Please note that this is not a full transcription. I am trying to cut out something that I think it is too detail. No guarantee on the. For the full details, please watch the original video on youtube.
EdenOS Roadmap & Progress Report With Brandon Fancher
We’ll be talking about the progress report and the roadmap of Eden, what we’ve done over the last two weeks, and what we’re going to be doing over the next two weeks. Anything that we put up here is subject to change.
Roadmap and Progress Report
Our initial big development push was all about community formation, how do we invite people into the Eden community, how do we bootstrap and start off New Eden communities etc.
And then after that, we were planning to go right into v0.2. Elections and Funding.
I put that that line to the green dot purposely right in between member induction enhancements and elections in funding, because we’ve actually already started on elections and funding in Eden OS.
Elections contract organizing people into the fractal hierarchy, groups for the elections, executing those elections on chain and releasing community funds to the winners, the representatives who come out of those elections.
After that, v0.3. will give us better visibility into past election results that will come later this year. So visualizing how funds are flowing within the community, how funds are coming into the community, how they’re exiting the community. And then beyond that, we’ve got lots of planned.
Then we’ve got to start drilling into, you know, just administering the community, how does EOS facilitate community operations. This is about starting out more Eden communities. Right now we’ve got the Genesis Eden group on EOS, but there are other groups that will want to stand up, we’re looking at Latin American Spanish speaking Eden group, maybe a Chinese speaking or a Korean speaking Eden group, etc.
We’re beginning to expose the accounting part of the system. And we’re doing that very simply, at first, we’re just going to show the balance of the Treasury on the homepage, along with some other member stats that were already showing there.
Eventually, all that Treasury stuff is going to get quite advanced.
We are also implementing some checklists.
So we’ve had some members slip in with using logos as their profile image, or using images that have been edited to maybe hide their eyes or their hair or something like that. The point of our profiles is to show that you are the person that was in the induction ceremony, and that you’re a real person. And that point has been somewhat buried in our notion documentation.
We’re also going to show invitees, a preview of their profile before they commit that to the blockchain.
Burn NFTs, NFTs are immutable, member profile in smart contract table
We’re also introducing the ability to burn NFTs and then resign. So if a mistake is made and we need to correct that mistake. We’re going to give you the ability to burn that profile and then you can start the induction process again.
Then we have to deal with IPFS problem. Whenever you upload your profile photo, or the video of the induction ceremony, we’re not uploading this to a centralized server, we’re uploading this to the IPFS network. It’s a decentralized distributed file storage network, but it’s very new. It’s still immature in a lot of ways. For the most part people are working very well. But some people have been getting errors around not being able to do that process, etc. We have some really big fixes that we were working on before those issues. I’m hoping that we can have all of this stuff pushed out this week, to the community.
Talking about the transparency, if you guys want to go to eden-dev.vercel.app. You can see how the sausage is made. It’s a developer development environment.
Is there are there some elements of the profile that can be edited? Even though the NFT has been minted?
The NFT isn’t minted until you donate. At the very last step. Whenever the invitee makes their donation. That’s whenever no further changes are allowed at this point in time.
Whenever you go to the membership, and you see the listing of everybody that’s a part of a community, the source of truth for that is actually our atomic assets. NFT profiles, it’s not our smart contract, not the community smart contract. That got us up and running really quickly. That’s actually the reason that you can’t easily just go back and make changes to your profile after you’ve already joined the community until the next wave of NFTs.
But we do have in our backlog that we’re going to be doing this sooner rather than later of reengineering of that membership portal. So that the smart contract, possibly smart contract tables, we might stored in RAM, we might if we if we have our state derivation set up working by then we might just derive it from actions on chain, but make our Eden contract the source of truth for your member details. And what that would do is it would decouple the NFT from your profile such that you can go and you can make changes to your profile at any point in time that we allow, we might still get it at certain points.
And it doesn’t have to trigger new NFTs. Now, your NFTs will still be sitting over there. Stuck in that point in time because they’re immutable.
But at least you know, you can you can update your profile information, so you don’t have to wait a year, with outdated information before you fix that, that’s coming later.
How’s GDPR managed with use of IPFS to store videos? (GDPR means European Data Privacy Laws)
NFT technically managed and minted by the people who are submitting the transaction. Our software simply provides a thin front end to the creation of the minting of these NFT’s.
So you’re putting your own information on the chain. The Eden community is not putting your information on the chain. And we’re not managing that information.
When a member leaves, the NFTs can be burned. You can go in and burn mostly NFTs. Of course, if you don’t own your own NFTs, you can’t guarantee that others are going to burn them, they own the NFTs.
The other part of it though, is that even if you burn the NFTs, that information is still in the block log on the blockchain, you can still derive that information by replaying the chain.
You’re dealing with a public blockchain and immutable ledger anytime that you’re committing information to that. When you go to donate, we make you tick a box, as you understand the information you are submitting is going on to the chain immutably and irrevocably, and permanently.
So please only make sure that the information you put out there is the information that you want to remain out there. You can do whatever you do on the internet. It’s like Twitter. You can submit a GDPR request. Twitter is a centralized organization, you can submit a information take down request, Twitter’s going to honor GDPR. But we’re not keeping a hold of that information ourselves, it does apply to centralized organizations that have your information. And Eden is not,
Why Eden member induction process needs up to seven days to get everything right?
Because that’s costly. We want to give people we want to encourage people to get this done in a timely fashion. Even if the seven days expires, that information gets cleared out, it gets cleaned up in our garbage collection, you can get another invitation.
So just like the invitee now has a checklist that they need to follow. We’re also giving a checklist to the witnesses.
A Guiding Principle
We want to deliver a user experience that’s competitive with modern full stack applications, while protecting and maximizing the independence of the Eden community.
Historically, blockchain powered applications or dapps, but they’ve provided kind of a clunky user experience. They can’t just spin up a centralized server to provide all the niceties of that.
We are working on how can we say create a server that provides a set of standardized services to Eden dapps, Eden front ends. And even more widely, eventually, other dapps out there that are built in such a way that anybody could take and spin up 100 of them with different dependencies and different backends. So we create almost a mesh of services that that feed a powerful user experience.
But the Eden community isn’t dependent on any single point of failure. I’m only mentioning that right now. Because some of the IPFS work that we’re doing is really geared to just that. It’s enhancing our independence and laying the groundwork for that sort of independent server infrastructure, if you will.
If we were just spinning up a server, all this information were in standard databases. We’d be going for extra speed, but we wouldn’t be delivering on an independent decentralized, distributed experience. We’d have so many single points of failure. We’d be highly cancelable.
Everything that we do, every decision that we make, as we’re building this out, is leading us closer to independence, instead of leading us closer to dependence.
The idea is that anybody can fork, I’d encourage and actually go to our Eden GitHub repo and fork it, clone it, pull it down, spin up your own front end, and try to run it. And then if you can’t run it, if you get stuck, submit issues to us to say, I can’t figure this out. Because the goal is that 100 of these front ends could spin up, and maybe even start iterating and improving beyond what we envisioned.
Whenever we came together, Dan formed this this company, he basically gave us some documents to sign they were the antithesis of what you’d normally sign whenever you go and join a company. It was like, everything we do will be released open source, you have complete freedom to work on other things outside of this, as long as you also are open sourcing them that you’re building them in the light.
Clarion is not building anything in secret. If we go silent for a little while, just because we’re focusing on getting stuff done, and as effectively and efficiently as possible. We are committed to open source, if we’re not doing a good job, anybody can just take what we’re doing and spin up their own and put us out of business.
v0.2 Elections & Funding
Our first step is going to be with our regularly scheduled six month elections. So you’ll be asked to RSVP (respond if you please) to declare your intent to participate or not to participate in the upcoming election. We do need people to tell us because the next step is that the smart contract using kind of interesting using entropy from Bitcoin, is going to divide everybody up into randomized groups.
So those groups of five or six people do that first level of our fractal election. Everybody will be randomized into groups, about 24 hours before the election begins. You’ll be able to log in as a member. You’ll see who else is in your group, you’ll see actually, the ability to get Zoom link.
We may have some Web RTC (Real Time Communication) chat in the UI, something we’re looking at right now, to allow you to right there, Eden OS communicate with the other members of your group. And you’ll be able to join a zoom call 40 or 50 minutes, vote in real time, change your vote all the way until the time closes for your session their, upload videos. There will be a simple mechanism for the distribution of funds based on the outcome of the election. And you’ll also be able to see your representatives once the election is over, wiring your leadership up to the top of the hierarchy, if you will. These are the things that we’re looking at for v0.2.
We will be closing in on an estimated delivery timeline for this year in the next week or two. We’ve pretty much established our scope right now. The smart contract for most of this is built out. And it’s there. Also we have a lot of wireframes that have become really designs and UI ready for us to implement as well. So it’s just a matter of us doing the work of connecting the smart contracts to the front end and getting this up and running.
v0.3 Enhanced Elections & Accounting
v0.3 is just an enhancement on the elections in a really big enhancement on accounting. So we will be exposing the ability to call early elections. So the community grows 10% an early election is called that’s opposed to the regularly scheduled six month elections that come in v0.2. Annual dues collections, election NFTs. And then detailed accounting of community representative and individual member funds. So you could log into EdenOS and see the flow of the funds within the community, how they came in, where they’re going after they leave, etc.
An enhanced view into current and past election results and even the ability to transfer funds internally. In fact, you’re encouraged to keep funds as much as possible within the community because we may be introducing some tariffs on funds that are withdrawn out of the community contract for spending outside of the community.
How we development the UI of Eden Application
I can give you a sneak peek into some of the UI that we’re putting together. Once we have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to work, then we get together with Thomas and we start hashing it out at a very high level visually, right in this tool, Adobe XD. We start with wireframes, black and white. And then we iterate and those wireframes start getting some color and some typography, and some nuance and some copy. This design is what we front end developers or full stack developers work off of whenever we, we begin building out the UI for this.
(Adobe XD enable a team working together in real time and in the same workspace, anyone can upload, modify, and put draft together so everybody could see it in real time.)
So this time around with elections. It’s really neat, because our designs are going higher fidelity, we’re getting more detail. So we’re starting to get a design system coming out. Thomas is doing a really great job here.
How Eden Application works
And then let’s go over to member elections. So you can see, you know, we’re starting to get the ability to opt into election. So we know there’s an election happening. And we know it’s scheduled and we’re getting close, we can start to see the breakdown of the various election rounds here.
(This is the UI draft of the Eden Mobile Application snapshot)
You’ve been put into a group with other people in the community. And it says here, meet with your group, align on the leader, and select your leader, submit your vote below. And so you’ll get a meeting link, you will be able to join that meeting right there from the UI. And vote, submit votes, upload meeting videos. This is still work in progress. But we’re getting there. This is all the mobile form factor here
We’re also getting some of our desktop form factor is in flux.
Roadmap is more details in our wiki. So go check it out there. We’re not looking for only people who are spectating. We’re looking for participants. You know if you want to join in if you want to contribute if you got ideas, please get involved. Reach out to us.
Whenever you’re divided up into a group, you’ll be able to see in Eden OS. On the web app, who else is in your group, you’ll be able to click on that person to go see their full profile. And of course, that will show you how you can get in touch with that person, whether via telegram, or Twitter, or whatever.
But we are looking at some other ways of getting more real time communications going there. Having an online chat with the people who are in your group, on the Eden OS web app, or web page. So you can talk to them, whether you’re in the video call or not right, talk to them on the web page, and everybody can coordinate. The important thing is that the video call happens and then it gets recorded. And if the Zoom link isn’t working, people can self-organize to get that done. But we do want to make that process as easy as possible.
How do we see that evolving over time with regard to Zoom links, things like that?
This has been kind of a challenge. Yeah, I met from the Eden OS web app. Yeah, exactly. You’ll have that there in the Eden OS web app at election time. We don’t want to be dependent on Zoom blown. Right now, Zoom is our tool of choice. Technically, we’re not dependent. Like I said, if you want to coordinate with your team and spin it up on Google meets, or spin it up on whatever other meeting platform Jitsi whenever you can.
So elections can still happen there. So we’re trying to strike that balance, we could have done some really cool stuff with Zoom. And we toyed around with this. If we really supercharged our integration with Zoom, and we had our Zoom secrets in our back end. We kind of set it up to where everybody just logs in with Zoom. And the Zoom links were pre-configured to only allow five or six people in that Zoom call. And we’re fully facilitated. And we could have integrated with the Zoom recording API.
But that actually does make us very dependent on Zoom. And to the point where another person who wants to spin up their own front end to Eden on EOS, wouldn’t be able to do so because the people who go and use their front end couldn’t get into the same election Zoom calls as people in our front end.
If we were just building centralized, we could be doing some really cool stuff and really easy way. But we’re not going for just easy we don’t want to compromise our values for the user experience, we want to hit the right balance, and work into the right user experience. Even if there’s a little bit of pain associated with the distributed decentralized nature of this going forward.
As part of the opt in process, when you opt into an election, you’re going to be given an election password. That election password is going to be stored securely in your browser, but you’re going to be asked to keep a hold of it in case you go to a different browser, or your browser storage gets cleared for some reason.
But you’re going to use that election password to decrypt the Zoom link when you request it. So you’ll get a Zoom link that’s there ready for everybody on the chain to grab, but it’s resistant to Zoom bombing because it’s encrypted. We’ll see how that works. It’s something we’re going to try out, we’re not going to say this is your private key, this is encrypted, we’re just going to say this is your password. Keep it in case you need it. We may actually use that same password to facilitate some of the Web RTC, live chat communications there as well. But that’ll kind of give us the best of both worlds. You can use Zoom, but in a way that that still keeps us independent of Zoom.
Will it be in the SSO password?
Initially, No. The technically the first person to join the Zoom meeting will be asked to sign in with Zoom, which actually creates the meeting link and encrypts it and puts it on the chain. But other than that it’s not an SSO password at this point in time
We’re also looking at the EOSIO, DID spec that’s being worked on, decentralized identifiers. A really cool W3C spec that I think is going to revolutionize authentication period on the web, and in blockchains, which are really becoming one with three. But that’s, that’s in the future.
Will there ever be a custom solution for video conferencing or voting?
Absolutely. That’s the goal. So I’m talking a lot about Eden OS and Eden on EOS. But the big vision, right, and really, the reason that our team came together was to build Clarion on which is a completely peer to peer, social network, based on blockchain technology, but with some iterations that keep it light and completely distributed. How do we build truly peer to peer apps that are all you know, pointing to the same EOS node or RPC endpoint etc. And that’s, that’s really what the Clarion visions about that vision includes peer to peer, video, voting, social. And it really brings Eden and Clarion on and social into to one really interesting combination.
We are really defining even now our principles for Clarion where we’re going, and ensuring that we are working into that. We’ve been experimenting with some peer to peer video communication technologies, web RTC, which does connect everybody’s computers together. Jitsi, which does that but provide some other server based alternatives, completely open source, Jitsi is really amazing.
But right now, they all seem to have some, some limitations that I think time is going to solve. I’m talking like a year or two, we’re gonna see a lot of this stuff really start to mature. But right now, we want to ensure that everybody can get on the video, that everybody can have a good enough video experience to communicate, that the videos can be recorded, that can be put on chain.
Back to the election, 24 hours knowledge who are in your group with contact detail, slight concern almost inviting thoughts on striking deal before hand?
24 hours before the election starts is whenever election RSVP or registration will be closed. During that period, we’re doing a couple of things. One of them is we’re collecting entropy from Bitcoin blocks, or preparing to, to trigger the divvying up of everybody in the groups. I believe that dividing up though into groups happens between an hour before so T - 1 hour, and the start of the election.
So it’s more likely that you’ll know who’s in your group some time around half an hour before the election starts, not 24 hours out. If people want to get on and talk early. There’s nothing that’s going to probably stop him. You know, that may not be perfect. We can iterate on that moving forward. But right now, let’s see what we’ve got. Now, I’ll say we would ask that people not do that and hold their conversation until the timer starts ticking because this is the purpose of what we’re doing here.
Resources:
EdenOnEOS (free download book - More Equal Animals)
https://edeneos.org
Public Eden Wiki (roadmap in greater detail there)
Git repository for EdenOS (you can see how the code is changing over time, stuff that is in our backlog)