Further Reading

Vlad Zamfir's Blockchain Governance 101 and then the follow up where he admits to his own intentions are good reading for thinking about the landscape of possible blockchain governance directions.

I read it and recognized that Ethereum is headed for "dev capture", and that I could work to help prevent that.

IETF

If you don't know much about the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), finding out how it governs and manages the development of core Internet standards is useful reading. The About page is a good starting point. From there, Getting Started in the IETF, where I'll quote the opening paragraph:

The IETF's mission is "to make the Internet work better," but it is the Internet Engineering Task Force, so this means: make the Internet work better from an engineering point of view. We try to avoid policy and business questions, as much as possible. Most participants in the IETF are engineers with knowledge of networking protocols and software. Many of them know a lot about networking hardware too.

Emphasis mine, and now some of the background of the EIP process -- and the Core Dev Calls -- should be clearer.

A motto of the IETF is "rough consensus and running code". There is an RFC published in 2014 called On Consensus and Humming in the IETF that expands on this.

NANOG

NANOG stands for "North American Network Operators Group". It has been around almost as long as the IETF has. From the about page:

The North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), is the professional association for Internet engineering, architecture and operations. Our core focus is on continuous improvement of the data transmission technologies, practices, and facilities that make the Internet function.

NANOG is a membership organization organized as an 501(c)3 non-profit.

Our members are typically drawn from the core engineering and product staffs of the major North American carriers, content providers, hosting and cloud companies, multi-tenant data centers, and interconnection service providers. NANOG is governed by the NANOG Board of Directors, elected by the membership, every two years.

This might be equivalent to people who run node clients, in an understanding of how such groups might organize as a stakeholder group.