With leadership from the EEA and support from OASIS Open, “EEA Community Projects” is THE place for Ethereum-based technologies and standards work in the industry. EEA Community Projects now offers well-trodden innovation paths for both member-driven initiatives and community-driven open source projects. Now businesses looking to innovate with Ethereum no longer have to choose between the EEA or the Ethereum OASIS Open Project to leverage a wider network of resources and further accelerate innovation.

As EEA Community Projects, the EEA’s standardization and open source community expertise are now at the service of the entire Ethereum community. Working within a process that is predictable, fair, transparent, and time-tested, EEA Community Projects provides a forum for those who wish to move beyond a single open source implementation to an ecosystem containing multiple diverse implementations that conform to a standard. EEA Community Projects exists to accelerate collaboration and innovation in Ethereum technology through the development and adoption of standards, documents, and best practices based on open source software. To access the EEA Community Projects GitHub, visit here.

The Ethereum OASIS Open Project was created as an OASIS Open Project to provide a neutral forum for diverse stakeholders to create high-quality specifications that facilitate Ethereum’s longevity, interoperability, and ease of integration. The initiative was founded by the Ethereum Foundation, the EEA, and ConsenSys and its sponsors include Accenture, Chainlink, ConsenSys, the EEA, EY, Morpheus Network, Nethermind, Provide, Splunk and Unibright.

As one of the original founders, the EEA has been involved in the Ethereum OASIS Open Project since its inception in 2019. In addition, EEA Executive Director Dan Burnett is the Chair of the Governing Board, a position which he will continue to hold moving forward.

As the EEA Community Projects, the Ethereum OASIS Open Project will continue sponsoring projects, such as the Baseline Protocol initiative, and will continue to permit frictionless engagement between developers who are actively contributing to developing clear, open standards, first-rate documentation, and shared test suites that facilitate new features and enhancements for the Ethereum ecosystem. Today, hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals are actively participating in the initiative.

Yes, the EEA and OASIS Open are excited to announce that the Ethereum OASIS Open Project is now EEA Community Projects. With critical Ethereum projects like the Baseline Protocol initiative under its stewardship, the Ethereum OASIS Open Project community has become the hub for open source-based standards development within the Ethereum industry. Now as EEA Community Projects, there will be many cross-community collaboration opportunities with the EEA and its members. Everyone is welcome to contribute to the existing Baseline and JSON-RPC efforts, and suggestions for new EEA Community Projects are encouraged.

Yes, multiple projects within the Ethereum OASIS Open Project will continue as EEA Community Projects, including the Baseline Protocol initiative and JSON-RPC standards efforts. For example, the Baseline Protocol initiative was announced on March 4, 2020, and launched as an OASIS open source project on March 19, 2020, supported by fourteen founding companies. Today, the community represents many of the largest companies in the world, spanning several sectors, along with startups, students and talented individuals. As an open source initiative, Baseline Protocol combines advances in cryptography, messaging, and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet. The protocol will enable confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving any sensitive data on-chain.

The community’s Technical Steering Committee conducts bi-weekly meetings and hears proposals for projects that are seeking funding from the grant pool. Grant funds are allocated monthly to selected projects, which can include technical work such as contributions to open source code and contributions to content, documentation and outreach programs. For more information about how to get involved in the Baseline Protocol initiative, visit https://www.baseline-protocol.org/.

EEA and the Ethereum OASIS Open Project communities represent a wide variety of business sectors from every region of the world. This relationship allows each of us to become more active in the other’s community by finding ways for our respective efforts to be complementary and compatible. We both will continue to grow our respective communities and pursue technologies and standards that may be unrelated to the other, but now Ethereum business innovation is being housed at one collaborative organization – the EEA.

The Ethereum OASIS Open Project has grown significantly over the past few years, bringing greater awareness of the Baseline Protocol and open source-based standards to the Ethereum ecosystem. Joining the EEA as EEA Community Projects will help the Ethereum OASIS Open Project take advantage of increased support and collaboration, particularly through enhanced marketing, testing, and events programming.

EEA members will benefit by taking advantage of using open source technologies as a business solution and will have access to a broader pool of developers working on Ethereum initiatives. Under the EEA Community Projects banner, EEA members can initiate both member-driven and community-driven projects, whichever is the best path forward.

This move strengthens and supports community work by ensuring there is a central location where Ethereum-related open source standards can be developed by the community under a transparent, internationally recognized process, and that the work of the community can be safely and freely implemented. As the EEA Community Projects, the Ethereum OASIS Open Project program will continue to provide support for open source development of code, APIs, standards, and reference implementations. EEA Community Projects gains a proven program, as the Ethereum OASIS Open Project builds on 25+ years of OASIS experience in collaborative development and its global reputation and relationships.  Deliverables produced in Open Projects have an optional path to ratification by de jure bodies such as ISO, IEC, and ITU as well as recognition from governments in policy and procurement.

The EEA has been closely involved since the beginning and was one of the first organizations involved in the Ethereum OASIS Open Project program. The EEA’s input has been valuable in refining the program. EEA members alongside the EEA Mainnet Working Group have continued to collaborate on the ways in which tools like Baseline can deliver value to consumer-facing industries through peer-to-peer transactions and services and now both communities are coming together.

This collaboration between our organizations allows more business-oriented work to leverage the Ethereum open source community where anyone can participate directly, helping to further accelerate the adoption of Ethereum technologies for business. Anyone in the business community who has Ethereum work to do, can come to the EEA and we will help them figure out the right way to do the work, whether member-directed or community-directed. Existing EEA Working Group members can connect with this new community to figure out if a member-led specification approach or a community-led specification approach is the best path forward.

Businesses can realize many benefits by adopting open source technologies, including reducing the overall total cost of ownership, speeding time to market services and product offerings, and improving overall software quality. EEA Community Projects is the place where community experts can develop standards from Ethereum open source projects that will enhance and accelerate Ethereum adoption. Broadening the pool of developers working on Ethereum initiatives, such as the Baseline Protocol, will only help to simplify workflow integration and improve interoperability between organizations using Ethereum.

Sponsors of EEA Community Projects provide the strategic vision, governance, technical guidance and funding to ensure that the work succeeds. Sponsors have the option to serve on the Projects Governing Board, where they will approve work produced by the community as well as proposals for new open source projects. Sponsorship dues are reasonable and scale based on organization size and type, making it easy for stakeholders to support the work. To learn more about becoming a Sponsor or joining the Projects Governing Board, visit here or email the EEA Community Projects administrator.

In addition to the Projects Governing Board, EEA Community Projects are guided by Technical Steering Committees, where membership is based on merit and not associated with sponsorship. The Technical Steering Committees (TSCs) are here mainly to ensure the smooth running of the maintainer project team and to be accountable to the EEA Community Projects Governing Board, and to the community at large.

Anyone can freely participate in any of the EEA Community Projects’ technical work without being a funding sponsor. Individuals can sign the contributor license agreement, and, if their work is supported by a company, their company has to sign the entity contributor license agreement.

In addition to the Projects Governing Board, EEA Community Projects are guided by Technical Steering Committees, where membership is based on merit and not associated with sponsorship.