31. Practical goals

Community goals (engagement)

The initial main output of the CIP Editors team was in the audio-recorded and eventually transcribed minutes of each meeting. These minutes were posted in the hope that interested members of the community would be able to find & reference items of interest by reading transcripts categorised by the CIP pull request under discussion.

This was outgrown over 2021–2022 for a number of reasons:

• nobody from the community seemed to read the verbose CIP meeting minutes;
• transcriptions were horribly flawed, especially for foreign accents, and required more time to correct than the meeting itself;
• discussions of current CIP PRs were disconnected from the discussions occurring in parallel on GitHub… the latter being where they really needed to be recorded and focused toward resolutions & action items.

Therefore our primary community output has been though GitHub ever since, with our success demonstrated whenever developers and community advocates can follow GitHub threads for the CIP topics they are interested in, and get a complete picture of CIP developments simply by email subscription to all activity on the CIPs repository.

Supplementary channels besides GitHub

Besides GitHub we have also had to evolve into other message streams to serve the following community needs:

• Non-developers often feel anxious about committing their thoughts to GitHub publicly and permanently, and so might only feel comfortable commenting on CIPs through social channels like Discord and Matrix or the more narrative discussion format of the Cardano Forum.
• Non-KYC platforms like Matrix have served users unwilling to offer mobile number- or device-based identity verification as required on Discord.

Therefore CIP discussions often span multiple channels for purposes of polling and temporary discussion. Successful efforts will be seen across a variety of cooperative media:

• … centered on official GitHub activity occurring regularly across all progressive CIP pull requests
• … plus enough peer group postings for the Cardano community as a whole to understand the CIP process itself
• … with confidence (especially for developers) that CIP discussions are taking place regularly, robustly, and inclusively.

As of 2023 another top priority should be the support of Working Groups on common CIP-related topics as per the subsection of the CIP Discord.  As of August 2024 these active forums are:

• Wallets Working Group
• Query Layer Standard
• Governance Metadata

Ongoing documentation of CIP process

Rapid expansion in 2021 of the CIP process beyond the establishment of its original formalities led to the realisation that the overall process of CIP Editing must be documented far beyond what is currently included in the few Editor related paragraphs of CIP-0001 (beginning here).

At the time of this first Wiki publishing (August 2024), editors have been following a process learned by observation over months or years: so, although the end results of the process are always visible on GitHub and other forums, most complexities and demands of our process had so far only been documented in editors' and key contributors' own habits and memories.

Unfortunately this does not promote a CIP process resilient to editor attrition, since not only could the CIP process be disrupted, key knowledge might be lost with a key editors' departure.  With this Wiki we are hoping to preserve individual knowledge as much as possible, and therefore for editors to keep recording here in the Wiki:

• routine activities taken around the CIP meeting process
• key aspects of real-life CIP editor workflow (which are not required to be documented in CIP-0001)
• any online & communication activity outside the scope of CIP-0001, such as interaction with the community and core development teams.

Potential encouragement of new editors

Through the last year at the time of this writing (July 2023 to July 2024), the CIP editing team has had 3 routinely working editors (Bitcoin has 2 BIP editors and Ethereum has 7 EIP editors.

We may not be in a position where additional editors must be designated from Cardano companies or the community… although logically the survival of the CIP process depends upon the ability for others to step in and expand the group of permissioned CIP Editors in case the group might contract in the future.

Therefore the CIP Wiki should be written & extended with this goal of helping any new CIP editor come up to speed quickly without having to reverse-engineer any process from existing communication & activity histories.