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ICON Technical Community Update – Q2 2023

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March 26, 2023

TL;DR

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Purpose

To support the growing technical community on ICON, we are publishing “ICON Technical Community Reports” on a quarterly basis. These reports are designed to inform ICON’s technical community about the ideological focus, milestones, specific goals, and planned timelines for a given time period. In this update, we will discuss milestones and goals for Q2 2023. Let’s dive in!

Specs

Dates

April 1, 2023 - June 30, 2023

Focus

During this time period, our main focus will be on utilizing in-place collaboration mechanisms to expand on the utility and adoption of existing or forthcoming interoperability tools. Much of this will be done through the Sustainability User Group, and the various Special Interest Groups.

Prior milestones

  • Ongoing: Create technical tutorials and templates

  • Ongoing Reorganize BTP specifications

  • Completed: Integrate CPS development with UG Sustainability

  • Ongoing: Increase knowledge of ICON-Java Execution Environment

  • Ongoing: Increase knowledge of ICON Consensus Environment

  • Ongoing: Organize in-person meetups

Goals

We are keeping the same high level goals for this quarter, as they have proven to be useful beacons towards sustainable and forward-moving technical developments for the icon technical community

Create technical tutorials and templates

In the last quarter, we have added Fidel Sanchez-Bueno, also known as Espanicon as a contractor working in support of the ICON Foundation Developer Relations team. With his help, we have improved information on running a local networkworking with accounts and debugging nodes, as well as added some of those to the tutorials section of the icon.community site. More to come about BTP relays, smart contracts, etc.

Reorganize BTP specifications

This will take some time, as the BTP implementation is taking priority. However, we continue to work with the primary BTP developers, Parameta (fka ICONLOOP), in order to create this specification set

Integrate CPS development with UG Sustainability

As with last time, efforts are being made to further decentralize the process that guides the decisions made with respect to the development roadmap. Code developments will continue to largely be made by Venture23 (fka iBriz). This is being integrated into the now-operational Sustainability User Group and is being tracked via that group and the CPS project. You can also participate in community discussions about this on the ICON Community Forum, on Twitter, or on Discord

We have begun the monthly CPS meetings, run by UG Sustainability. Meeting notes are archived in the icon-project/community repository. Meeting recordings are archived in the ICON Network Youtube in the ICON Community Group playlist

Increase knowledge of ICON-Java Execution Environment

This will take time as well, as it is a big undertaking. We are working with the primary developers of this execution environment, Parameta, to understand more. Additionally, we are working on better user-level tutorials for the ICON-Java environment so that we can encourage more development in that environment, which brings along new security-based development practices, more debugging, more tooling and libraries, and more general user feedback. This is expected to be facilitated through a new Special Interest Group called SIG Execution Environment

Increase knowledge of ICON Consensus Environment

Again, this will take time. We are working with the primary developers of this execution environment, Parameta, to understand more. This is expected to be facilitated through a new Special Interest Group called SIG Core Blockchain

Organize in-person meetups

We have begun in-person community meetups through the Web3 Partners endeavor, launched by Eric Solomon. Web3 Partners communities are localized business development and collaboration-based education communities. As the goal of the ICON project is to bridge many web3 and general decentralized technology communities together, these communities are not limited to ICON-based project development and education. However, the ICON community is taking the initiative to bootstrap and co-organize in these communities to promote themselves, their projects, and the ICON ecosystem in the larger decentralized technology landscape. So far, there are active communities in Delft/Rotterdam/the Hague, Netherlands and in Bogota, Colombia. There are a few more global communities in development. Shout out to the community members collaborating on this.