A lot has happened today, so there is a lot to catch up on.

We should be aiming to produce Daily Digests to keep the group engaged and to make sure no important information gets missed.

To start, things are moving along very well. I’m extremely happy to have found so many like minded people to explore blockchain development with.

Notable Events

Moved from Riot to Slack

We moved from Riot to Slack, which seems to be working out a lot better in terms of organization and engagement. We currently have 8 active channels.

Introduction Channel

I would like to reiterate the importance of our #introductions channel. Please post your introduction in there. Keep your intro to a single thread to keep things easier to read through. If you want to add information, edit your original or add to the thread. And if you want to comment on someone’s introduction, comment as a reply to their message, on a new thread, so it keeps everything organized.

GitHub Team

We set up a GitHub team. I propose we use this, but you certainly do not have to. The purpose for having our work under a team effort will be to spread awareness of our group, which will help us build momentum for adding new members and getting exposure for our projects.

If you want your GitHub account added to the team, post a message in #access-requests (be sure to include your GitHub username)

Trello Team

We can use this for initial project management and information management. Over time we should consider transitioning to a version controlled system.

We currently have three Trello boards

These are just some initial boards I set up to help us organize information.

We will (try to) make all boards publicly visible and allow commenting. But if you want to be formally added to the Trello team, post your request in #access-requests (be sure to include your Trello username)

Initial Website Concept

Kudos to @manchaary for making an initial resources dashboard. Next, we need to commit it to a GitHub repository so everyone can contribute to building it. A website will be useful for sharing our mission and showcasing our eventual works.

Yesterday, I registered the DappSociety domain names (.com .org .net .io) as well as social media accounts. Eventually we will need to discuss which domain to use and how to manage these as a group.

For initial hosting, we could set up a shared VPS account or use something like the free GitHub pages. Over time, we can evolve our strategy here to something like IPFS or server which are owned by smart contracts.

Notable Discussions and Announcements

We have the opportunity to participate in the Colony.io beta. I am going to speak with Collin from their team this week.

We are not limited to Ethereum development. But since everyone came from the Ethereum sub, I just quickly chose an Ethereum logo to use. We are interested in learning development on any blockchain (EOS, Bitcoin, etc)

We don’t want to grow too fast, so I will be holding off on doing any further promotion to add members. But at the same time, we are not closing membership, so if you know anyone who would be a good fit, definitely send them an invite. Once we have covered some ground and have more to show, we will do some more member acquisition stuff.

@xzentorxz made a channel named #needhelp. This is for anyone who needs help, even if you don’t know where to start, if you feel a little overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to post questions in there. And I think it would be beneficial if some of the more experienced team members (in a certain subject) would offer to mentor other members. I would certainly be open to giving some guidance and in effect be a mentor in any way that I can. (I’m still brushing up a lot of these new technologies, so I’m by no means claiming to be an expert)

Volunteers Needed

This is a group owned by its members. So we all need to contribute where we can. Initially we are doing a lot of scaffolding to bootstrap a better experience, which I believe will make us much more organized and productive when we begin actual projects in the near future.

Please look through the list below and offer help where you can:

Community Bootstrapping Team

As was just mentioned, initially we are doing a lot of scaffolding work. We need people to help facilitate this and make the groups user experience as seamless as possible. This will be things like writing/formatting/editing best practice guides for the tools we use, for how to start projects, for how to schedule meetings, etc.

If you can help with this, please state your interest in #community-management

Team for discussing group governance smart contracts

If you can help with this, please state your interest in #group-contracts. We will schedule a formal first meeting for this probably sometime next week (our discussion will be influenced by what I hear from the Colony.io team)

Admin Team on Slack

To show interest, post in the #access-requests channel that you would like to have admin privileges. Once you are made an admin, work on giving admin rights to others who have requested. Also, please keep the best interests of the group in mind whenever performing any actions.

Trello Board Organization

Keeping these boards up to date and useful will be a group effort. There will be many sub-teams here broken out by which boards you are a maintainer for.

To show interest in helping as a Board maintainer, post in the #community-management channel stating your intentions. Once you are made a Trello team admin, work on adding others to the Trello team who have requested access in #access-requests.

Also, keep the best interests of the group in mind whenever performing actions. Never delete someone else’s information without permission (To protect against this, maintainers should perform regular JSON exports)

Daily Digest Team

I am going to be out of town from Thursday to Tuesday night. So, if anyone would be willing to volunteer to help with the Daily Digests, that would be great. Then going forward it will be a team effort of extracting and curating information for them.

For example, as you go through Slack, star things that are important, and pull them out to a shared note space (maybe a Trello Board). Finally, one person can write it all up on a Trello card and post it to the group in #general.

To state interest for this, please post in #community-management.

Group Knowledge Base / Information Archival Team

One major downside of Slack is that free accounts are limited to 10,000 most recent messages. I don’t want us to lose any important information, so we need to be actively archiving information. For now we can use Trello, but hopefully we can come up with something better soon.

We should aim to have a valuable, open source knowledge base. I don’t know what the best tool for this would be, probably some open source, version controlled Wiki. It would also be awesome if it could have commenting and voting/curation features (even if using some Ajax service so the comments are not version controlled).

For a start, we should archive the introductions channels to a Trello Team Directory board. Everyone can have their own card describing their background and we can give each other kudos on those cards. It can in effect be a first attempt at a reputation system. We can eventually implement some decentralized reputation system.

To state interest in this, please post in #community-management.

Important for Our Success

Please everyone keep up the enthusiasm. This is going to be very important in our early days. Keep the discussion going in public channels. Try to do as much discussion as possible in public channels rather than in DMs. Private discussion are okay, but they are going to keep information away from the group. So we want everyone to be learning together.

For example, the only use case I have had for private chats is asking people to send me their Trello username / emails in private chat. And now that has been moved to #access-requests. But any discussion that can help everybody, you might as well do it in the open.

If you feel there is no channel for it, then contact one of the Slack team administrators to make a channel. And if you would like to be an admin yourself and be able to make channels, simply post a request in #access-requests. There are no rules who can be an admin as long as everyone is acting in the best interest of the group.