Hello all!
A few people have approached me asking what lessons from Ethereum can be brought over to help Zcash become a stronger, better community. A big thing I do in Ethereum-land is community building activities and social systems/communications work. After talking to some people from across Zcash and getting feedback, I’ve decided to start a chat server specifically for Zcash developers to be able to cross-communicate and quickly get questions answered using a medium that is has faster response times than the forums. This chat server will optimize for usability and good moderation to prevent, as much as possible, detrimental community interference so developers can ideate, plan, design, and code.
Why Discord? I found that many of the Zcash developers are on Discord already. Although in an ideal world we would want to choose a service that is aligned with the ideals of privacy preserving open source software, the reality is that choosing a tool that doesn’t have enough buy in or adoption from the devs is detrimental to a community. Usability and adoption are more important qualities in this case.
2 Ways You Can Help
1. Join the server!
You don’t have to be a developer to join the server, but this isn’t like the forum or a community server where there will be price discussion and many off-topic chats. It’s important for the sake of transparency that this chat room remain open so it can be welcoming for new devs and the Zcash community can contribute openly.
Invite link: Zcash R&D
Once you enter, please read the rules and post in the #introductions channel.
2. Suggest channels to add that I may be missing.
Here are the current channels. Categories are in all caps/bold and channels start with #:
GENERAL
#announcements
#events
#discord-feedback
#introductions
#general
R&D
#1559
#cryptography
#halo
#layer-2
#light-client
#mobile-wallets
#testing
#user-defined-assets
#user-experience
#zcashd
#zebra
#zips
#zkproofs
LANGUAGES
#c-plus-plus
#go
#javascript
#rust
Please leave feedback, questions, suggestions in this thread or the #discord-feedback room in the server.
Thanks!