Ethereum EIP Editor Selection: Explained

Current EIP Editors:

1. Nick Johnson
2. Casey Detrio
3. Hudson Jameson
4. Vitalik Buterin
5. Nick Savers
6. Martin Becze
7. Greg Colvin
8. Alex Beregszaszi

Yoichi Hirai, a former EIP Editor stated in a blog post following his resignation that, “EIP editors are not chosen democratically”.

Nick Johnson, an EIP editor with the handle @arachnid, gave the following explanation for the current structure for EIP’s and EIP editors:

A couple of really important notes here. First, the part at which the general userbase has input is on deciding to accept or reject a proposed change by way of hard fork. This is the network's ultimate governance method, and employs economic consensus to determine which 'side' 'wins'. As a result, individual end users don't need to 'vote' on draft EIPs, and thus we don't need a formalized process for taking community consensus at that point of the process. Further, the presence of this ultimate check discourages the implementation of a change that everyone knows will be unpopular.

Second, 'consensus' in the EIP process does not mean "nobody disagrees"; it means that all technical and editorial concerns that have been raised have been adequately addressed. RFC 7282 is an example of how the IETF handles this, and the sort of process we aspire to. In this context, voting can be harmful, as it gives the impression that decisions are taken by majority rule; on the contrary, one single participant expressing a critical flaw should be enough to torpedo a proposal, and a hundred people with irrelevant objections should not.

Personally, I think this is a good process (at least, if functioning as designed); it ensures that standards get written to the highest technical standard we can achieve, and it ensures they don't get adopted unless the community agrees (that last bit is baked into the operation of a consensus system - we couldn't change it even if we wanted).

Finally, one last note: The EF does not run the EIP process - EIP editors are volunteers and don't all work for the EF. Nor does the EF have the final say at all core devs meetings.

Despite this clarification, most people in the community reference the EF core dev team and EIP editors interchangeably as if they are the same. In addition, it’s still completely unknown how EIP editors are selected.