LONDON (Bywire News) - The second chief delegates got together for their first meeting as they sought to work out how they could take up the baton from the previous group. It was largely a session for introductions and preparations which will lay the groundwork for everything which follows.
First up there’s a chance to introduce ourselves to the new set of chief delegates. Here they are.
Edgar Fernandez
Top of the tree is our new head chief delegate, Edgar Fernandez. He ran on transparency and demonstrated the value Eden is bringing to the community. His background lies in banking after which he has become an entrepreneur.
Michael O'Sullivan
Next up is Bywire’s own Michael O'Sullivan. He ran on a campaign to produce more content for the EOS ecosystem.
“Eden has huge potential and I want to realise some of that potential, including figuring out the meaning of Eden and how it can have influence over the EOS ecosystem,” he said.
Brock Pierce
The star attraction of this set is Brock Pierce, entrepreneur, former child actor, presidential hopeful and blockchain pioneer. He has been involved with EOS from the beginning which, depending on who you talk to, could be a good or bad thing. He was a founding member of Block.one and played a role in the original token sale of EOS.
“I’m a big believer in the potential of what’s occurring here,” he said. “I’ve been frustrated like many of us, felt powerless in terms of the ability to deliver the things I’d like to see done. It’s led to me being frustrated enough to take matters into his own hands.”
He took his stock in B1 and converted it into EOS tokens, he says, to align his interests with the community. “If EOS fails to perform I lose,” he says.
“If it succeeds I win.”
He has been vocal about his admiration for Eden – and claims this was one of the things which prompted him to make this commitment. One of his great advantages, he says, is the fact that he personally does not need the EOS for his projects which means he’s in a good position to dedicate all his allocation to projects which he feels are worthwhile.
Chuck Macdonald
Chuck started out as a Jazz trombonist, before becoming an electrician and eventually entering the blockchain world. He started ‘blogging and playing around with tokens’ with Steemit in 2017 and has been an active member of the EOS community since 2019.
“I’m in Eden because I see the potential of it as a technology to help communities come together and do things,” he says. The ‘thing’ he would most like to see is to run the process more. “Our process is beautiful it’s very elegant code,” he says, “we just need to run the process more.”
One of his goals is to convince Eden that it is worthwhile for them to identify their tools and package them up into a dApp that anybody would be able to use. That’s not just our election process it’s anything else we might design down the road.
Gracie Lau
CEO of JJB.one, Gracie works to provide platforms for the blockchain gamer. She produced the first platform for blockchain gamers in China.
“I realise believe in EOS. It’s a new level blockchain,” she says. “That’s why I moved from Ethereum to EOS.”
She will be spending her money on projects which have the most value for the community, especially in onboarding and the awesome dApps which make people think ‘we should be using EOS’.
Thanking the previous delegates
They started with some kind words for the people who had come before them. Being the first through the door can be difficult and it’s a task they bore extremely well. Most of the chief delegates have run on a platform to ratify the new bylaws proposed by the previous set.
The one thing they seem keen to change, though, is limiting the length of the meetings to an hour. Under the first group, meetings could sometimes run for two or even three hours, with the group often continuing their discussions informally after the official end of the meeting.
It was a sign of the close bond they developed and also gave them a chance to engage in much more philosophical discussions about Eden and the direction they were taking. At a time when each new week seemed to bring another Earth-shattering development to EOS, it also gave them a chance to reflect on the dramatic changes happening within the ecosystem.
One question raised by Brock Pierce is what happens if someone is unable to make a meeting due to scheduling commitments. Under the rules, two-thirds of chief delegates would have to agree, but that is something which could be provided by proxy if someone is unable to make it.
There was also debate about who should chair the meetings. The previous group of chief delegates had rotated chairs and that’s something most seem keen to continue. It will share the load and give different delegates the chance to set the agendas of meetings.
Michael O'Sullivan also raised the question of voting structure and revealed he had purchased the domain name Eden.vote. Previously votes had been informal with chief delegates signalling their votes, yay or nay in the video call. He suggested they could either continue this approach or opt for something more formal and transparent.
Chief delegate bylaws:
The final point on the agenda was the ratification of the bylaws handed down by the previous chief delegates.
There are questions about whether you vote on these individually or as a complete document. The intention of the previous chief delegates is that if you don’t ratify everything nothing gets ratified and you have to propose something entirely new.
Most of the new set of chief delegates had run on the understanding that they would ratify the bylaws. However, there were complications. The first is the rule dictating that bylaws were either ratified as a group or thrown out completely. This had been done by the previous group to avoid endless tinkering with the rules which could hinder development.
However, it created problems for the new group if there was a detail about one aspect of the bylaws that they were not certain about. They could be left with a choice between ratifying the entire set with one element they might not be happy with or scrapping them all and developing a new set which would waste much of the progress made so far.
It raised a significant problem with the structure of the chief delegate group in that none of the previous leaders has remained in post. This, as Brock Pierce pointed out, leads them to a knowledge gap. An entirely new set of chief delegates is forced to guess what the previous set might have been thinking.
After much debate and despite the fact that many of the chief delegates had pledged to ratify the bylaws as quickly as possible, it was proposed to delay the ratification to the first agenda of next week and hold a call with Aaron Cox, the previous head chief delegate, to clarify some of the language.
Michael O'Sullivan was the one dissenting voice claiming that a pause in the ratification process could only raise the possibility that they were considering abandoning a key promise that most of them ran on.
There is also some debate about the role of the head chief delegate. The previous group had voted to equalise the amount of funding given to the head chief delegate. It allows for a more even spread of funds but does raise a question about the status of the head. If he or she is not acting as chair and receives no more funding than any other chief delegates, they risk becoming little more than a figurehead.
New group new feel
This was just an introductory meeting, but there are already significant differences between this group and the one which went before. They have set out to be sharper, and more efficient in their meetings. It will be more productive in one sense and ensure decisions can be made more quickly, but there is also a sense that at a time when the community was still getting up and running it made sense to allow for more high level and philosophical discussion.
Whatever the next three months bring, one thing is clear. The nature of Eden’s fractal democracy and the time demands of the job mean that each new group of chief delegates is likely to be significantly different from the last. That will mean a leadership team that will continually refresh itself, but it can lead to problems in terms of continuity and knowledge transfer. How one group picks up the baton from the last will do much to shape Eden and its future direction.
(Writing by Tom Cropper, editing by Klaudia Fior)