Announcing the Zcash Gardening Club - a monthly open Zcash development call

Ecosystem Updates
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About

The Zcash Gardening Club is an open monthly meeting for open source contributors to share about their projects and connect. Anyone is welcome to join, provided you agree to follow our code of conduct. Registration link here.

This is one of several community & open development events hosted by ECC. Please check out ECC’s Community Events for others.

Format

  • What?
    • A monthly call where contributors can share their project’s status, connect with each other, find new contributors, and answer questions.
    • Format: Each session has one or two 15 minute topics, followed by a round-robin “open mic” where any participant can share a 5 minute project overview, a status update, and a request for collaboration. After the round-robin there is an open Q&A section where anyone present can ask questions to any of the presenters.
  • Why?
    • To connect Zcash open source projects with interested collaborators, keep people up to date, and provide an inviting forum for the Zcash development community.
  • Who?
    • Presenters - any open source contributor representing a Zcash-focused open source project. Make sure to apply for a presenter slot ahead of each meeting.
    • an open Audience - any member of the public interested in learning about these projects and ask questions to them in the Q&A section.
  • When and Where?
    • A 50 minute Zoom call, on the first Tuesday of each month, at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST, starting May 5th, 2020. Register here.
  • How?
    • To request a presenter slot and/ or to attend as an audience member, Register here.

I will be the facilitator initially. Feedback welcome!

See Older Meeting Agendas

Previous Meetings

2020-10-06 - Gardening Club - Tues, Oct 6th

  • Aditya, Nighthawk Wallet
  • Kevin Gorham, Light Client Working Group
  • Kris Nuttycombe, Payment Request URIs
  • Linda Lee, Documentation Update

2020-09-01 - Gardening Club - Tues, Sept 1st

… (TODO @nathan-at-least: fill out this agenda)

2020-08-04 - Gardening Club - Tues, August 4

  • Aditya Kulkarni - Zecwallet Viewkeys
  • Thomas Schmiedel - zboard
  • Juan Leni - Zondax
  • Nestor Bonilla - ZAct
  • Aditya Bharadwaj - Nighthawk Wallet
  • Aaron Jaramillo, Zper
  • Linda Liu, Zcash Documentation
  • Holmes Wilson, Zbay
  • Adesuwa, Send Zcash

2020-07-07 - Gardening Club - Tues, July 7

  • Loong Wang, RenVM
  • Henry de Valence, Zcash/ Cosmos
  • ChileBob, Gateway XYZ
  • Holmes Wilson, Zbay
  • Mitchell Krawiec-Thayer, Zcash Observatory

2020-06-02 - Gardening Club - June

  • Thomas Schmiedel, z-board
  • Prastut Kumar, Zcash Service Status Dashboard
  • Alfredo Garcia, Zcash core developer
  • Brad Miller, Wallet team, ECC
  • 20Birds

2020-05-05 - (Announced in this post) - Recap

  • Aditya Kulkarni, ZecWallet
  • Michael Harms, ZECpages
  • Holmes Wilson, Zbay
  • Za Wilcox, Zingo
  • Mitchell K. and Pranav T., Zcash Observatory
  • Steven Smith, Electric Coin Co
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FAQ

How is this related to other ECC meetings?

  • Zeal Calls are monthly calls for the broader Zcash community and users. Zeal Community calls cover a range of topics such as guest speakers from other privacy organizations and occasional technical AMAs.
  • ECC Livestreams are quarterly presentations by ECC for the public. Livestreams cover ECC strategy and engineering roadmaps.

What are related resources for Zcash open source contributors?

Will ECC or Zfnd present here?

This meeting is open to presentations by those teams, especially for status updates or requests that are likely to be of interest to the open source community. ECC intends to present regularly.

However, a priority for this open invite meeting is to make sure a broad range of projects have a space for presenting and collaborating so we will avoid giving larger / established orgs crowding out other projects.

I think Zcash should do X, is this a good place to make my case?

You’re welcome to present about a well-prepared proposal in the short 5 minute slot. That’s just enough time to give people an understanding of the basics and invite them to follow-up conversations elsewhere. This isn’t a good venue to present the entire proposal or discuss it. A good place for posting a proposal and following up on it could be the Zcash Forum.

I have a project that isn’t a software project. Is this a good place to share it?

If your project is relevant to the Zcash open source development community, this is a great place to share that. Examples might be technical study groups, developer research projects, translation projects, minicon organization, etc…

I have a commercial product and want to announce / market / recruit users for my product, is this the right venue?

This venue is only appropriate for engaging with open source collaborators for a Zcash-focused project. If your product is Zcash focused, has an open source component, and you want to engage with Zcash developers, you are welcome. To engage with Zcash users consider a more appropriate venue, such as forum announcements, asking to give a demo at a Zcash Zeal call or post in the Zcash Forum.

What if there are too many presenters?

If there are more presenters than time, we’ll prioritize hearing from new projects, or the projects which have gone longest since the last update. If there are more presenters than slots for several months in a row we may increase the meeting frequency.

What if this is a bad time for me, for example because it’s in the middle of the night where I live?

Let us know! If there’s enough interest we may rotate time-of-day to be globally inclusive.

Why the name?

We wanted to pick something less generic than “Zcash Open Source Status Call” because we think it’s memorable and fun to have some mascot or identity. Zcash protocol upgrades use an arboreal theme, maybe this is gardening in a forest? :wink:

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Zcash Magical Crypto Gardening :grin:

source

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I’m glad someone appreciated the name! :woman_mage:

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I have liked the naming since they decided to call it Sprout, Sapling, Blossom, and soon to be Heartwood. :slightly_smiling_face: It shows that we know Zcash is a work in progress, but is always steadily growing.

Perhaps one day to be a mighty Oak :deciduous_tree:

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Really cool idea. I will like to be a presenter with the work i am doing in zcashd ZF Grants - Zcash core developer

@nathan-at-least you can maybe contact me and guide me a bit if there are slots available.

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Great! You’d be a perfect presenter. Please use the presenter survey link mentioned in the announcement to sign up so I don’t forget.

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Thanks @nathan-at-least , just signed up.

I am not totally sure what i will present exactly yet so the responses i provided in the survey will maybe change :slight_smile:

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Does anyone have any experience with “whereby”: https://whereby.com/

My understanding is that Zoom has a pretty miserable reputation with respect to privacy, and I’m wondering if alternatives haven been considered?

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Here’s their privacy policy:

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Not tried that but tested Jitsi with a group of 25 & it really sucked.

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I have experience with whereby but not with many people. So, I’m not sure how it would scale . But from my experience, it has been pretty decent considering that it’s a browser-based video conferencing site.

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@ChileBob - you took the words out of my mouth! I’d love to explore whereby though.

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I’d be down to do a small whereby test next week to try it out. I think we’re going to stick with Zoom for the inaugural garden club but if whereby is a better alternative and I learn how to use it perhaps we could consider switching to that tool later down the road.

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Zoom is awfully close to being malware but at least it works, we use it with groups of 30 teachers & students.

Jitsi works better if everyone uses Chrome (webRTC support) or their app, but that’s a big ask.

EDIT: I’ve left Jitsi videobridge running, DM me for details if you want to try it out.

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Why zoom? I though the ECC/ZF was is in the privacy business.

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Hello Zcashers,

Tomorrow is the inaugural Zcash Gardening Club meeting, a monthly to discuss how to make Zcash open source projects grow. We have 8 projects presenting and 10 mins for Q&A. You can review the projects ahead of time here.

  • Aditya Kulkarni, ZecWallet
  • Michael Harms, ZECpages
  • Holmes Wilson, Zbay
  • Alfredo Garcia, Zcash core
  • Za Wilcox, Zingo
  • 20Birds
  • Mitchell K. and Pranav T., Zcash Observatory
  • Steven Smith, Electric Coin Co

The format for the call is round-robin where each presenter has a 5 minute slot to give an update on their project. Anyone is welcome to join, provided you agree to follow our code of conduct. To attend the audience, join the Zoom call.

Zcash Gardening Club is on the first Tuesday of each month, at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST, starting May 5th, 2020. Register here

I see people suggesting alternatives to Zoom. For tomorrow’s meeting we’ll use Zoom, but following that if someone else wants to host some “test run meetings” with other platforms that work for everyone involved, then we could potentially switch in the future.

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@mistfpga - I am researching zoom alternatives but at the moment zoom is the conferencing platform that best suits our needs. Other services people have recommended are either unreliable or do not support groups larger than 10.

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Michael from Zecpages here - hit me up any time:
https://twitter.com/michaelharms70

Feel free to add any ideas/issues/prs for zecpages here:

Thanks everyone!

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@mitchellpkt For the Zcash Observatory web interface there is a cool dashboard that was built for a Zcash art installation called “Harvest” from a few years back:

https://cpietsch.github.io/harvest/#/

It’s no longer active since the installation is over, but the code is there on GitHub to hack/add on to.

About Harvest: the work of WIND AIR LAND SEA

PhotoAlexandraMagnusson1_720
PhotoAlexandraMagnusson1_720720×480 157 KB

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