The Importance of Education & Diversity in Protocol Development

Transcript

Hello everyone. I hope you all are having a good day. As we know this is Edcon, a developers conference. So the obvious expectation is it's going to be something technical. But actually my talk is not very technical. It is related and I hope by the end of next 20 minutes I would be in a position to send my m message across. Today I'm here to talk about the importance of education and diversity in protocol development.

Since this is my first time in Aaka in person, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself. So my first slide is about me. I joined the web3 space in 2016. This is my next phase of working. Before 2016 or in my previous life, I was working for Accenture a web two world and then took a break. After that, I joined the ecosystem. Ethereum was introduced to me by my husband. One day he decided that he would buy three GPUs off Craigslist and DIY our first mining rig.

It was an experiment. It was an experiment to have fun with family. But I kind of liked the idea and I started learning more about it. What is Ethereum? People may ask that why I did not learn Bitcoin before. Yes, because I was busy raising kids and I didn't know about Bitcoin before. I learned about Ethereum first and then I got involved with the blockchain space. I loved the concept. I love the idea and I decided to follow more talks, learn more about Ethereum, what it is. It was very new at the time. So I watched tons of Vitalics and Vlad Zaman and so many other developers videos online which were available and started writing them

in simple and easy to understand language with my first website called Etherorld. Ether world was a platform to share my knowledge, my experience that I was getting from learning from the web 3 space but I wanted to share this with people so they can learn and be able to participate. It was going well but that not on very high pace. I was just taking out time from my daily routine from my kids activities and just writing whenever I get time about it.

Couple of years passed, Ethereum was evolving and they suddenly started looking for people who can come and volunteer to support the project management into Ethereum blockchain. With my background from Accenture, I decided to join Ethereum cat herders as a project manager and uh started helping out Ethereum protocol development. It was an eyeopener because I learned that just coding is not the thing that uh people can contribute to.

There are many other ways that anyone can contribute to the Ethereum ecosystem. Supporting protocol development is one of those. Ethereum cat herders help me understand and open many venues where I can involve more newcomers. First I decided to contribute with some kind of project that can help onboard more people. Uh wallet wallet was the basic thing that everybody was looking if they want to do a very simple transaction. So we looked into block action wallet but because of many regulatory compliances I decided not to pursue that. But since I was involved

with protocol upgrade it was a very good opportunity for me to work very close to protocol developers. is the client developers team. It was the era of 2020 when developers were working to launch beacon chain the proof ofstake system and uh they were doing all kind of testing because beacon chain would involve a lot of money of course and they were trying to migrate from P to POSOS in parallel of course not migration in parallel they wanted to launch that and they were trying to do new kind of test nets then I uh launched this another website which was to support the beacon chain test nets. It ran for a few more months when mainet la

was launched in 2020 but we could not continue it further in uh in absence of enough funding as well as enough time as I mentioned I was busy raising kids at the same time as well being a woman that's also an important job and I was trying to do both the things together I'm very happy and proud of my kids on my family that they supported me everywhere where I go, whatever I do, my daughter is here. She always supports me and she comes around to all the conferences that I go. So you may have seen her some sometimes.

Well, as I was moving ahead, I also tried to support with marketing of Ethereum with a group which was evolving at the time called marketing DAO. It worked for a few months but it did not go further. times past as we all know Ethereum's building block is EIP. EIP is something that every developers are very much focused about. They want to write EIPs. They want to document it and may be able to deploy it on Ethereum mainet one day.

That's the goal of every developer here to add their contribution. But how can they do that? Are they good at it? like whatever they are writing makes sense in technical terms but it may or may not make sense to normal people. They may not understand what this is and there are other guidelines that was required at the time in order to make sure that we invite and accept right kind of proposals for any network upgrade. I started learning more about EIPs and got involved with many activities of EIPs. Um I started a podcast of EIPs then got involved with EIP IP meeting that means we are working towards improving the process and also documenting these proposals how many

proposals are going through in a month or kind of thing in a hackmd file. Eventually I realized that keeping this information limited to hackmd may prohibit many more users to learn about it. Thus I launched EIP inside. Along my way I've met two wonderful women. Ladonna Higgins she's right over here and Shy Wong who is currently the co-exec of Ethereum Foundation. We realize that there are very few women in the space who are actually involved on the protocol development side of Ethereum. We do have a lot of developers but they are working towards application side of it. We were talking about how we

can onboard more women, how we can actually educate them to be a part of protocol development and we launched W in 2024. I'm going to talk more about WIP in my future slides. I mentioned about starting Ethereum with Ethereum CAD herders. When I started back in 2019, it was just a working group. Eventually after few years I was successfully able to register this u this working group as a nonprofit entity in United States and now that it's called as ECH Institute Incorporation another sidetrack

this is about a movie the notebook you will get to know in a few minutes like why I'm talking about said this movie is set on a very simple background where there is this uh poor boy and rich girl they fell in love and they have their life. This girl whenever she comes to meet this boy she is riding a car. She's driving a car and sometimes she goes mad and she does not drive well. She hits the fence. Um she's going haywire on the road and about to get hit by a truck. I have watched this movie multiple times so I know she's not going to die. But every time that scene comes up, my heart skips a beat because I feel like what will happen if the car gets crashed.

As some of you may know that even if car gets crashed, now we have a safety feature. The safety feature is airbag. Airbag was introduced in 1970s as a major safety innovation. It was adopted by General Motors for the first US fleet cars in 1973 and in 1981 Mercedes-Benz launched it for the driver seat driver's side of the um car where it was like flagship feature for S-Class cars of Mercedes. This was a very good innovation but there was a blind spot. Airbag worked perfectly well in testing. Why?

Because they have tested well on the model which was a size of average male driver. The size was like 170 lb of weight and 5'9 of height. So engineers who were designing this airbag they considered themselves and they designed the model accordingly. There was nothing wrong. They weren't malayacious but they excluded a majority of female driver or maybe young drivers. As I mentioned I have kids my older one is driving car now and I feel safe when I know all these safety features are around but just imagine mothers who could have sent

out their kids on car and they don't know if the car would uh have those airbags. So this testing uh basically excluded many of these. However, the statistics suggested that if there is a crash, if there is an um injury that is mostly for participants which does not match the height of the dummy that was used for testing purposes. So on recommendation of some female engineer, medical resources and many women who studied these statistics closely, this was then redesigned. Airbags were now considering different demographics of driver.

Airbags become safer and it could save millions of life. And in the 1997, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of United States also implemented this as like um inclusive crash test standards. So one sizefits all may not be a perfect example. It may fail when it comes to technology. Technology are considered for general purpose. Sometimes they are designed for default users and we consider that as an optimized solution.

This may or may not work. So if the protocol is for everyone, protocol must be built by everyone. How can we do that? We can do that by educating our community member and including everyone, every participant, every user. We can create awareness. We can enable these participants to be able to contribute to the ecosystem because this will help us drive innovation. We all know education matters. It gives the fundamentals to people who want to make a contribution. It would help us scale the network, the human network as

well. It is basically a public good and that should be made available free for people. This would definitely help us in enable more diversity and inclusion. So education is not just an outreach. It is protocol infrastructure. We must build it better. It does matter because diverse contributors brings diverse perspective. If we have these experiences collected together, we may be able to spot issues early on. Education empowers to participate and help in design and governance. We want to have diversity because diversity makes the system more stronger, safer, and inclusive.

Ethereum isn't just code. It's the knowledge shared openly as public good. It is a very good quality of Ethereum that it is opensource. I know there are many projects but I'm so proud to be a part of Ethereum ecosystem because I think that whatever people can do by making a contribution to open source is not just about sending something out but also learning many things in so it's really really good thing to have in my about me slides I mentioned about women in Ethereum protocol so women in Ethereum protocol was launched in 2024 I ledana and shy met with Aya Miyaguchi who was the executive director at the

time and shared this idea that we want to have this working group. We want to have more women participating in protocol development. She immediately agreed to the idea and she o was open with all heart. She said that whatever support Ethereum foundation can provide we are happy to help you out. The launch of Ethereum protocol is now supported by um Ethereum Foundation and at the time it was ECAT herders but now EC institute. Why we needed WIP in the first place?

Because we wanted to raise awareness about protocol level opportunities. As I mentioned that there are developers but they are application developers. They are more focused on like cryptocurrency side of this technology. But we wanted to have people who can help get the blockchain side of this technology. We wanted to provide structured learning. So we should be in a position to enable them. We should be in a position to uh get them global connection and support that is required in order to come forward and also it reflects Ethereum's inclusive value.

W basically creates a welcoming entry point for all women and non non-binary developers into a highly technical and male-dominated society. The image that you can see here is taken a couple of days ago. I'm very happy to learn that our leadership are always eager to help and support all these initiatives around women. This is from a side event of ET Tokyo where we had a very friendly conversation with Shye Wong who is presently the co-exec director of Ethereum Foundation. She took out her time to talk to the community to talk to different women and also men because it's not only the responsibility of

women to uplift other women but it is also of men equally. I also did a SWAT around it. Tried to follow what are our strength and what are the opportunities. Definitely we have tremendous opportunities. We have potential uh for university partnership rising demands for diversity and inclusion and we can expand this mentorship for internship pipelines to have more aspiring developers available. WIP isn't just about inclusion. It's about making protocol development more resilient.

A little bit about ECH Institute. EC Institute currently help with the facilitating Ethereum protocol meeting, makes notes available and any support that developers team may require. We help out with EIP stuff. uh we do podcast peep and EIP where we talk about all these EIPs which are getting selected for Ethereum network upgrade and also for applications uh layer and we also have ecosystem project demo where we talk about uh different projects and provide them a stage to talk about uh their project and provide a demo to the ecosystem. We believe that education plus inclusion together will have a stronger governance and community

support. So, Ethereum governance isn't just about developer. It's about everyone's participation. Let's join hands for building Ethereum's future together. Ethereum's next decade will be defined not only by rollups and sharding, but also who we bring with us. It could be your family, it could be your friend, it could be a girl next door. Well, my last slide is uh highly inspired by the announcement made by Ethereum Foundation just yesterday.

Decentralized uh artificial intelligence team of Ethereum foundation. I would love to see this in future have a decentralized diversity and inclusion team be a part of Ethereum Foundation. Thank you everyone for coming out here today. Thank you very much.