[gregKeymaster]

Hi EducingDemon, my apologies, our forums are acting up. We need to replace them entirely (they're basically broken, preventing me from administering them randomly, and worse, they're allowing a lot of spam through).

If this post goes through, just know that we've basically completed our investigation of Grantcoin but we need to write it up. It looks like a nice effort, our primary concern is with its Sybil prevention mechanism. More as soon as we replace these forums with something decent and maintained.

[gregKeymaster]

Hi EducingDemon,

Thanks for submitting Grantcoin! Foundation staff are currently evaluating it and will post a summary judgement here once our investigation is completed.

Cheers,
Greg

[gregKeymaster]

Hackathon #4 Recap

Goals Achieved

  ✅ Bring newcomers up-to-speed on the design and codebase of Group Income Simple.

This has become an implicit goal for all our hackathons. We've had new contributors join in during each one so far!

Attending were AnObfuscator, Ismail Khoffi, Andrea Devers, Simon Grondin and myself.

Thanks for being there, it was great to have you!

  ✅ Move our source code to GitHub
  ✅ Get continuous integration testing working via Travis

Our real tests now have continuous integration! With thanks to AnObfuscator!

  ✅ Get user creation working (the backend stuff is done, just need to hook-up front end)

At least part of the frontend now talks to part of Simon's backend (sorry for the pun! ;D).

  Create .vue components out of as many UI widgets as we can

Here things took an interesting turn. It was not fully clear to me from the outset what situations Vue.js was good for, and what situations alternatives were good for.

Specifically one issue was how to make the site support all these features at once:

• Be user-friendly for designers used to directly editing HTML and using simple PHP-like code to avoid repetition
• Minimize reliance on server as much as possible (creating a static site that can be served easily over a CDN or IPFS or whatever)

We could use a static site templating system like Jekyll along with some templating language (like Mustache, Handlebars, or the more powerful and PHP-like EJS) to create multiple .html files to serve, but that would result in “ugly URLs” and having to deal with folder hierarchies. It just seems unclean.

Alternatively we could use our Hapi backend with EJS to render on-the-fly the correct HTML, but that would mean that we'd be tied to a server for rendering EJS instead of having it done locally by client-side JS. Our preference is to minimize our reliance on server-side infrastructure, not increase it, so this seems like a no-go.

It should be noted that there will always be a “server” running the backend API, but by putting much of the logic/programming for displaying the UI into the client-side JS, there would be less code for us to (in the future) “swap out” for when we switch from a node.js+database backend to Ethereum.

It's starting to look like our old and dismissed friend Webpack might be useful after all.

These considerations, and thoughts on the proper roles of Vue.js, EJS, and browserify/webpack are available on GitHub.

Next Hackathon: Tuesday, April 5th — San Francisco and Online!

The San Francisco Basic Income Meetup will be having weekly meetups Tuesdays for working on Basic Income related projects. We'll be joining them this time around, and you're welcome to join us either there or remotely to work on Group Income (Simple Edition).

As usual, details will be announced by @Group_Income and posted to this forum.

We'd love for you to join us then! 😀

[gregKeymaster]

Hackathon #3 Recap

Goals Achieved

✅ Bring newcomers up-to-speed on the design and codebase of Group Income Simple.

Many thanks go to Cayman Nava and Andrea Devers (and yours truly) for joining us this hackathon! Together, many a great feat were accomplished on the front-end of the website.

✅ Create a great, flexible Node.js & Grunt-based development environment for both the backend and the frontend — in one repo.

I can say with confidence that we have one of the sweetest development environments and project structures of any Node.js project out there.

Just one command: grunt dev — is all that's needed to:

• Launch the backend API server
• Launch a frontend HTTP server for viewing the site as you work on it
• Launch a live-reload server to live-refresh the your browser whenever you make changes
• Watch for changes to the frontend's source and automatically rebuild the site (plus refresh your browser)
• Watch for changes to the backend's source and automatically relaunch it

Vue.js: Our frontend framework

We “componentized” several of Aaron's frontend widgets into .vue files, and we made it straightforward for designers like Aaron to create plain old .html files and work comfortably with Vue.js (our favorite frontend framework).

To see why we chose Vue.js over ReactJS, see:

• http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction/
• http://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html

In a nutshell: Vue.js is simpler to use than React, yet just as—if not more—powerful.

Our repo is neatly organized into three main folders:

• backend/
• frontend/ — Contains standard .html pages like the homepage and the about page
• frontend/simple/ — Contains .vue and .js files that are compiled down to a single .js bundle using browserify and then loaded as a modern single-page app (for when users are logged in to their groups)

Also, a lot of miscellaneous R&D also went into this hackathon to ensure that we do the best we can on the security aspect of the website (for example, did you know that cookies are still the best way to authenticate a user to a website?).

What didn't we get to?

We still need to get all the widgets on the front-end talking to the backend, and we need to finish the UI/design/markup for the frontend. We also need to verify that everything works on the backend and finish any remaining features.

We also did not publish the source to GitHub yet, but don't worry that will be the first thing we do during the next hackathon (March 26th – 27th)!

General Hackathon Insights

Hackathons are a wonderful and remarkably different way of Getting Things Done. They represent a total departure from the typical 9-5 Monday-Friday work schedule.

Hackathons seem ideal for certain situations and stages during the life of an open source project, but you've got to know how to do them right. I'm learning various insights as I go!

For example, it's possible to accomplish quite a lot during a two-day hackathon—even a week's worth of work!—but at the same time hackathons can be quite draining due to their full-on focused intensity. I noticed this when I saw myself posting unusually angry tweets to twitter and it dawned on me that the draining effects of the hackathon made it easier to stress out.

So from now on I'll be taking a recovery day (or two) after each hackathon. That works out quite well, for it gives an excellent reason to do a post-hackathon celebration! 😀 It's a great opportunity for teams to hang out together and bond over lunch/dinner, watch a movie, etc.

Next Hackathon: March 26th – 27th!

As usual, details will be announced by @Group_Income and posted to this forum.

We'd love for you to join us then! 😀

[gregKeymaster]

Hackathon update posted: https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/01/of-turtles-and-group-income-hackathons/

[gregKeymaster]

Hi, thanks for those answers. I posted here without really exploring the details on GI specifically, just initially assumed it had a blockchain component because of your involvement — my bad on that one!

Oh, it certainly does have a blockchain component, you were right to assume that part. Just not the first “Simple Edition” of Group Income that we're going to use for a pilot study. 🙂

Good luck getting it moving! Can't go wrong with Aaron and Tibet 🙂

I completely agree! They're both great fellows!

[gregKeymaster]

Posted some of our accomplishments this weekend to the Gitter channel. Hopefully I will get a chance to blog about this weekend. 🙂

[gregKeymaster]

Just created the Gitter public chatroom: https://gitter.im/okTurtles/group-income

[gregKeymaster]

i could probably join sometime sunday evening, though i don't really have any of the skills you list (i've started a few social enterprises, so i guess i'm an ok bookkeeper..)

Sure! We'd be happy to have you join us on Sunday. 🙂

mostly i'm interested in the structure, how currency is created and how its value is communicated to users and nonusers.

Group Income (GI) does not create a currency (that would be the domain of Group Currency), but rather it uses existing currencies, and then it routes income streams into a group such that all group members receive a minimum amount of income each month in a fair manner.

The ideal vision we have for GI does this routing instantly and automatically, and this hackathon is about creating a simple prototype that does it in monthly installments (while having payments be manually done by group members). We're creating this prototype just so that real groups can begin using it without having to wait for us to creating something more fancy and automatic.

You can see our vision of what Group Income will look like (and how it will behave) here (and you can watch a talk about it here).

happy to help however i can (what will you be using, slack?), but if asking lots of questions would get in the way of a prototype getting done, i can save it for another forum.

I think we might setup a public Gitter for this (and keep it going after the hackathon). We have a Slack too, but that is more for folks who are looking to get their hands and feet dirty (adding code, helping us put together the crowd fund, etc.), and if that sounds like you then we'll be happy to send you an invite. 🙂

So one of the things that I will be doing today is adding a link to a Gitter chat channel for this repo: https://github.com/okTurtles/group-income

I'll post a note here when that's up. 🙂

thanks for the work you do!

And thank you for your interest in Group Income! 😀

[gregKeymaster]

Great! Please see this thread and get in touch.

[gregKeymaster]

Well, that is one type of app that's possible, but it would be different from Group Income (GI). GI is a specific algorithm that does two primary things:

1. It tries to ensure a minimum amount for everyone.
2. In assuring a minimum amount, it does its best to maximize fairness.

The idea of pooling together money and dividing it evenly is different. There is no notion in that of “ensuring a minimum amount”, and the amount that gets distributed to people can go well over that minimum amount, so contributors can end up feeling unfairly taken advantage of.

We met up at the SF Basic Income meetup yesterday and decided that we're going to write up a very simple version of GI that people can run manually, and then we'll find some groups that are willing to try it for a few months to see how it goes. We can use the feedback from these groups to perfect the algorithm.

If that's something you'd be interested in helping out with, let me know! 🙂

[gregKeymaster]

Do you need help with frontend / js?

Sure! I just created a How to Help thread. Check that out and we can invite you to the Slack. 🙂

[gregKeymaster]

I was just wondering how easily achievable do you personally think this would be Greg?

Doable. Most of the details have been worked out as far as the algorithm goes. We've created some mockups of the UI (see the twitter account for links to slides of a recent presentation). We're working on the crowdfund right now. Then it's just a matter of time.

[gregKeymaster]

It'll be interesting to see what innovations come from this. I want to see more people pursue their own goals and enrich society as a whole. Automation is the way of the future and we should move from the old work model as fast as we can.

🙌

[gregKeymaster]

what is the source for wealth distributed?
Is it depends on services/products given by same community members?

Yes, the value for the basic income comes from the group's activities, and this can include:

– Goods the group creates.
– Services the group offers.
– Even outside investment into the group (which can be accomplished through purchase of the group's tokens).

See these links for concrete examples:

http://groupcurrency.org/#Examples
http://groupcurrency.org/#FAQ (first FAQ item on “AcademicCoin”).

Could it be an hurdle for “unconditionally basic income?”

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by “hurdle”. All basic income systems require that there be enough value behind a group for the basic income to exist.

maybe it creates a central bank (for each group by the group members).

This too is not clear to me; not sure I understand what a central bank has to do with anything.

[Author]

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