HIP stands for "Hedera Improvement Proposal". These improvement proposals can range from core protocol changes, to the applications, frameworks, and protocols built on top of the Hedera public network and used by the community. The HIP author is responsible for building consensus within the community and documenting dissenting opinions, as well as tracking their HIP through the process outlined below.
Hedera Hashgraph is the only public network built on top of Dr. Leemon Baird’s Hashgraph consensus algorithm. Hedera goes beyond blockchain to provide the fast, fair, and secure environment needed to enable enterprise adoption of distributed ledger technologies. You can learn more about Hedera by reading the Hedera whitepaper, and for a more detailed understanding of the Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm you can check out the hashgraph algorithm whitepaper.
The goal of HIPs is to have a place to propose new features, to collect community thoughts and input on a particular issue, and further to document all these subject matters in one place. It’s a great way to document these discussions and proposals here on GitHub, because any revisions made on these text files will be recorded.
See hip-1 for details on the HIP process.
Each HIP should only be one single key proposal and/or idea. The idea should be focused and only issue to one subject matter to be successful. A HIP must meet certain minimum criteria: it must be clear and have a complete description of the proposed enhancement, the enhancement must represent a net improvement, the proposed implementation, if applicable, must be solid and must not complicate the protocol unduly.
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Evaluate your idea: consider why you’d like to request changes or improvements, and how it benefits the Hedera Hashgraph community.
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Thoroughly look through those proposals already submitted to ensure there are no duplicates.
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Ask the Hedera Hashgraph community first if your idea is original, or has already been through the HIP process.
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Reevaluate your proposal to ensure sure the idea is applicable to the entire community and not just to one particular author, application, project, or protocol.
An excellent place to discuss your proposal and get feedback is in the issues section of this repository, or on Hedera's Discord Server; there you can start formalizing the language around your HIP and ensuring it has broad community support.
These proposals and discussions have no effect regarding private (permissioned) implementations of the Hashgraph consensus algorithm; additionally, this repository and it’s contents are run by the Hedera Hashgraph community, which means they do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Hedera Hashgraph LLC.