On chain Guilds platform- Come help us out!

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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Thanks, Alan! To add on to this, some things we’re excited for the future are:

  • Quests- have the ability for guilds to add on chain quests to onboard new users and engage with people on chain. Users can complete quests and get rewarded.
  • User profiles and Email function- as users build out their profiles, we can also have the ability for guild leaders to mass email their guild members.
  • Ability to reward people based on activity- we can figure out “active members” on chain and reward them. This is also keeping in mind that there might be members who are active in the guild and contributing, but not active on chain- we’d love to chat through this a bit more too.
  • Progressive onboarding- how can we reward members in a guild or tip them on telegram in a way that they dont have to go through the full wallet experience? What is an intermediary stage we can use to onboard people and have them set up a wallet only when they want to interact.

If you have any feedback or features you’d like to see, please leave them below.

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Quick Q :sweat_smile: are guilds being added to this list automatically, or is there a manual process they should follow?

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The will be listed automatically as soon as they are in NEAR Ecosystem repository: ecosystem/entities.json at main · near/ecosystem · GitHub
This repo is maintained by guilds team.

Any update you can do a PR to this repo.

The option for “joining on chain” option to this guilds needs to be requested.

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Ok, so can I request for the marmaj Guild?

Realize that this platform is supposed to enable the guilds to grow in size/activity while facilitating some data gathering/metrics around that activity to inform and report on the successes being had by the guild’s program. However, I see some potential pitfalls arising to consider:

  1. Centralization of guild operations in this platform. Depending on the guild, you can probably already find many of these ideas implemented in various ways. If you focus on standardizing them or offering as a service through this platform - we risk moving away from the autonomous nature of the guilds and the innovation that arises from the different ways of addressing the same issues. Obviously the counter to that is that efficiencies and best practices can be achieved by everyone implementing the same way.

  2. Consider prioritizing composability going forward. That’s part of the whole idea of the open web. So, instead of building all these things into this platform - enable teams to build them separately and let guilds decide which to implement in their activities. For example:

  • profiles and notifications are something that can already be plugged into any application (and that would go for Guild information as well) in a decentralized manner (built on integration with Ceramic/NEAR). Profiles that then follow that person across any dapp on NEAR which is the way this needs to be looked at vice building another module for this platform. Or, if its deemed existing solutions aren’t good enough, aim to support them, or build a new one, but then give the option as to which a guild can implement (integrate them all at the platform level).

  • rewards - sounds a lot like what Cheddar is trying to do, but then let’s also ask the question as to why a guild needs to use this reward system - maybe they are issuing their own tokens as rewards or use something else.

  • onboarding - might be beneficial to build out a standardized - new-to-NEAR onboarding flow that incentivizes someone to get setup with a wallet/learn how to use it. I’m guessing most guilds with activities on chain have their own way of bringing their prospects through this and it doesn’t require a whole lot of guild identity customization - pretty much a standard flow.

  • members - as it is effectively a type of registration, seems logical to have the functionality in this platform if a guild wants to use it to enable its members to register their affiliation to their guild. However, others may already have on chain membership registration setup for their guilds (I do). I would not be keen on having to direct my members to go through two registration processes to be counted as active members of the guild. The platform needs to be able to draw data from relevant contracts (although those not using the platform for the key metrics needed by NEAR should make it available somehow - e.g., through a subgraph on The Graph for easy consumption/integration)

I guess in general, I’d rather see this platform focused strictly on registration and verification to enable guild discoverability across the ecosystem and wherever possible, it needs to do it in a Web 3 way without centralizing functionality:

  • why should I need to rely on a centralized entity (maintainer of the site) to add my guild to the directory?

  • why can’t the site just identify which guilds are whitelisted (approved NEAR guilds) and filter the display accordingly?

Would recommend thinking of ways to draw in and aggregate data from guild activities as they are currently occurring vice aiming to bring all guilds onto one platform. That might mean asking guild’s to do things on their end to make relevant data accessible to the platform (and others like it).

I’m not saying to not build a guild’s platform. Just saying that care needs to be taken not to replicate a web 2 system without reimagining how it could function with web 3 tools/adhere to open web principles.

Likewise, caution against creating a system where only guilds who use the platform and its tools are going to find favour or be able to participate fully in the ecosystem. If they aren’t listed or their activity can’t be measured through a platform integration that provides a dashboard of guild ecosystem activity then they are disadvantaged (intentionally or not).

Of course, guilds may also have a responsibility to report activity for data aggregation in a manner that can be automatically consumed as part of their obligations as participants in the ecosystem (although that obligation is debatable).

I don’t know why my responses to these things always end up being so long - apologies for that :slight_smile:

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Hi Chloe,

The guilds are being pulled from the ES map: ecosystem/entities at main · near/ecosystem · GitHub

So if you update info in there, it’ll show up on the guilds platform. And yes, we can definitely include MarmaJ in the next phase roll out in 1-2 weeks - @cloudmex-alan please make a note. :slight_smile:

Hi Aaron,

As always, really appreciate the feedback.

The hope and goal is that every new guild, in their onboarding process, are advised to add their guild to the ES map on github and the ES team reviews the PR and adds them, which is the centralized repository. I don’t know if centralization at this stage is necessarily a bad thing since this only helps guilds list themselves in any aggregators that use the github repo as the back end.

The main reason why I think a centralised solution is helpful here is because we also want to include the ability to state activity levels of guilds so that a new contributor knows which guild is active or which ones are in-active. People are usually eager to update their guild info on the repo when they start, however, if they have other priorities etc in life and want to stop running the guild, they don’t often come back update the status of their guild. This is in fact the problem statement here and if there are decentralized ways in which we can indicate this, that would be ideal and we should definitely look at implementing that.

:100: agree! The idea is that the end user experiences everything in one platform instead of being re-directed to different places, which breaks the flow. For example, I really like stats.gallery profiles and we are also planning on implementing the “transactions” feature to gauge “activity” of the guild members- in our case the definition would be at least 2 on chain tx in 1 month. But I suppose this is where ceramic profiles can also help, in the future iteration where we can have guild member profiles too.

On onboarding, we were thinking about custom on-chain activities and quests. For example, if I’m new to the NEAR Music guild, by basic steps might be:
Step 1: Set up a mintbase store

Step 2: Mint a music NFT

This is obviously heavily inspired by Stats Gallery quests, but thinking more along the lines of how can we make it more interactive, so that if mintbase contract is the one associated with a guild, and if i deploy my own store or have my own nft minted, it recognizes that. In terms of onboarding, it helps the guild get a member that’s already completed the bare minimum, so perhaps their quality of engagement going forward would be much higher.

Again, i realize that creating custom on chain quests for onboarding might be really challenging given the different guilds, but I think it would be interesting for us to think along the lines of creating that infrastructure.

Creating a whitelisted list of guilds would also be a form of centralization right?

Completely agree with this. Definitely keeping in mind that there’s a lot more to community building and value addition to the larger ecosystem than just getting their members on chain and have them be more active on chain. This is also the reason why we haven’t reflected anything from this platform into guilds funding because this is going to be a WIP for a while, until we capture these nuances and only if we reach a stage where guilds feel like a large part of their work might be represented in a platform like this, will we make that switch. Until then, it’s going to be a lot of work into understanding how guilds use this, what features are useful, and keep building.

I love reading through them! I know that @chronear is putting together a working group around the platform. Thinking deeply about the problems we can solve with a platform like this is really important and I’m glad we can have your feedback and help in building this out.

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I think this is not what we are proposing with this platform, right now NF have a picture of what is happening on guilds looking for more traditional data as discord users. What this platform propose is to have a bigger picture on what is happening with guilds and their members based on chain activity. More data, more knowledge, better decision making.

Note taken!

Would take inspiration from here to think in next features to be developed. Ceramic looks great to be included.

Totally agree! Web 3 is evolution, so on we have to focus in see what things stay as done or what new things would replace old stuffs

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 :slight_smile: )

I would suggest the guild’s platform can actually be separated into several components. At base level, recommend focusing on these processes first:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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):

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This is wonderful @ALuhning, thank you very much for sharing your weekend hack with us, looking forward to testing it. We are honoured to have you on the Guilds Platform Advisory Group! I admire your particular emphasis on Guild Discoverability and already thinking about how we could work towards better geo-specific and regional connectivity for the community.

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Hey @ALuhning some thoughts here:
We have recently been discussing with @Grace that there should be one general intake form for the individual contributors to register. Do you think it would make sense to integrate the DB of the Guilds platform with OWS Airtables DB? This way OWS we will be able to offer project opportunities to more newcomers for onboarding them. And for the Guild leaders, it will be easier to find new guild members when needed.

We can add additional questions to the form if needed, but I think it will be more efficient to merge these

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I guess that’s a fundamental question we need to consider - keep using Airtable which is a centralized web 2.0 service (albeit useful) or use something built on top of a web 3 tech like Ceramic to give people ownership of their data (part of NEAR’s mission statement) and remove the requirement for centralized administration of it (like OWS is like doing in maintaining/growing the Airtable database).

This is the issue with using Airtable - you need one general form/method to get everyone in the database and extending it requires sharing the API keys/giving edit/add permissions. If you’re using something built on a decentralized tech like Ceramic data streams, then anyone can build an interface to onboard that pertains to their specific situation and all the data that is collected becomes available to everyone in whatever form they need it. If OWS needs certain info, they simply add more fields to collect and build on the data stream - creates rich profiles for individuals that follow them anywhere they go on web 3.0. They own it and they can change/delete at will. Nobody else can mess with it - which isn’t the case with Airtable.

If you haven’t yet, I’d really recommend trying the app I put together to see how such an intake might look (it’s using Ceramic). https://mynear.xyz

If we use a decentralized solution for data streams like Ceramic, then it enables acceleration of other innovative apps.

I’m probably doing a poor job of explaining this - will work on a picture to make it more clear.

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