Motivation

We want to help more Asia / Chinese-speaking developers to join the Ethereum core protocol development, and we feel EPF is a very good opportunity to do so.

ETHPanda & GCC plan

Since the EPF program happens in the open, and developers can join the process in a permissionless fashion, we plan to :

1. Before May 26th: Share links within the ETHPanda & GCC network to encourage more developers from the Chinese-speaking community to apply before May 26. For those who are selected, GCC can provide a matching funding.
2. After May 26th；ETHPanda and GCC wants to start a shadow program ( Let’s call it “EPF Shadow” for now ) to onboard more developers to participate EPF in a permissionless fashion. We expect to recruit 20~30 developers and provide retrospective funding if they can complete the program. They are expected to follow along EPF’s 3 phases.
   1. Before Phase 1: We expect to receive 20~30 applications from “shadow developers” before June 10th (Phase 1), and no interview is needed, since we are not offering any exclusive resources at this point.
   2. During Phase 1: They are expected to join the open calls, participate in open community discussions, and leverage community resources such as epf.wiki to get a grasp of the core protocol.
   3. Phase 2: We expect to provide core protocol mentorship to the shadow developers who “survived” Phase 1. And they should’ve established solid communication with the communities, and should be able to complete a project proposal with the help of the mentor.
   4. Phase 3: We expect the shadow developers can implement their design during phase 3, and attend all open community gatherings including in-person gatherings.
   5. Wrap-up: If a shadow developer has completed the shadow program and delivered non-trivial results, GCC can provide a retrospective funding for such developers.

AMA

• Funding
  • EPF official funding is from 1000 U per month to at most 10000 U per month，with an average stipend at 2500 U per month. The stipend is not meant to be “salary”, but a basic living cost defined by each applicant.
• Mentorship:
  • EPF is a completely open program. Mentors are not meant to “teach” anything, they mainly help participants to clear obstacles, onboarding to different resources and give feedback on designs. The mentors do these in the community every day, and they will review each proposal. (The only difference might be: they are likely to prioritize selected participants, which is very reasonable ).
  • It’s really upon the developer themselves to utilize the communities open resources to solve their problems. Thus, they have to be very self-motivated.
  • EPF was concerned about the mentorship bandwidth. The program requires both strong English communication and coding skills. If too many permissionless participants join the program and start occupying the community bandwidth (e.g. asking questions that can be found in AMA, not able to communicate fluently in English, completely new to coding and asking questions on how to coding etc.), they might be overwhelmed.

Shadow Program

• Host EPF Town-Hall style AMA in Mandarin-speaking time-zone
• Find Chinese mentor to onboard more developers
• Interview to select shadow developers
• Host weekly office hour and shadow developers online standups (for them to share their progress and discuss ideas)
• Other resources that can help the shadow developers
• The project name will likely not be “shadow program” LOL