilágyi[6] maintains. However, a purportedly open community such as Ethereum may want to default to full openness, as ETH Magician Greg Colvin[7] argues.
The Chatham House Rule of the latest Ethereum 1x meeting,
