“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” —Helen Keller</blockquote>

We all want to do awesome things, and we need to make it as easy to collaborate as possible so that people can focus on their ideas, rather than having to worry about being invited into a Skype room just to be able to coordinate with others working on similar ideas.

Bellow is a reddit post that sums it up nicely:

From the design stage, Ethereum Builders was envisioned as a tool that would lower the entry barriers, increase the community member interaction and bring the fun of working together closer to everyone.

Besides, with an actively engaged community, the ongoing feedback given by the group can also help the developer team test and improve features while including new people in various aspects of Ethereum as a project.

Now, with Ethereum Builders you have people talking about their work, sharing knowledge, and providing peer-to-peer support, all of which also allows new developers to come on board and be up and running quickly and successfully.

Regarding the future Ethereum sessions, I’d like to remind everyone that anyone can schedule a session. That means anyone really with a project or an interesting topic can propose a time, and if people consider the project and/or topic attractive, the rest will take care of itself.

Since soft-launched on March 20th, Ethereum Builders has now over 100 members that share knowledge and collaborate openly.

Awesome!

The first session was a much-needed Ethereum client install fest, followed by an introduction in the Ethereum 101 project, a lounge session with Decentral Vancouver and spiking up with the awesome Project Groundhog presentation and brainstorming session.

We also have a few cool sessions coming up, such as the “ultimate stablecoin built on Ethereum” (eDollar) scheduled for April 12th to blockchain based prediction markets built on Ethereum (Augur, date not set yet). The sessions are open for anyone, so if you find any of these topics interesting, join in or create one yourself if you’d like to propose a topic!

Now, in order to manage this project, we use a cocktail of collaboration tools and since it has been received well by quite a few people already, I’d like to share it with you too. If you find this useful and need some help in getting it up and running or want to say thank-you, get in touch with us.

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” —Michael Jordan</blockquote>

After exploring a vast number of options, I was convinced that co-opting the existent infrastructure (i.e. GitHub) and repurposing it (i.e. ZenHub) is the best combo for our needs, taking also considerable less time to deploy as an initial experiment.

In the current form, this is how things were thought:

Step one: Supercharge GitHub workflows

Here’s how we transform your usual GitHub account into a powerful project management tool:

Go to https://www.zenhub.io/ or directly install the Chrome extension from the webstore Connect your GitHub account with ZenHub.

You can check if everything went okay by checking your GitHub application settings. You should see ZenHub as one of the authorized applications.

If ZenHub has been correctly installed, then a new tab called “board(s)” should appear on your GitHub repo pages. The board(s) are populated by the issues created, each new issue becoming a card on the new ZenHub board tab.

This is how a populated board should look:

Step two: Enhance GitHub interactivity with Gitter

Besides GitHub, we also use an application called Gitter. Very straightforward setup process; an incredibly well suited app for distributed communities and projects like this one. With this tool you’re able to transform your favorite repos into your favorite chatrooms ^_^

Get started by:

Signing in with your GitHub account Join the available chatrooms or create new ones.

You can find listed a few Ethereum chatrooms below if you want to join the fun :)

Step three: Accelerate open source with Bountysource

One of the biggest problems surrounding open-source, community-based projects is resource starvation. In our case we’ll Bountysource to get around the resource-starvation issue and allow the community to guide itself and become self-sustainable in the process.

And here’s how Bountysource fits into the picture:

Sign in with your GitHub account Create, contribute or solve the current issues listed in the Ethereum repos (and not only).

The cool part about it is that once integrated, it automatically updates the GitHub issues (Title, Body, Label), which is great since we’re using ZenHub and the Gitter activity panel. Below you can see an automatically updated issue that had a bounty created via Bountysource.

And this is how it looks integrated with Gitter via the activity panel on the right:

You’re fully set up now to chat openly with other people about Ethereum (in multiple languages), contribute to all the existent issues and also create new bounties. Things will get more interesting once we have the possibility of creating a DAPP and/or DAO, but in the meantime, I think this is a pretty cool solution as well.

For those who are curious, you can see the components in action for the ΞB platform as follows:

By setting things up this way, now the GitHub organization ethereum.builders is morphing into an aggregator of projects, offering people a way to learn, discover and join ongoing Ethereum efforts.

Tapping into the collaborative potential