Engineering Update #1 🛠️
The consensus about the current crypto bear market seems to be this: relax, reflect on what matters, and above all, build. We’re happy to! Much of our energy over the last few months has gone into designing the architecture of the Social Sensemaker. In essence, the sensemaker pipes social data through neighbourhoods. It’s the backend data store of each neighbourhood.
Recall our first demo, the Memeable Viable Product (MVP 1.0) — we spun up a simple meme-sharing module to show off the configurable elements of a neighbourhood: reactions and user-assigned weighting of particular reactions relative to others.
Then, when we spoke at MetaGov Seminar, we showcased a second module, one for annotating papers for collaborative writing:
What does this have to do with the Social Sensemaker? Our challenge is to build these data stores in such a way that they operate totally independently from the “generic tools” — like the meme share tool and the annotation tool — that people can select (or not!) into their neighbourhood.
This is critical for members of any given neighbourhood to be able to index all the modules a group has in play, without being compelled to download or participate in all of them.
Sensemaker and module de-linking is how we plan to accomplish modularity and pluggability of neighbourhoods. Simply, to make neighbourhoods as easy to configure and use as possible. No more hard forks that break apart web3 communities— just the option to choose, to “opt in” to various activities of a neighbourhood as one likes, from the very start.
We need to have these different modules “talking to each other” first. Then, the next test is to have separate neighbourhoods composed of a few of these “generic tools” using the sensemaker to share social data across neighbourhoods. This will help cross-neighbourhood resource mapping and indexing, and also provide different views on data that may be desirable in a neighbourhood. One might want a “widget view” of data for the particular group activity, an “agent view” to see member data across different activities, and a “whole neighbourhood view” to make sense of the total action in a particular community.
That’s all for now! We’ll keep these updates coming. If you have any questions, or want to join the conversation, come say hi in our server ✨