Events, Demos, and Next Steps🌟
In the last month, the team has had the pleasure of attending a handful of events across the world, in New Zealand, Europe, and the US. Check out our recaps here:
Holochain + Neighbourhoods in Christchurch
https://twitter.com/Neighbour_hoods/status/1665819476477067269
The CoFi (Collaborative Finance) event at the Crypto Commons Hub in Austria
https://twitter.com/Neighbour_hoods/status/1670852454622035983
DWeb Camp 2023 in California
https://blog.neighbourhoods.network/social-coordination-sensemaking-at-dweb-camp-2023-335d5e3726b1
But first: What kind of demo did we bring to these events? A big recent development push enabled us to show off social coordination a la Neighbourhoods. This involves assessments on resources that are stored and calculated in the Sensemaker—the distributed ‘data store’ for apps used within a neighbourhood—as well as a set of plug-ins to customize and represent these assessments.
Let’s take a step back and explain…
✔️A library for assessments and dimensions
The basic purpose of neighbourhoods compliant applets (miniature apps) is to enable comunities to specify the kinds of experiences members have while interacting with, and communally making sense of, posts, media resources, and other digital representations of objects that they deal with in everyday life.
Our language for social sensemaking is now reflected in little widgets for ‘assessments’ - active community input and passive metrics - and ‘dimensions’ that compute this input in ways the group has chosen in advance.
For example, on this very Substack article, you can react with a heart if you like this post, and you can only give one heart per user. Using Neighbourhoods, a group could decide to up the number of hearts a user can give, or even do away with hearts altogether and implement a 5-star rating system to see more nuanced responses to posts, polls, or any digital representation the group cares about. We are working on a library of such options, which provides a list of assessment displays and creation components.
Next: Stable Alpha, Marketplace Development
Following this milestone toward our goal—facilitating cultural configuration as a group effort—we turn now to two big pushes for the rest of the year…
First, a ‘stable alpha’ version of our Groupware Toolkit. A very early version of this toolkit came out some months ago, giving a window in which we collected feedback. Now, it’s time to respond to needs for ease of developing applets with better templates, additional tweaks and upgrades to our configuration wizard, and improvements to the sensemaker dashboard, where group data is made visible and auditable.
Such updates will make it possible to initiate the set of apps that will comprise our neighbourhood for developers of applets.
Stay tuned for more updates about how we envision the use of $NHT to settle payments between applet developers and the many communities who can share the cost of tools they need.