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Ethereum is a platform for developers to build on, and like all development platforms, it lives and dies by its developer community. In just a year, Ethereum went from an idea to public release and the developer community it has gathered in that time is unparalleled.

Together, we have developed strategies and tools to make it easier to build applications on Ethereum. Open source projects like Dapple and Truffle make us more powerful by making the development process faster and more robust. Advice on developing secure smart contracts have sprung up all around the community, making our products more secure. The Ethereum Foundation is playing a vital role in advancing the core technologies of this decentralization renaissance, but it’s not enough.

We need a way to harness the entire community’s latent desire for progress in ways that centralized organizations are incapable of doing.

To harness that desire, we must let go of the archaic custom of pooling funds and deciding how to spend them together. We are entering a world of abundance, and it’s time to start acting like it. When abundance is the goal, controlling access to shared funds is irrelevant. What matters is identifying the contributions that have made our common wealth abundant so we can honor those who have contributed.

Coming to consensus on contributions, a problem we solved centuries ago

We define genres of music without an elaborate governance process. Anyone can define a new genre and the contributions that fall within it. The genres that are likely to persist are the ones that the contributors themselves agree upon. Once a genre is broad enough, it’s the contributors themselves who have the authority to reject new contributions that claim to be a part of their genre. If you know how to identify a rap song or a cubist painting, you know how to identify a contribution to Ethereum Commonwealth. Using this process, Benefactory helps us identify the contributors of every last cent — of every last wei — to our common wealth.

The first Ethereum Commonwealth proposal is a new feature for TestRPC, a widely-used tool for developing against a simulated Ethereum network. Read the proposal, discuss it with the community, and when you’re confident that the work will be valuable, contribute to the grant. But more importantly, you need to change your mindset. When you know you can build something that can make Ethereum easier to use and develop on, make a proposal to the community so you can work on it. When you know of a problem but you don’t know the best way to solve it, post a request for proposals so the community knows people are willing to fund a solution to that problem.

Now that we have the technology to record contributions to our common wealth, we should make contributions we will be honored for. Our contributions will be easy to find for anyone who cares to look for them on Ethereum, the digital scroll in the cloud.

The easier we make it to build on top of Ethereum, the better we will make the world together.