Good chats with @chronear and @shreyas this week - inspired me to really get into this over last couple days (much to the dismay of my over projects 
)
I would suggest the guild’s platform can actually be separated into several components. At base level, recommend focusing on these processes first:
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Guild Onboarding - make it easy for guild leaders to follow a pathway that has them create/connect an admin account for their guild, register the guild, and create the guild’s profile.
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Individual Onboarding - make it easy for an individual to follow a pathway that has them create/connect an account, register it, and create a profile (persona) for it.
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Guild Admin - provide interface where a guild leader/authorized people can administer guild functions (and move away from PR requests on Github). Suggest following are important first steps:
- ability to update guild profile information, change logo, contact info, etc…
- verify status of a guild (in good standing or not, endorsed by NEAR or not, etc…)
- set certain accounts (those who review Guild applications) as verifiers - give them the ability to change toggle guilds between verified/unverified.
- change guild tiering level (and provide means for applying for tiers or automatically advising when a guild is ready to move to next tier based on some kind of metrics)
- guild analytics - see activity and visualize guild growth/stats
- Guild Discoverability - guild onboarding will potentially make lots of information about the guild available. It can then be pulled/queried/searched and displayed in a manner that allows individuals to browse the guilds and choose to investigate/join those that appeal to them. After an individual onboards, recommended guilds should be presented to them based on their interests/values.
And, of course, we need to build these things with web 3 tech. I’d suggest we want the information gathered during onboarding to be accessible by any other dapp in the ecosystem that wants it (e.g., display the guild info on a webpage like is being done now, or maybe add rich profiles to artists on Paras/Mintbase and other platforms.) Likewise, we should be building in support for things like PfP projects so people can set their NEAR avatars to NFTs.
If only there was an onboarding app that made that all possible…
Introducing My NEAR Journey
I put together this app over last couple days to help solve some of these issues and demonstrate a possible direction this could go. Try the My NEAR Journey onboarding app (testnet) (https://mynear.xyz). Recommend using it on mobile or opening dev tools and using a mobile display - still some work to do on styling for larger screens.
Will be moving it to mainnet shortly. (Note that it has some integration with mainnet dao platforms like Catalyst and Astro - those things may appear broken in the testnet version).
For those who care - it’s 100% web 3 (except that it’s currently being served from an Azure VM):
- underlying contract deployed to dids2.vitalpointai.testnet (enabled for The Graph support)
- react front end
- integrated with Ceramic.Network for identity (every guild/indiv gets a DID which is registered on the dids2 contract. That makes all these profiles portable into other applications simply by accessing the did’s Ceramic data stream.
- has a NEAR subgraph deployed to The Graph.
Any application can query The Graph subgraph to retrieve the DID of the account. Play with the example query in The Graph playground for this subgraph to see what data you can use from the registry contract.
After getting the DID for an account, you can query Ceramic and get back a guildInfo object to then display/use as you need to in your application. For example, this is what gets returned after onboarding a guild in the app (we could obviously customize the data gathered if we need something else e.g., guild operating plans/budgets):
