Our years in the industry, as well as curiosity and continuous learning from a diverse set of fields, gives us confidence that we can deliver.
The following few sections detail some of the thinking behind our approach to delivering on the goals.
Vertical Slicing
As is being found to be best practice in industry, and as demonstrated by geniuses throughout the ages, you cannot design coupled components separately without expecting suboptimal solutions. In order to mitigate this, you design and explore the entire space together. Doing everything at once would be infeasible, so we take a thin squiggly line through the stack, which we will call the vertical slice. We have decided to make this vertical slice an MVP for auditability and accountability reasons.
Prototype vs production
Another key thing is the concept of prototyping and production phases of development. Both of these phases are interleaved and serve different purposes. Initially, prototyping will dominate the time invested, and this will shift to production when the underlying systems and algorithms have been finalized. Prototyping is important to do first, because of the exponential and compounding ramifications for everything else to come in the production phase.
Bootstrapping
Somewhat counterintuitively, we don't start with developing the compiler and algorithm behind it. The use cases are so broad and generic, the abstractions so difficult to grasp, that we delay this until we have more knowledge that will come through engineering and building out the thin slice. The MVP takes into account our understanding of the problem so far and is production ready in that it is a product of quality that can stand on its own.
Don't Cling!
We are willing and expect to throw away this bedrock when its foundations are invalidated. This will necessarily happen, it's unlikely to get the bedrock correct by fluke. Many programming languages are written in another language or abstraction first, and then later rewritten in the language itself. This is much easier to do than to try writing the language in the language while creating the final language.
Purpose Driven
The human element and real world use case is what drives us. We will measure to understand how our hypothesis and tools are affecting users and the world around us.
We now go on to describe the planned features of the MVP and the timeline.
The MVP will be delivered as a web application written using https://thi.ng/. All code and features will be open source. We will provide a minimal Conversational UI and minimal Gravity UI for adding and viewing relationships between data. While the MVP will probably still expose generalized semantic data, we will be focusing on a specific use case of communicating and viewing trust. This exploration means doing a deep dive on security, identity, privacy and anonymity. We will deliver a small educational piece through the conversational UI that will allow us to have educated users that can make trade-offs of these elements. Our algorithm will be transparent and parameterizable. There is no need for a centralized server. All data is the users. We will design and incorporate a mechanism for backup. We will design and deliver a mechanism for distributed 2-Factor Authentication (2FA). This client side architecture and 2FA for verifying and proving means that we are about as decentralized as you can get. The user has all the control. And will be somewhat educated :). Additionally, we will be designing for parameterized account recovery, delegation of control and caching.
Overview of Deliverables
1 x Production ready MVP including Gravity UI POC (In network energy distribution visualization) and Network of Trust (S.N.O.T) modules
- Open source code
- Open source Sketch files
- Design Streams & VLogs
- Designed for security and distributed computation (decentralized, scalable, local first)
- This MVP is not designed or engineered as a throw away, but for continued growth and expansion after incorporating our learnings.
1 x Non profit
- Financials & meeting minutes online
Workshop design materials
Multiple workshop offerings for the community
Estimates
Github repo with TLA+ specs 1 -2 Weeks ————— (ongoing)
Prototyping for the underlying system and mechanics – 1- 6 months (ongoing)
Business entity formed (researching NPO) ––––––– 1 - 6 months
Design of conversational UI components –––––––– 1-3 month
Design of gravity UI ———————————–– 1-3 month
Setup cloud test and production environments ––––– 1 - month
Go live ––––––––––––––––––––––––– 1 - 3 months
Explore integration and collab ————————— (ongoing)
Development of web app features ———————– 1 - 12 months
First Workshop —————————————— 1-3 months
Multiple day, In depth Workshop ———————— 6 months
Team Expansion
Product Segments
Gravity UI / Visualize Trust
Search / Filter for entities
Rating an entity, including semantic comments
Invite user
Sync datasets (Dependency on notification module)
Reply to ratings (Dependency on notification module)
Customizability of algorithms for rating, search, and visualization,
Security module - Summarizing changes, Two factor checking of trust credentials
SSI Data Manager (Basic) - You must be able to set privacy type (secret, private, temp open, public)
Integrating into Cardano as a Fat nodes (extensible for incremental update and light wallet support)
How will users interact with our product?
Our product is a web application, so a user will navigate to a URL in their browser. After doing this, they will have a chat-like experience. They will be guided through the application, which will slowly guide the user to understand how and why to take responsibility for their data. The user will be able to add rate and add information about entities they have interacted with. The graph of information can be viewed in a tabular form or via our gravity UI option. This will allow the user to play with data and to see truth emerge. As he changes the filters or algorithm over his data set, he will be able to see the results updated in real time. This should allow him to visually see e.g. which connections could be unhealthy, or where opportunities for healing or collaboration are. A user will be able to have their dataset automatically sync with others. Collaborating with others is at the heart of what we think about. We aim to grow the network with a culture and philosophy that is positive, supportive and collaborative. Users should be able to find connections for work, learning and play.
Our cost estimate is based on 6 months of work. This time range has been picked to allow to us to find a flow and show our dedication. We believe this time range will be enough to have a rough MVP shipped that we can use. This is a very ambitious goal. The whole team is responsible for the running and development of Workshops, but we will initially have a dedicated team of three.
Patricia Mayer, Workshops & Coaching
6 months * 3500€ = 21000€
Christin Schmidt, Workshops & Coaching
6 months * 3500€ = 21000€
Steffen Wehning, Workshops & Coaching
6 months * 3500€ = 21000€
Timothy Eichler, Development
6 months * 5000€ = 30000€
Niels Kijf, UX
6 months * 6000€ = 36000€
Hiring Plans
We are in the process of finding development support and have two developers in mind.
Because these are tentative, we have reduced the funding period to just 3 months.
The funds will be used for the express purpose of supporting the development team expansion.
Software Engineer, user experience innovation - 10+years
3 months * 6000€ = 18000€
Software Engineer, computational design - 20+years
3 months * 8000€ = 24000€
Timothy Eichler - Distributed Software Engineer and Consultant
Timothy spent two years doing volunteer work with the Oceania Leadership Team and STFEurope. Thereafter, he began his formal studies in Mechanical Engineering. He gained experience working as a junior engineer in the mining and automation industry. He quit in the final semesters to work as a self-taught developer. He has been working as a full stack developer at ambient.digital and as a consultant developer for ThoughtWorks. Most recently he started Dreamorganism and has been developing his own communication course after professional courses left his curiosity unsatiated. His broad experiences and curiosity allow him to believe he can revolutionize the software industry.
Social UX pioneer > Niels Kijf - Founder Social Design Academy
Niels (Master Digital Media Design, Oxford) is a digital design innovator. He started the Social Design Academy to deliver UX 3.0 education. Our current software design is still targeting the individual, yet web3 is designing shared experiences for groups, a fresh new field that needs a new educational program. Leveling up UX into Social UX is one of the Social Design Academy missions for 2022.
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/nielskijf/>
Patricia Mayer
Patricia Mayer holds a master’s degree in history of South Asia and English Literature and Linguistics. Her deep interest in different cultures, human life and languages influenced her choice of studies and her further path. After a detour into the world of office jobs that brought her diverse skills such as: content writing (SEO), organizational and counseling skills; she worked in the social sector with refugees, children and high-school graduates and has teaching expertise. She now combines these skills with her work as a shamanic energy healer in workshops and training in nature. Her work is deeply influenced by yoga philosophy and different mystical traditions.
Steffen Wehning
Steffen Wehning holds a bachelor in Biochemistry and is currently completing his masters in exercise science and coaching. As the creator of Hack My Health, he helps support people to make changes for their long term health and performance. He has a special focus on nutrition, longevity & the Mind-Body-connection. Furthermore, he sees himself as a "medium" translating cutting-edge research results into action in related areas such as Nutrition, Psychology, cross-sectional ares, i.e. clinical psycho-neuro-immunology (cPNI), and the effect of diet, habit- and/or lifestyle-changes as a treatment for chronic stress and diseases.
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/steffen-wehning/>
Christin Schmidt
Christin Schmidt holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Florida. Her last job has been supporting a purpose company producing organic food and to grow their business. She makes the world a brighter place by opening hearts and bringing people together. She brings sustainability projects to life with her expertise in designing more sustainable, environmentally friendly, supply chains.
