#Before We Begin
Before we get too far into the project we should answer some things. Where do we want to run this project from as a community while we are in this infant stage? The safe community is on this forum. People who will be interested in seeing this project’s success are here. It compliments everything the safe network is about. If we move the project discussion to another forum we risk losing potential eyes on it. Momentum we create around the idea of the hub might be lost. Leaving it here might result in our posts becoming a burden on the moderators or potentially distracting from the focus on the safe network itself. The safe network is the most important thing right now and I don’t want our project to distract, I also don’t want to lose the momentum that this community undoubtedly can provide. What are our options? I think this forum software allows that certain categories can be opt-in; meaning they won’t show on everyone’s main list of posts unless you explicitly say you want to see them. That is one option. Another option is to let it ride and if it becomes a distraction or mods hear that people don’t want to see this stuff we can decide then to do something about it. What do you mods think about what I’ve said above? Along those same lines I am willing to volunteer to moderate posts dealing with CrowdFoundHub to take the burden of doing so off the main volunteers if that is something you mods want to consider. #The Project’s Mission
The safe network’s mission is all about Privacy, Security and Freedom for All. It’s the first thing that brought me to the community two years ago. It continues to motivate me to be involved. My personal mission for this project is Enabling the World to Labor in Freedom. It comes from an Albert Einstein quote, “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.” The very purpose of this project is found in those words. Everything I invest into this project will be invested because I believe in those words to my very core.
I recently spent two awesome weeks in Florida with two of my favorite families in the whole world. Their were 14 of us under one roof and it was a blast. The servant attitudes in that house blew me away. Anyway, while there we visited Kennedy Space Center. As I was looking at the old launch room for the Atlas rocket I started pondering things, because that’s what I do. I realized that I have more processing power in my work PC then they had in that entire launch room. How did they do what they did with such low tech? They did it because they had a mission and failing that mission was not an option. Too the moon folks, that is what I’m hoping for here. #What Will Our Goals Be for April?
So we have some pledges for supporting the mission of the CrowdFoundHub project (I’m excited by this). I think the pledges might be in the realm of 25K-40K+ of Maidsafe Coins so far. That was one day of asking about interest levels and we all know a pledge is only a pledge. Bottom line, there is interest in seeing it become a reality so the community can use the hub to go on missions of their own. I’ve also been talking to @MrAnderson about merging or supporting each other’s projects. I’ve talked to a couple folks who I feel are key contributors in the safe space who will not be named yet about being caretakers of signatures if we end up having to use multisig to manage developer payments. I’ve got a “definite maybe” from one and the other needs to know his/her reasonability before committing to anything. Trust me when I say I see nothing but clear heads from these folks.
The next step as I see it, is deciding on a direction together. The direction we decide on will be our “The Most Important” next step. As a potential owner, you can be as involved in this process as you want to be. You can let your voice be heard, or accept what the community decides; it’s completely up to you. I see my role as a facilitator and motivator at this point of the project. I’m open to other’s opinions on how we should do this. This is just one way… if you have a better way let’s do that.
I’d like us to answer the question, “Where do we want to be at the end of April?” I’m going to use the proven OKR (Objectives + Key Results) framework for now. I’m sure many of you are not familiar with the framework so I’ll do my best to [explain what it is and why it’s important] while using it. If you want a more detailed understanding of what the framework is, you might consider reading the book Radical Focus that I talked about previously.
##Objective
[The objective is the cat’s pajamas! Something we need to focus on and that we can be passionate about together. It’s the qualitative stride we are taking. It is the fuel for our mission’s (Empowering the World to Labor in Freedom) rocket! Fuel is explosive and can be dangerous.] A couple examples might be: Define the MVP in as much detail as we can so we know what we are targeting. Focus on building the community (with its key members) around the mission of the project. [It is suggested that we start by only having one OKR and when things expand to include more key members we can do more, each key member focusing on their own OKR with their own team of supporters. The OKRs are meant to cascade from the overall to the individual. Does this make sense?] Anyone who wants to throw an objective out for us to decide on, or expand the examples I’ve given please do so. If/when we have enough we can create a vote post to decide on which one we will focus on for April. If we don’t get any that might mean there isn’t enough community interest in the project at this time. I hope we get some discussion going around this.
##Key Results 1-3
[These are the quantitative results we hope to see if we are really focused on the objective. They are meant to be hard to accomplish but not impossible. It’s suggested that we start out with a key result that we think we have a 50% chance of succeeding at. We start out scoring these at a 5 out of 10 scale. 5 meaning we think we have a 50% chance of hitting this key result. Each week we will post an update to get a feel on how we should change the score. If we change the result from a 5 to a 3, we think we now only have a 30% chance of getting the result we want by the deadline. Then we brainstorm on ways to increase the score for the next week.] If our objective was to build community and find key partners an example key result might be, “Get a pledge total of 200k MaidsafeCoins” or “Get people other than @chadrickm posting about the mission.” or “Find three key members who are committed to running there own OKRs next month.” [It is suggested we limit the number of key results to three because the point is to be able to remember them easily. We can focus on key results after we decide on the objective but if you want to include some ideas, feel free.] #Let’s Begin the Discussion
Again if you know of a better way to make real progress towards the mission let’s do that instead. If you think this experiment could work, let’s hear your ideas for objectives.
As for forum organization, I think leaving it as a regular front-page item till we see how things develop. It’s likely that as projects develop it’ll be appropriate to then change them to opt-in categories to keep the traffic from being too random, but we’ll see.
I like the general tone of the approach and definitely love the stated principle: Enabling the World to Labor in Freedom.
I agree with @fergish, stay here until it becomes an issue because I think this project is well aligned with the values and goals of Project SAFE (cf. MaidSafe Foundation). This may not be the case for all projects, but we can use the community as a litmus test.
In retrospect, moving SAFEpress off the forum (for the reasons you considered @chadrickm) was too soon and made it harder to build it into a going concern - and it is now stalled. The other factor was not having enough people early on to give it life and build momentum. I’m not so concerned about that because others are still doing the things it was designed to do (create initial SAFE web app frameworks and design patterns for dynamic websites). Useful learning though
People could of course still discuss it here, so this was a factor, not necessarily decisive. We had quite a few enthusiasts, and some hoping to work in it, but nobody with enough time to get it rolling and gathering energy. Meanwhile, as I said, others are working in their own way on the same goals, so there’s not much point unless I had the time (and much more skill - I would still need a lot of co-conspirators) to give it a long solid push, or unless someone else wants to pick up that role. The branding is available!
If the platform turns out in anyway like I hope it does these projects will be easier for a community to manage and build real momentum around.
One of my favorite and the most sobering quotes from the interwebs I’ve seen is, “There’s this thing between the past and the future, called the present.” It’s where we are and we have to figure out how to move forward as a community. Thanks for the support guys and I’m excited to hear some objectives from anyone who has em’.
Just an idea, but I think the first project would be to start a Community run forum on which to start to build on, rather than running everything past the centralised modding system of a private forum such as this.
As you say, this would be for those people who were enthused by the whole idea of de-centralisation, privacy, security and freedom and coming to Community decisions together with transparency and accountability.
As mods on here have made clear, this forum is also mainly for technical discussions concerning SafeNet (or whatever else the private owners/mods decide it is for). I’d support this as a first project as I believe it is highly necessary to benefit and involve the larger Community rather than a small group of individuals - particularly if the long term goal is to monetise it somehow and pay mods etc.
As mods on here have made clear, this forum is also mainly for technical discussions concerning SafeNet (or whatever else the private owners/mods decide it is for).
Pretty much anything can and is discussed on the forum, and it certainly isn’t restricted to the technical. Stuff which is not relevant enough to most regulars and new arrivals, to appear on the front page goes in off-topic or meta, and there are lots of discussions held there in addition to very wide ranging discussions in the other categories. Many are not at all technical.
Yep, I’m guessing people will build all kinds of things with it, including forums, both moderated and unmoderated. The moderated ones will probably still have people thinking the mods who have a pretty thankless job are unfair too such is the way of communities…
As far as an objective is concerned, I think defining what the MVP is collaboratively is an excellent objective. This definition should include all features/stories as well as a list of intentional non-features/stories (for MVP) that were considered but decided to put off until later. I think using some kind of collaborative document editing such as google docs to accomplish this may be useful.
Features and stories could easily be discussed on the forum then transcribed into a document later. Starting a monster feature/story discussion thread may be a good way to bring attention to the project as well.
I made no mention of mods being unfair, rather that the modding system is centralised and not accountable to the Community. This argument is commonly and consistently misrepresented though as complaints about mods, rather than the system itself, so not really surprised by your comment.
I think a platform to get apps started with a register of developers is excellent and something I would hope to leverage for enterprise building. To that end I would envisage a platform that was multi disciplinary…a one stop shop for the resources required to build an enterprise.
I would envisage a Project Decorum as the structure to create innovation for new enterprises on SAFE and would hope an ‘app building cooperative’ would use this as their own source of inspiration when building out the platform.
What about existing applications? Can they be ported across?
Nick: For typical applications where the functionality exists within the network, such as storage apps or, fairly soon, messaging apps, stored within existing PaaS suppliers like AWS or Google it will be trivial to port the app to SAFE. So you can have apps hosted on both the existing internet and SAFE.
Think of all the Venture Capital investment that has an interest in current applications surviving, do you think they would be interested in porting to SAFE?
So all I’m suggesting to builders is, be realistic when starting out to develop an app…the same as creating any business, you had better be able to do it better than existing businesses.
But, with a new framework being formulated (Decorum) and knowledge gained of the network from participating on these forums over the past years…there’s a ‘competitive advantage’ opportunity to either build a better twitter, facebook, wordpress or brainstorm something completely new with programmable safecoin etc…
When I see a Dropbox for example, moving to the RUST language, I wonder if thats an app looking to host on both the existing internet and SAFE…it will be trivial
As far as development resources go (and there would be lots of other roles to fill as well), I predict we will see devs and dev shops who focus on different aspects of the technology. A project’s community should be able to court the devs with the right know-how for the task at hand. I would hope that an on-demand employment approach would allow someone who invested their time and energy to learn the technology in general and become a master at some speciality, would make a really good living doing what they are passionate about on multiple projects. Especially if the project uses community accepted protocols like what I’m hoping @Seneca 's Decorum project becomes. A reputation of work done on other projects will be huge. I’m also hoping “masters” would be hired to pair up with new devs to spread their knowledge around the ecosystem. Gone might be the days of formalized classroom learning, back to a more apprentice type approach of learning. I hope that’s the case anyway.
I don’t really have much to add other than agreement and enthusiasm. I think chrisfostertv is right. Just being on safenet might give a small head-start advantage, but any apps still need to improve on what’s currently out there.
I’m looking forward to getting involved in lots of different projects. I really hope this takes off.
So it begins. Community formed with a solid foundation sees the path to community controlled narrative of software development.
I am willing to start with pledging 50,000 MAID (Or 125 grams of gold) for a functional token system to be built within SAFE’s tagged structure data system (beautifully described by @Seneca about mining tokens in SAFE on Safe Crossroads) where crowdsafe.io can guide the creators (idea, investors), developers, and end-users (content contributors) can have a free flowing source of value the is created and returned back to all necessary and equal parties. CrowdFoundHub could be the necessary repository for developers/coders to prove their work and CrowdSAFE could be the integrated space to connect the three necessary parties (Innovator, Creator, User/Content contributor) and allow freedom to work to happen.
Here is a recent PM post that explains a little further in a direction token based development could be used in other areas of non-software development:
This is absolutely amazing discussion and right up my path of thought. Hearing @Seneca podcast interview talking about mining tokens within SAFE’s tag data structure seems like an avenue of possibility. Have a small percentage of tokens available for monetary investor (Idea) launch and then a predefined amount paid to time/feature-builder (Creator) investors, then the remaining to the end-users (Consumer) as the provide content. It seems those three parts are necessary for any successful project. Each should be rewarded. The trick is finding the balance of human direction and mathematical enforcement of agreements (Like SAFE does so well).
Here is a link on a discussion I had with @mckmuze Brady (seesions.media) and Tim from n99 @we_advance with regard to how musicians/artists could use tokens to get more value to them earlier in their career, rather than later (often after they are dead) Imagine a world where everyone is on the search for the next great Micheal Jackson to invest early and the artist has total control on how their branded token is distributed.
I don’t care about the branding as much as making sure community aspect is intact. So let’s discuss more. The community has to “own” this.
I think @waynenilsenis correct that we will need to define that MVP and really understand all the parts to it. I don’t think that we will even need to vote on this being the first objective, as I think it’s the next logical step. I’ll take a stab at defining the OKR more and have a draft in a day or two.
That’s exactly how I feel and great to hear others want to “walk the walk” and be more congruous with the whole Maidsafe thing about de-centralisation,of authority, accountability and community involvement. It’s what I hoped for this forum in the beginning, and also what I believe was intended before all the centralisation anathema that is so totally diametrically opposed to the whole idea and vision that brought us all together here in the first place. The Community needs/deserves a forum.operated on the basic principles we all rallied behind…because this one most definitely isn’t it.
and the other needs to know his/her reasonability before committing to anything. Trust me when I say I see nothing but clear heads from these folks.
