On chain Guilds platform- Come help us out!

If you haven’t already read @erik.near’s post, please read more here: Guild types and onboarding thoughts

The context of this project is to address the following:

We’re currently working on this project with our consultant PM, to ship out a basic platform that allows people to list their guilds, and allows community members to join the guild on chain.

Note:
Talking through this project with Erik, one of the things that stood out to me was how on chain doesn’t necessarily mean a DAO. It could be a way in which we get people as on chain members, but not the only way.
This seemed to be surprising to a couple of people I talked to, so just highlighting here for those reading.

Considerations:
Talking to @amgando was really useful for us to look at the technical considerations like storage and tx costs involved for anyone joining the on-chain guild and how that might potentially be a barrier. Possible solution could be a pre-funded wallet to offset this cost, making it easy for people to join.
The other main one being the ability to sort, filter etc with on chain data- possible solution could be using something like The Graph to create a snapshot and not work off of live on chain data.

People involved:
We want to build this in the open and would love involve anyone who is interested. We need you! Come help us build this out. As soon as we get the initial version spec out, I will follow up on this post with more details. But we currently have:

  • @amgando who has agreed to help us with basic smart contracts and connect with NCD grads/DiRs to help ship the product and support launch.
  • Potentially Dan from Edu team, who has shipped the awesome NEAR Jobs page, can help with the front end.
  • @starpause to see if there are basic components, like the membership component from Astro, that we can take and implement in this platform without starting from scratch.
  • Our consultant PM.

The community team will be working on onboarding campaigns with guilds to help bring their members on chain on this platform.

Phases of the platform:

Phase 1: [2 weeks-Q4- Target Dec 7 for soft launch]
Basic website with list of guilds and people can easily join on chain. To start with, this will live on nearguilds.com until proper testing and user feedback has been given, to then move it to near.org/guilds.

  • Prep: Figure out joining flows for each guild & connect to their call to action for select 6 Guilds identified below. These guilds have been chosen due to multiple factors like variety, onboarding process figured out, size etc.
    • Join form/Closed guild/Open guild
    • Integrate that within Github NEAR Ecosystem Map so that we have one central repository and everything else pulls from there.
      * NxM - Astro DAO
      * NEAR Vietnam - no Astro DAO
      * NEAR Russia - Astro DAO
      * Human Guild - no Astro DAO
      * OWS - Astro DAO
      * OSA - Astro DAO
  • Scope incentives & implement for the 6 guilds
  • All guilds in the Github NEAR Ecosystem Map are still visible in the basic website

Phase 2: [Q1 2022]

  • Figure out joining flows for each guild & connect to their call to action for those remaining (not MVP 6 above)
  • Integration with Astro DAO flow
  • Meeting with Wallet Team to see how we can highlight top guilds after wallet creation process.
  • Potential integration with near.org/guilds after proper testing.

Phase 3: [Q2]TBD

  • Guilds standard
  • Options for guild leads to customize, send emails etc. through the platform
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Anyone interested in helping out, please feel free to comment below and I’ll reach out to you. But otherwise, will use this thread for additional context and info about the progress of this project.

@ALuhning more context about the platform here. Would love to get your help and input on this, including, but not limited to the DID stuff you mentioned :slight_smile:
@alanborger would you be able to help us with feedback on designs etc?
@blaze OSA is one of the guilds we’d love to get on this platform when it’s built. So will reach out to you on the member onboarding phase, but otherwise, if there’s anything else you’d like to help us with, please let me know.

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Hey @shreyas I was chatting with @mecsbecs and had some ideas on features that could be helpful…

A profile page for each Guild with a join button and a list of events or activities linked to social accounts, Astro DAO, governance forum would be amazing features to have… It saves smaller guilds from having to create a website and with all the Near integration built in I think it would be awesome, even a way to link the Near wallet for users… A guild hub…

Just some thoughts

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Hey @vandal,

I love that! I was chatting with the team to eventually have something like Ubuntu LoCo Teams List | Ubuntu LoCo Team Portal that shows the different communities, and they are all individual pages that lists basic info like socials, key people etc. These pages are managed and updated by the guilds themselves and others can flag if the info is outdated or the guild isn’t active.

I’m sure we can have this evolve into something like that. Perhaps for the v3 of this project, we can even have a system that allows for guild leads to do airdrops, send emailers etc through one portal, manage astro DAO interactions etc through one platform.

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A NEAR Guild social media portal?!? Nice! I think at the early stage some sort of membership management would be good. Integrate it with AstroDAO maybe? It could list the Bounties, Proposals… on a nice profile page :slight_smile:

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This is where Ceramic integration (DIDs) may be helpful. We already have a DID registry deployed to mainnet (did.near) where NEAR accounts get associated with a DID generated through Ceramic. If that was integrated into this concept - you could add an “add to registry” button or step in the guild registration process and then use it to retrieve data associated with that guild (account) wherever you like. We can pretty much store whatever we like to build out the guild profile page and the guild would manage that themselves. The data can also be easily retrieved cross app simply by calling the data stream that is associated with that DID.

It’s how we create community (DAO) and member profiles in Catalyst now. I’m going to add a couple things to the DID registry contract to basically tag which DIDs are guilds to allow easy aggregation. Have also been adding “events” to allow The Graph integration (although The Graph is currently having issues with NEAR indexing following the sharding upgrade).

Another piece to consider is verification. Think it’s important that some mechanism is in place to verify a guild is an authorized guild. Otherwise can end up with impersonators or scammers, etc… Might be as easy as checking verified as part of the registration process and storing that (will add that to the registry as well) - assuming there is intention to maintain a manual review of guild applications. Likewise, should be a way to revoke verification if a guild goes rogue and NEAR doesn’t want to be associated with them anymore.

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@shreyas Nice initiative. Definitely interested in helping where I can. Let me know if I can assist!

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You mean something like this? Already have a lot of that built into Catalyst. Happy to answer questions/give demos if anyone is interested. Reach out here or on Discord.

For a Guild like NxM, which is also a DAO, it would be great to somehow link the registration of member wallets to a group on the DAO as well. Could that be something we could work into it? As it stands, we’ve created a google form that is currently used to collect members information and ultimately our plan was to issue Membership NFTs in various tiers. Would be cool if an NFT could be minted on this new platform to signify Membership.

Oh, and while I’m at it… @StevenR @qarmitage @rhymetaylor and I are working on a Membership NFT platform, so why not we try and figure this out together?!?

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@shreyas - in case it’s not already on the feature list for the guilds platform - would be helpful to have a feature (visual map) that indicates where guilds are located. Would assist with collaboration if, for example, I was interested in targeting/host an event in another location for some reason. Would be helpful to be able to establish contact with the guild leader in that locale to setup things like venues or get assistance with locale specific considerations.

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@ALuhning that’s a good idea, however, I think we can only do it for the geographical guilds as the others arent really specific to a certain region. Even in that case, we have guilds based in a certain geographical region and guilds that are spread around the world but that speak the same language(Eg. NEAR hispano for Spanish speaking).

I think geo would be interesting to implement here on the forum. If we have members fill up their location, I think we could trigger a DM to everyone in a certain region.

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Hello community!

We has been working on the phase 1 of the On Chain Guilds Platform.

This versions allows:

  • Login with NEAR Wallet.
  • Look at guild’s detailed information
  • Join a guild on chain
  • Once joined, view social networks links for each guild
  • Download a CSV with guilds member list

Coming features that we are developing include:

  • Active users dashboard: where guild leaders con look how active are guild members (On chain transaction)
  • Develop a blockchain indexer to recover full guild list members in case it growths too big.
  • UI Changes to be more user friendly.

Some ideas that are pending to be developed and validated are:

  • Have a refund mechanism for people to allow free transactions for joining guild.
  • Link guild platform smart contract with Astro DAO.

Any feedback that you can give to us would be great! :grin:

Preview link (Can change): NEAR Guilds

Screenshots:




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Awesome work Alan ! Near Hispano Members Rock :rocket:

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Great work! Coming along nicely. Couple suggestions/questions to consider:

  1. Guild’s detailed information - is intent to make these editable by the guild leader/designate themselves? If not, would suggest it should be (maybe with an approval/review process) (be perfect for Ceramic integration to allow that)

  2. Join a guild on chain - can you elaborate? how do you envision that occurring?

  3. Blockchain indexer - may I suggest using The Graph? Just need to ensure whatever the transaction is for becoming a member on chain is emitting a log with the information we want to query. Building a subgraph from there is easy. (more info - Building subgraphs for NEAR)

  4. Link guild platform with Astro DAO - Astro is great, but not every Guild is interested in using Astro DAO. How about allowing the guild to link to/integrate their DAO platform of choice (e.g., Vital Point AI uses Catalyst)

  5. On the “find a guild” page - would help discoverability by including a metric showing current number of members as well as a search feature (search guild categories/location (for geo-based guilds) which guilds can set/choose from). Also should give some consideration as to how the guilds are ordered on the page (it doesn’t appear alphabetical now, but in that example, does alphabetical give a guild starting with A an advantage/more visibility over one starting with Z? - maybe the display is randomized on each load?)

Love the progress. Again, nice work.

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Hi @ALuhning, I want to tell you:

1.- Our source of truth is the github ecosystem repository maintained by NEAR Foundation, it also can be pull requested to change guilds information: GitHub - near/ecosystem: Community-sourced and curated data for the NEAR Ecosystem.

2.- There is a smart contract that save signer account on a map of guilds that exist on it.

3.- Thanks for your suggestion! The Graph is an excellent option. Any info related to that would be glad to know.

4.- We are still thinking which is the best method for taking advantage of both astro DAO and guilds platform.

5.- Good points!

Thanks for all the support!

If you want to share the contract address, I’d be happy to take a look and build the subgraph for it (both testnet/mainnet if applicable).

Yep, did this and it took several weeks to change a logo in contrast to any normal application where one can upload a logo at will. To consider - not everyone is a developer and I suspect many of the guilds have zero idea how to submit a pull request/contribute to a project on Github. Something more accessible might be worth considering.

Further, in interest of the open web where people control their data/assets/governance as per the NEAR mission - why not give guilds the ability to control it vice turn it over to Github to hold in a central repository. Can easily filter the list of what’s shown to verified guilds/unverified guilds based on an authorization signature (digitally) from an applicable entity at NEAR foundation.

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Can you sen me a DM to telegram? We would like to schedule a meeting with you to see how to implement The Graph :slightly_smiling_face:

Hello NEARverse,

I would like to thank everyone for participating in the discussion about the On-chain Guilds Platform. Great to see this very informative discussion leading up to the launch. I am planning to coordinate a Focus Group to gather more insights from our valued Guild leaders and Community members and would like to hit the ground running asap with your help. I invite every interested contributor to book a slot in my Calendly to discuss the same. If you can’t find a convenient time on the link, please let me know without hesitation via DM and we will work something out!

I will also reach out to the participants in this thread individually soon.

Thanks!

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¡Hi community!

First phase of the On-Chain Guilds platform is ready for community and waiting for its official kickoff.

What can I do?

  • Join to the firsts highlighted NEAR guilds on-chain.
  • Once joined, look for the social network information.
  • For guild leaders, download a CSV with NEAR ID’s of guild’s members.

What is coming next

  • Datrics team will work on have a tracking of how many members are being on-chain active accounts, tracking # of transactions and transfers done in NEAR Wallet. In this sense we will be able to track how active are guilds members.
  • Ideas are still pending to be validated: connecting Astro DAO? Airdrops? Other kind of statistics? Hope community can lead us in what’s next.

Extra notes

Screenshots:




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Amazing work @cloudmex-alan and team! We are grateful for all your efforts in getting this invaluable component of our community infrastructure off the ground.

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