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Counterparty Foundation Board Announcement

4/16/2016 by Robby Dermody

With the upcoming elections of the next board of the Counterparty Foundation, we feel it’s an opportune time to look at our progress so far as well as to lay out some thoughts on how the project could grow and improve further. Indeed, the Counterparty project has come a long way since its January 2014 inception. Today we have:

  • a stable, tested and working platform with active development,
  • numerous exciting features planned, such as updated Ethereum VM support, P2SH, segwit support in Counterwallet, and sub-assets,
  • a formal Counterparty Foundation, board, and bylaws,
  • extensive documentation,
  • a comprehensive website, forums, and active slack chat,
  • and most importantly, a dedicated and vibrant volunteer-based community powering this as well as dozens of projects built on Counterparty.

Despite this, there are some areas where the project could still improve. Our first thoughts on this front are to move towards more active and transparent project leadership: specifically, a more active and empowered board, with the responsibility of officially representing the project. Through the board’s efforts, we would look to see better communications to both the Counterparty community itself and the larger crypto community as a whole. In addition, we would like to place more focus on enhanced technical outreach that hopefully yield further additions to our development team.

As first steps towards these goals, the board has voted in favor of a resolution to change board composition to be four community seats and one founder seat, instead of three community seats and two founder seats. Moreover, elections will be held May 1st of every year, for a one year board term.

After this next election completes, the new board will decide on a specific communication strategy as one of its first orders of business. Most likely, this will include:

  • A regular meeting every month over slack, open to all, where events of the past month are recapped and the community may directly participate and ask questions.
  • A “Quarterly Update”, detailing project goals for the next quarter, and a retrospective of the past quarter’s goals.
  • The creation a public relations task group. It will be proposed that this task group include two members from the board as well as two from the community appointed at-will. Under the supervision of the board, the goal of this task group will be to create and present information on the project to both the Counterparty community and to the larger ecosystem, via the website, social media, press outlets and so on.

In addition:

  • Development progress will continue along the lines of the CIP program already in place and Devon Weller will continue to administer this program. Proposed and accepted CIP proposals will set the direction and pace of development. The development team will work with the board to formulate quarterly project roadmaps, which will inspire development efforts and CIP proposals, but not dictate or bind them.
  • After community discussion, a vote will be put to the board to eliminate the Counterparty foundation membership program due to the inability to deliver on the stated benefits, as well as the time required to manage it. It would be replaced with a simple donation program, and all individuals with currently active memberships would be offered a full refund. In addition, the merchandise program would be discontinued, as well as the counterpartyfoundation.org site itself, with the domain instead redirecting to a new page on the main counterparty.io domain that details the foundation and project structure.
  • The project will continue to operate via volunteer hours and community donations. Donations to the project, as well as to compensate developers in particular for their time and effort are always welcome. The board will explore ways to further encourage donations.
  • The board will clarify and codify moderation guidelines for the official slack chat and forums.

Feel free to comment on any of this on our slack chat. We’d love to hear any feedback on the above from the community, as well as additional ideas which will help improve Counterparty for everyone. And, if you enjoy the project, consider running for a board seat in the upcoming election. The deadline is this upcoming Monday, April 18th.