@g-dubs, good Job for going to extreme to know about the easiest one. And i totally agreed with this statement -The plan is to elect other partner consensus nodes, like telecom firm KPN, before the year is out. And then in 2019 NEO plans to open public campaign for election of all consensus nodes.
On the development front NEO announced NEO 3.0 is next on the roadmap.
According to core developer Erick Zhang NEO 3.0 will be an entirely new version of the NEO platform, built for large scale enterprise use cases. It will provide higher TPS and stability, expanded APIs for smart contracts, optimized economic and pricing models, and entirely redesign NEO's core modules. i just uovot and resteem it.