Is there any open research being done on the ways to improve Ethereum’s R&D processes?
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Yes. You just posted on one of the experiments 
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This and the subsidy/grant programs are all good initiatives. But how have you ended up with these? I’m looking for the open discussion to contribute to.
So far that is mainly internal discussion inside the ethereum foundation team; though if you want to make any suggestions we’d be happy to listen
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Good, I’ll create an issue in the research repo in the next days.
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Speaking of ethresear.ch being one of those meta-innovations…the software for this forum is really nice. What is the forum software that runs on the site? I checked the about page but couldn’t find more information on the code. It’s very smooth and feature packed!
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I’m so glad you like it.
Don’t forget you can use \LaTeX too!
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Yes, it’s FANTASTIC! And overall so well put together. Great job to all of you Definitely setting the gold standard for (technical) forums.
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What’s the reason behind the Foundation not being radically transparent?
Signal to noise ratio often gets very low for certain topics. So we don’t broadcast everything. But the fact that we made this forum for you to share your input for feedback is pretty darn transparent.
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Yes, this forum is great. But what is the difference between the power of open collaboration on research/software development and on management?
Well, this is your opportunity to demonstrate the advantages of a more open management. What do you suggest to improve meta-innovation?
As a first step, I think making the Foundation (radically) transparent is necessary. I opened an issue in, for lack of a better place, the EIPs repo to start a discussion on it.
I’m personally amazed by the fact that the only information easily available about a such an important organization is this and the blog. Transparency provides the basis for analysis, open discussion and improvements on its activities. The advantages of open management and open-source development are virtually the same IMO.
I’m probably biased but, combined with the right incentives for contribution, I see this as another potential scaling solution.
Transparency is almost always a good thing, and I predict that Ethereum Foundation, when it reaches full maturity, will probably have transparency practices reminscent of those in IETF or Wikimedia. So those are points in your proposal’s favour.
The main argument against opening up management to full transparency (or full user input, an even higher bar) is that:
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There’s some discussions, particularly with governments and large orgs, that need to start private as we feel each other out. No risk averse org wants to publicly start something and then later rescind, or have it publicly blow up in their face.
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As for full management participation, unfortunately it’s much more time consuming to distinguish management nonsense from useful contributions. Everyone has an opinion on management, and it’s harder to distinguish useful responses. This is worse than code, which there’s a higher minimum bar to articulate your ideas, and in general it’s easier to determine the value of a pull request than a policy change.
Fully opening up management is ideologically desired, but for the reasons above, it would moderately slow down the rate decisions get made. And given the current hyper-competitive landscape in crypto, adopting that slowness would be precarious. As such, I would argue against complete (radical) transparency or user participation in management for at least the next 2 years.
That said, Ethereum is interested in suggestions. Can you suggest something else, something less radical or something smaller?
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Yes, pick up any topics which interest you. Start contributing to it. You will be noticed by the core contributors
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To transparency: I’ve put “radical” in parentheses because of the concern you raised. So, what about finding the maximum safe level of transparency and starting to get there?
To management: That seems like a problem solvable by mechanism design. Getting people raise ideas responsibly and/or incentivizing them to help with curation. It can also start as a non-binding signaling mechanism, not slowing down anything.
Research on the second one can get started while already executing on the first one. More transparency is desirable even till you don’t find the satisfactory solutions.
@a4nkit I’m trying to spend my time efficiently. I belive this would have more impact.
Okay. Let’s talk about more transperancy.
What sort of less radical transperancy would you like to see?
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In research we currently have meeting public meeting notes. http://notes.ethereum.org/GbBswFgEwZgVgLRwJwGMIIgUwOwCYEAjHLABgWGS1BzjiwEZCo8g
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And on YouTube there’s the biweekly all hands dev meeting.
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There’s also the new Ethereum magicians which just had their first public meeting. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rgQnZKpNc71XUotSTVmHt9La8y3_yKi8te1bH396AWA/edit
What would you like to see beyond these? Just thinking about it, all of our regular meetings have public minutes. Perhaps we could better advertise those.