There is a pattern which has run through my whole life. I try everything.

I am a ENTP according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator with the “P” standing for Prospector.

Some website call this type of person “The Debater”, some call it “The Diplomat”, some call it “The Visionary”. The specific labels are not as important as the characterization of the patterns of behaviour. Those are spot on in describing me.

I was a lot more introverted earlier in my life, so was an INTP. I have also had long spells of severe depression, and more recently hypomanic phases. I finally got what I believe is a correct diagnosis on 30th Oct 2019 – Cyclothymia. Or, as my good friend, Texture, calls it “Baby bipolar” 😂

From Judging (“J”) or Perceiving (“P”) article on myersbriggs.org:

The following statements generally apply to me:

• • I like to stay open to respond to whatever happens.
  • I appear to be loose and casual. I like to keep plans to a minimum.
  • I like to approach work as play or mix work and play.
  • I work in bursts of energy.
  • I am stimulated by an approaching deadline.
  • Sometimes I stay open to new information so long I miss making decisions when they are needed.

When I say everything, I mean everything:

• I got fooled into joining Amway when I was 18-19. I think that experience really helped me to understand the danger in OneCoin.

• I was a gold bug, a sovereign citizen, a prepper and a huge Alex Jones fan in 2009. I stocked up on decades worth of dry food, baseball bats (no guns for me), old US silver coins for barter, the lot. I learned to grow my own vegetables. I was learning to sail (so I could get a boat as my “escape route” from collapsing Vancouver when SHTF. I was looking at buying property in Chile. I was totally bought on New World Order, Bilderberg, Council for Foreign Relations, Bohemian Grove, etc. I used Liberty Reserve. I was looking at buying additional citizenships, some through very shady means. I was a 9/11 Truther. I even went down the Birther rabbit hole for a while and started doubting vaccines 🙂
• I was a Libertarian and Ron Paul fan. I followed the 2012 US Presidential Election intensely. Was gutted at how he was treated. I still think that his position on Military spending is spot on. Abolishing pretty much all government functions and social welfare nets? Maybe not so wise, I see now.
• For years I was obsessed with trying to understand how on earth Germany descended into Nazi hell. I have shelves and shelves of books on Nazi Germany and WWII. I have a copy of Mein Kampf. I also have shelves of books on the USSR and Communism, and multiple books on Stalin and Lenin and Mao.
• I was fascinated with the Occupy movement when that came around.

In a more mundate form, I has seen this behaviour in myself in a work context too.

I was at Electronic Arts for 15+ years, and in that time I found myself on nearly every different side of every fence there was within that organization. Working on game teams, in central technology teams, on workwide initiatives. As an individual developer, as a technical lead, in an architectural oversite role. Visit “every bucket”.

Same in my Ethereum journey. I started as a community member. Then I was a volunteer. Then I was “on the inside”, working for the Ethereum Foundation. Then I was at ConsenSys, working for the largest for-profit entity within the space. There I was deeply involved in the creation, launch and operation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, and involved with Hyperledger. So very different dynamic within a consortium of frenemies. Then I was at Sweetbridge and Quantfury, and setting up Varro Technologies with Alison – trying to work through startup land – and building your own company. Then I flipped over to Ethereum Classic, which was seen by some as “the mortal enemy”. Not me!

What does all of this mean?

I have probably “been you” at some point, because I try everything out. I may or may not “like those clothes” for a long time, but I will at least try and am thoroughly curious and seek to understand EVERYONE and EVERYTHING. I like to think that I have a lot of empathy and compassion because of my breadth of human interactions. I hate unresolved conflict.

It is exceedingly unlikely that I am “your enemy”, and if you see me say things which “trigger” you, or which sound like my thinking is hostile to you and your beliefs, the likelihood is that that is untrue. I have skin as thick an elephant, so please just tell me whatever your issue with my statements is, and we will have a conversation like adults.

Criticism is welcome. I am a big boy. Let me have it! In public or privately as you wish. We might both learn something in the process.

I have been called an Infinite Fucking Looper, a Corporate Communist, a Socialist, a Misogynist, a Racist, an Egotist, a Tyrant, an Authoritarian, an Ethereum Maximalist, an ETC Maximalist, a Hyperledger Maximalist.

There is nothing you can say which I have not heard before. I think all of these labels are totally miss the mark, but I take no offense. Just words.

The only Maximalism which I would confess to would be Humanity Maximalism. I believe that most humans are essentially good, and that collaboration is the path to our Star Trek future.

Even that I would temper, though. I love cats and dogs and other animals too, and I hope that I get to meet aliens one day as well.

I am delighted to announce that ETC Cooperative are officially Associate Members of Hyperledger as of 21st November 2019.

In September, I pledged that ETC Cooperative would contribute ETC support to the newly approved Hyperledger Besu codebase. That support has already been upstreamed, and ETC mainnet syncs successfully.

This is a very happy day, and a very satisfying step in a long personal journey.

Quote from Hyperledger:

“We are very happy to have the ETC Cooperative now a formal part of the Hyperledger community” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger. “Even back in 2016, it was clear to me and to Bob that the more we could do to bring together developers from all our different ‘tribes’ working together on common code the further we could go as a whole blockchain community, even if we differ on long-term goals, governance models, or genesis blocks. Since then, the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem (both ETH, ETC, and the growing enterprise uses charted by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance) has made the value of technical collaboration even clearer. Bob was an early believer in this, and to see this idea bear fruit in ETC Coop’s interest in ETC support in Besu and their interest in other Hyperledger projects is a high point of 2019 for me.”

Quote from ETC Cooperative:

“My own Hyperledger journey started in May 2016 when I hosted an Open Source Blockchain Meetup outside of OSCON in Austin, Texas. I was working for the Ethereum Foundation at the time.” said Bob Summerwill, Executive Director, ETC Cooperative. “Chris Ferris and Brian Behlendorf both attended that event and Chris spoke. It was obvious to me even then that moving Ethereum codebases under the mature governance and IP policies of the Linux Foundation was the best way to advance the project. With HL Burrow and HF Besu that is exactly what has happened, though it has taken a lot longer than I anticipated. It is an absolute pleasure for me to bring ETC Cooperative to the Hyperledger table, to help accelerate this trend. We are seeing ever increasing cooperation between ETH ecosystem, ETC ecosystem, EF, EEA and the many other flavors of the “Ethereum family”. Hyperledger is the best possible place to coordinate that collaboration, in my opinion. We have already made our first contribution to Hyperledger – with ETC support upstreamed to Besu last week.”

How do we address the East/West disconnects within Ethereum Classic?

It is actually really simple when you understand that the root issue is technical hindrances to communication across the Great Firewall of China. I would argue that these technical hindrances are much more significant than language barriers. There are many countries which share language, but differ a lot in culture.

“England and America are two countries separated
by a common language” – George Bernard Shaw

The vast majority of communication within English-speaking Western and global communities is happening on the ETC Discord server and on Crypto-Twitter, but both of these applications are blocked by the Great Firewall, so are inaccessible to the majority of people on the Chinese mainland. This is a fairly recent thing, with VPNs being a lot more accessible (though legally “gray”) until this year. Even beyond that “brick wall”, these communication tools are very little known in China.

WeChat, on the other hand, is completely ubiquitous in China, and not just for chat, but also for payments and other functionality. It works just fine in the rest of the world too, so is the natural choice for a global communication platform for Ethereum Classic in which we value the Chinese community’s needs to a degree appropriate to their importance to ETC.

There are a lot of people in China. There are a lot of great companies. Much of this is unknown in the West because of the language barrier and these communication barriers. So let’s fix this, and get active two-way communication paths going. We want the Chinese communities to benefit from the latest information from the English developers and also to build greater understanding of Chinese development efforts in the West.

So please join us on the brand new ETC Global Comms channel:

On 3rd October 2019 we reverted EthereumClassic.org from the WordPress site which was active from April 2018, having been one of Anthony Lusardi‘s earlier projects as the previous Director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative (February 2018 to March 2019).

So was that spending a waste of money? Not at all. That website served the community for 18 months and was a significant upgrade both in its aesthetics, but also in its content. We are not going to lose any of that content. We can migrate it back across. This is just a change of underlying technology, motivated by the workflow benefit we gain by enabling anybody to update the website themselves by submitting pull requests against a public Github project, rather than having to ask administrators (first Anthony and then myself) if they can please add an extra entry, or make change XYZ. That is not a scalable approach, and it resulted in the “rot” of some of that information.

Where this infrastructure touches on East/West disconnect is that we have also had an information gap between the communities because ethereumclassic.org has only ever been an English language website to this point.

There are two primary communities and their websites covering China, to this point:

The earlier community was ethereumclassic.cn, maintained by ETCC – Ethereum Classic Consortium (China), with Roy Zou the best known face. Here is Roy presenting at the first ETC Summit, in 2017 in Hong Kong.

The second community was started in 2018, driven by DFG and ETC Labs, but has a broader scope. That is ethereumclassicasia.org, covering China, Japan and Korea, and also having outreach to other Asian countries. Christian Xu is the driving force behind these communities.

Having multiple community groups for a single country is not intrinsically problematic. Ethereum Classic is permissionless. There is no “official” anything or any right to exclusivity.

Not even the ETC Cooperative itself is an “official voice” and can only use its influence and respect to suggest that things move in any particular direction.

If we add Internationalization support to the Github-based ethereumclassic.org, such that Chinese language documentation on the platform is available without needing a specific website then we will be a lot more aligned in the information we have access to. For countries which only have small communities and perhaps only have users rather than developers / companies building the platform, just providing translations without the overhead of maintaining their own website, and all the overhead of keeping that information up to date will be very appealing.

Indeed, within minutes of me suggesting this approach, we had a volunteer to do German and Russian translations.

So I think that Adding Internationalization Support to the EthereumClassic.org will be the second “move”, as well as the creation of the WeChat channel, will move us in a very, very good direction. If you agree, please help! Come to Github and comment on that issue, offering your help in whatever form you can. I don’t think it will take long!

So today is the last day of Hyperledger TSC voting.  The polls close at 5pm Pacific today, with the results announced tomorrow.

There was a little Twitter activity around my observation on the diversity issues which we have in the TSC, and a new mail thread has been kicked off:

How can we improve diversity in the Hyperledger technical community?

I am a Community Ambassador for CryptoChicks and I care deeply about this topic and will do everything which I can to help promote a healthy and welcoming environment for women in the Hyperledger technical community.

Women of Hyperledger – How can I help you?   Please join that thread.

The candidates for the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee (TSC) elections were announced today, together with everybody’s one page “pitches”, including my own:

Hyperledger Annual TSC Election Candidates (2018-2019)

There are 29 candidates for the 11 seats on the committee.  All of the incumbents are standing for re-election, together with 18 challengers, including myself.

The existing committee has the following composition:

• Intel – Dan Middleton, Kelly Olson and Mic Bowman
• IBM – Arnaud Le Hors and Chris Ferris (Chair)
• State Street – Greg Haskins and Binh Nguyen (recently ex-IBM)
• Other – Jonathan Levi (Hacera), Hart Montgomery (Fujitsu), Nathan George (Evernym), Baohua Yang (Oracle)

And here are the challengers:

• Bitwise IO – Shawn Amundson
• Blockchain Engineering Council – Claudio Lima
• CME – Stanislav Liberman
• Finterra – Mostafa S. Joo
• Independent – Axe Tang, Clive Boulton, Sjir Njissen
• Monax – Silas Davis
• Ontario Provincial Government – Steve Boyd
• Oracle – Todd Little
• Quantfury – Bob Summerwill
• Red Hat – Mark Wagner
• SANLIAN Technology – Leon Liang
• SecureKey – Troy Ronda
• Soramitsu – Mukhutdinov Bualt, Nikolai Iushkevich
• State Street – Srinivasan “Murali” Muralidharan
• T-Mobile – Chris Spanton

I really enjoyed what Silas Davis and Mark Wagner had to say.  I worked with Silas on the Technology Working Group for the first few months of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and love what Monax have been doing to bridge the worlds.  This quote from Mark also really resonated with my own motivations for standing for election:

One of the reasons that I have chosen to run for the TSC is to provide more vendor diversity on the Committee as over half of the TSC is from two companies. My time is focused in the working groups and I am currently not associated with any of the projects. Thus I try to span all the projects with equal interest

– Mark Wagner

There most certainly is an overweight representation from IBM and Intel on the TSC at the moment, and I hope that we can come out of these elections with a more diverse balance of representatives.

On the topic of diversity, as a Community Ambassador for CryptoChicks, I have to say that I am sorely disappointed to note that not a single candidate for these elections is female.  The Hyperledger Governing Board has 21 members, only one of whom, Blythe Masters, the Chair, is female.

I spoke about CryptoChicks on Coindesk LIVE during Consensus 2018 in New York this year.  CryptoChicks are a non-profit blockchain educational hub with a mission to grow the professional and leadership potential of women in blockchain technology through education and mentorship.  I am delighted to do everything I can help in that noble mission.

Voting starts tomorrow and runs until August 22nd, with the results announced a week tomorrow on August 23rd.

Good luck, everyone!

[Sent on August 9th 2018 in response to CALL FOR NOMINATIONS / Hyperledger / Annual TSC Election sent to eligible candidates]

My name is Bob Summerwill. I have been a professional software developer since 1996 with the majority of my career in the videogames industry, including 15+ years at Electronic Arts in various technical leadership roles on 20 AAA tiles, including a spell as Label Software Architect for EA Sports. I always found myself gravitating to collaboration projects of all stripes within EA. I later worked as a DevOps Solutions Architect at TD Securities in Toronto. I am currently Blockchain Lead for Quantfury, CTO at Varro Technologies, a community leader for the Ethereum Project and Community Ambassador for CryptoChicks, a Canadian non-profit organization working towards gender balance in blockchain.

I have been involved in blockchain since 2014 and have been an active participant in the Ethereum ecosystem in particular since 2015, working at the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. I worked as a developer on the C++ Ethereum client at the Ethereum Foundation after several months in the community adding ARM Linux cross-build support to bring Ethereum to mobile Linux devices and smartwatches.

https://doublethink.co/2015/11/30/first-working-ethereum-c-cross-builds/

I spent 5 months in 2016 leading a failed attempt to relicense the C++ Ethereum client as Apache 2.0 so that the codebase could be contributed to Hyperledger. I have always been supportive of Hyperledger, recently speaking at the relaunch of the Hyperledger Vancouver Meetup. I have been participating in the Identity Working Group. I see Hyperledger as critical to the technology, providing an umbrella for open source development with a common IP and licensing policy and with the mature governance and collaboration project expertise of the the Linux Foundation standing behind the projects.

I was instrumental in the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. As Co-Lead Architect I presented the Technical Roadmap at the launch event and later served first as Secretary of the Technical Working Group and later as Vice-Chair of the Technical Steering Committee. I have a very intimate understanding of the dynamics within enterprise blockchain, spanning both public blockchain and enterprise companies. I have spoken at dozens of Meetups and conferences on a large variety of topics in the last couple of years and am I very active on social media and in the community:

• https://twitter.com/BobSummerwill
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobsummerwill/
• https://varro.tech/media/

Here are some blog posts about my blockchain journey:

• https://bobsummerwill.com/2016/07/12/ethereum-everywhere/
• https://bobsummerwill.com/2018/07/30/i-am-running-for-election-to-the-hyperledger-technical-steering-committee/
• https://bobsummerwill.com/2018/08/07/building-bridges/

I have been working to build bridges across the blockchain ecosystem for many years, but I have unfinished business in building what I see is the most important bridge of all to help blockchain reach its full potential: The bridge to mainstream adoption. That is why I spent a year working on the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and why I want to offer my service on the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee.

This is not a zero sum game. Nobody has all the answers, but many of us are on parallel journeys and would be better served by sharing the road. What might have looked like hard lines in 2015/2016 are increasingly blurring and the line between public and private networks is blurring.

I believe I have both the technical background, personal character and blockchain consortium experience to bring people together on Hyperledger, to broaden engagement, and especially to bring together the Ethereum and Hyperledger communities to a degree which has proved elusive to this point.

Here is my conflict of interests statement:

• https://bobsummerwill.com/conflict-of-interests-statement/

Best wishes, and I thank you for your consideration!

– Bob

I have never enjoyed zero sum thinking.

I am an eternal optimist and my view is that most humans are essentially good people.  Who wants wars, famine and conflict?   Surely it is better to collaborate where that makes sense, and not to sabotage each other where our goals are not aligned?

I have been told that I am too altruistic.  That I need to be a little more selfish.  And perhaps it is true, but that is something which is an effort for me.  It is a stretch from my default position, where I always seek to build a better future for humanity and for my children.

Integrity and transparency are really important to me.  I don’t want to wear a mask.  I don’t want there to be a business Bob and a personal Bob.   You get the same Bob whoever you are and whatever the context.  It is this one, here with my friend and fellow Vancouver blockchainer, Chelsea Palmer (AKA Ms Gnu) at Decentralized Web Summit last week:

Last November I started maintaining a Conflict of Interests Statement on my website, so everyone on the planet can know who I am and what my financial incentives are.  I want there to be no doubt whatsoever about the purity of my intentions.

Somebody asked why would I do this?  Was I running for office or something?  I replied:

Well here we are.  Nine months further on and I am running for office.

I am standing for election to the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee (TSC) because I have unfinished business in building what I see is the most important bridge of all to help blockchain reach its full potential: The bridge to mainstream adoption.

Golden Gate Bridge in the Evening Sun (Creative Commons Attributed 3.0 Unported)

As I wrote more than two years ago in my Ethereum Everywhere blog post while I was attempting to bridge the Ethereum and Hyperledger communities for the first time:

Corporations will build blockchain technology irrespective of what we do.   It is already happening.

Just as both Intranets and the Internet have a role to play, so do public and private/consortium chains.    Maximalist thinking is not particularly helpful here.

The real world never works in black-and-white, and demonizing people with similar but not identical goals is self-defeating.

And I still love this quote:

So maybe the world was not ready for such a public <-> enterprise blockchain bridge in 2016, but I see a real shift in that thinking in the meantime.  Maximalism of all forms is melting away as more and more people realize that a one-size-fits all solution is very unlikely for blockchain.

There are use-cases where public permissionless chains make sense, where public permissioned chains make sense, where consortium chains make sense, where private chains make sense, where throughput trumps decentralization, where security is paramount over performance.   We need scaling on-chain, off-chain, with sidechains, child-chains, with sharding, with alternative consensus.   We need privacy features.   We need interchain solutions.   We need content-addressable storage solutions with incentive layers.  We need standard libraries, frameworks, debuggers, testing tools, better IDE integration, formal verification, and much more more.

Nobody has all the answers, but many of us are on parallel journeys and would be better served by sharing the road.

R3 are now building a public network and Richard Crook’s Cordite project is building enterprise tokens on Corda:

The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance which I helped to bring to life in early 2017 recently published the EEA Enterprise Ethereum Client Specification 1.0.

ConsenSys have announced that they will release a new Enterprise grade Ethereum client this October at DEVCON4:

IBM are experimenting with building a USD stablecoin on Stellar.   Their joint venture with Maersk will undoubtedly require some means of settlement as well.

We.trade has popped into existence.  We had the latest phase of Project Ubin in Singapore not so long back.   IBM and ConsenSys’s work in Dubai aiming to migrate all government systems to blockchain by 2020 continues.  The owner of the NYSE is partnering with Microsoft and Starbucks on a Bitcoin exchange.

We are starting to make steps towards regulatory clarity.

We are not playing games anymore.  This is seriously impactful stuff.   What might have looked like hard lines between public and private and between different technology bases in 2015/2016 are rapidly blurring.

As John Wolpert said so well in his recent Bring on the Stateful Internet post:

There is no conflict here.  His conclusion is spot-on:

This is the same perspective which I would bring to my work on the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee.  This is not a zero sum game.  We need to work together across all of these technologies, and to have a neutral forum where we can all collaborate on the open source projects which underpin both commercial and non-commercial efforts.   Same as Linux.  Same as the web.

Say hello to the Hyperledger Greenhouse:

I have done lots of interviews and conferences in the last year or two and they are all up on my website if you would like to get more of a flavor of where I am coming from.

My door is always open to communication.   Here are all of the ways you can contact me, but I am most active on Twitter.

Have a great day!