Dear Masterminds,

For most of the last year, Ron Gross has been volunteering in the role of Executive Director of the MSC Foundation. As we approach the 1 year mark Ron is transitioning out of this role after providing a great deal of his time and effort to build up the community. He intends to stay involved as a member of the Board and continues to hold his MSC for the long term, but will be moving out of the leadership position.

In the search for candidates to provide leadership for the Foundation, several members of the Board of Directors asked me to step up into the role of the Chairman of the Board and take up the work of setting the road map and working with the full time development team.

For back ground on myself you can check out my Linkedin and Angel List profiles to see the technologies I’ve developed in the past and projects I’m involved with today.

https://angel.co/david-johnston

I’ve agreed to take on this position because I believe in the future of the MSC protocol (having been one of its very first supporters) and the amazing open source developers that are involved in its development.

To kick off this transition I’d like to list the new priorities for the MSC Foundation going forward:

1. Develop A Clear Road Map Moving Forward:

The protocol and its reference clients have come a long way the last year with the recent launch of both Omni Wallet and the MasterCore clients into Beta. However for the community to be on the same page it makes sense to have a road map that we can craft together. This road map outlines the next features the team will focus on developing, protocol improvements to be made, and milestones we will aim to accomplish together.

Please see the road map I’ve proposed with lots of input from the MSC core contributors: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k3O2jwBQpL7byjXoA9zzwyNJ_j0EmVzSDK5_qoLq1Ro/edit?usp=sharing

This is an open source document, by all means add your thoughts, comments, and productive input.

2. Open Up Communication:

In order to get more developers, entrepreneurs, and founders involved in the MSC community I’m calling for an open door, open channel policy on everything MSC. Meaning more AMA’s with core contributors, clear points of contact for those wanting to get involved, and more engagement in community spaces such as the MSC sub Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, MSC and BTC Forums.

This blog post has been cross posted to MSC + BTC Forums, Skype, and Reddit. http://mastercointalk.org/index.php?topic=796.0
http://www.reddit.com/r/mastercoin/comments/2cow6s/resetting_the_msc_foundations_priorities_give/

I’ll also be working with the team to consolidate the points of contact so its clear who to talk with in the organization.

3. Streamlining of Spending and Partnerships:

I believe the MSC Foundation ought to be focusing on the open source code development as its highest priority. As such I’ll be reducing the Foundation’s involvement in business development and increasing its bandwidth and commitment to the development of the MasterCore reference clients open source code.

Conclusion:

This post is just the beginning. I’ll be making a series of announcements and posts in the coming weeks about the topics above in more detail and on other topics as they are relevant to the community.

I’m committed to the success of the Master Protocol. I believe the creation of tokens and assets on the Bitcoin blockchain is the most important technology being developed today. For this to be successful I’ll be doing everything I can to encourage community engagement and an open development process. 

Thanks to everyone for your support of this project.

Chairman of the Board of the Mastercoin Foundation

Don’t be shy, contact me any time at David@Mastercoin.org