The road ahead

Bruce Fenton was kind enough to answer a few questions on May 5th, 2018 regarding the road ahead.

Q: How can people become directly involved with the development process of the core ravencoin development?

BruceFenton:
It’s open now - anyone can make pull requests on Github, same as Bitcoin’s model 

We want to work to have more communications around dev as well

Q: Is there a plan for what entity will control the important/controlling pages/access as the project move forward (github/twitter/webpage), is there any legal issues with one corporate company owning the access to the above, and in reality having the control to a open source project or should a foundation be made. (I'm not familiar with US law on the above).

BruceFenton:
We are creating the Ravencoin Cooperative which may make sense hold those and have defensive trademarks but ideally as little centralization as possible

Q: So, the folks working on the roadmap, and those who want to get involved with that aspect... where do they communicate with each other now @BruceFenton ? Where do we go to get plugged into that?

BruceFenton:
Here in discord is one of the best way - probably 90% of comms are here - anyone working on any individual project can collaborate and work on whatever they choose 
It’s pretty decentralized in that there is no main group — Ravencoin is, at its core, simply an idea — that idea starts super centralized and then a few people know about it then a few more and so on —- this then changed and morphs what the project is and how it unfolds — so basically there is the initial idea then there is the paper Tron and I wrote — this is fairly centralized simply because there was no community — but since the idea and the code are both given away they genuinely belong to everyone now — so anyone can build and participate — ideally by the next major milestone: the fork upgrade, it will be even more decentralized with more devs and supporters. 

The consensus at this stage would be (ideally) the same as Bitcoin:  people can program, build and do whatever they want with the Ravencoin network — they will compete and fight and con and cajole and innovate and create — just like Bitcoin - the second layer will be a beautiful chaotic mess, just like Bitcoin and — even at the first layer / base code level it will be a mess in the sense that there will be fierce fighting about any and all code changes with anyone involved taking criticism — that’s unfortunate but it’s beneficial to security to have adversarial development environment (same as Bitcoin)  - it also helps prevent anyone from having too much control 

But anyway - even at that first layer / base code, people will disagree not just about code but about what Ravencoin even is or should be 

This is all healthy(edited)


So how this relates to your question-

1) we want to get a mailing list or something similar going to have a more organized discussion on code changes etc 

2) timing on this probably makes sense to prioritize the next code changes - since this project is early stage consensus is easier since there are not longstanding special interests - so as we go this makes sense to increase devs etc 

3) as we do this anyone can make pull requests or become a developer - there is no developers versus outsiders, anyone can be a developer & it isn’t and should be a centralized group 

4) the more devs and participants the better
Hope that is useful

Q: That all sounds great. Looking forward to the mailing list. Several of us are very enthusiastic about being a bit more involved with the day to day discussions centered around all of this. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and direction.

BruceFenton:
For sure — this is one of the top priorities for sure - we know the best practices for tech dev and open source and we have lots of technical and industry and blockchain know how but the unique nature of this project made it the first really decentralized launch — but this also ended up with us launching the basic idea then the network then a more detailed idea then more code — so instead of one dev who coded something like Satoshi did — there was an idea and then it was developed — but as the idea was improved we went ahead and launched the network so it could be working by the time we had the idea and code fully flushed out 

There’s more speculation for projects who say they want to build an idea and network- with this we can already see how the network works - this is a huge advantage

This obviously ended up working way better than we could have hoped - building a huge network and lots of interest in a very short time 

What’s exciting about this is that it’s as true to the cypherpunk ethos as any project 

So the code is more distributed and public than most projects but will be even more distributed once the upgrade