Update (04/20): We now describe our roadmap using GitLab's Milestone feature. Check out the new masterplan here.
After some weeks of intense discussions & little coding, we're back are ready to share our plan for getting the fathom network off the ground.
This starts with the playground. We've breifly mentioned this distributed learning program before, but work is in progress specifying it fully (see this pull request), explaining what it is, what it will be centered on, and how the players are expected to interact.
We want to launch the Playground around July. In order to do so there are serveral things that need to be in place.
We need infrastructure in order for the playground participants to interact and communicate, and create.
We originally starting building a smart-contract permissioned chatroom in order to enable this, but have since been abstracting the concept further. What we have arrived at is in two parts: 1. a collection of small tools and libraries to enable rich social interaction around on-chain data and identities 2. a web-application to explore fathom concepts and run the transactional part of assessments
The first tool we are going to build is Bridger, a library and web-app to allow anyone to easily make and verify claims about Ethereum identities and data on-chain. The goal is to form a bridge between things going on on-chain (like fathom assessments) to existing platforms (like Github), in a simple, secure and easily extensible way.
This will let us use these platforms as a communication substrate and start the playground, allowing us to iterate and experiment quickly.
Of course though, we aren't satisfied with depending on Web 2.0 platforms so in parralel we will be exploring ways to build small communication systems. This may look like the smart-contract enabled chatrooms we've been working with so far, or integration into systems like orbit or ssb
The main fathom application is used for exploring concepts, starting assessments, and conducting them. The plan is to keep it very minimal, only dealing with the parts that touch our smart-contracts and rely on links via Bridger to conduct the actual social part of assessments.
Once Bridger and the Fathom App are ready, it comes time to launch the Playground. The first part of this is opening up applications. We're still working on the application process, but at least part of it will be tied to an on-chain process to distribute a stipend to playground participants.
Once the playground is in progress we will continue with admissions through a rolling process. We'll be supporting the learners, and learning ourselves, creating credentials and tools.
We are happy to share that our team has grown again: Welcome aboard Antoine Estienne!
We've opened an org-repo, to hold our organizational practices, including a new contribution guide, a more detailed roadmap, and issue and MR templates.
We're still figuring things out and exploring this space. However, we have a clear path forward that we are diligently working towards.